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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Monday, November 23, 2009

Wither Goest A Secular Nation? 

...there a plenty enough fascinating aspects to the current dispute between Congressman Patrick Kennedy and his Rhode Island diocese Bishop Thomas Tobin over Kennedy's support of abortion rights, but there are even more outside questions that are just as fascinating. As the story documents, public figures such as John Kerry and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have run afoul of various segments of the Roman Catholic hierarchy over their support for a woman's right to control what happens to her body...

Clearly, the biggest immediate issue is the effort of a religious entity to to control the actions of public officials who have roles to play in the conduct of a secular government established by a secular Constitution. While there are any number of Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Southern Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Mormons, Unitarians, Brethren, and others who are in one way or another involved in one or another of the three branches of Federal governance, none of them have any claim to the steering wheel, especially given that the Constitution of the United States doesn't grant any one or all of them any particular priority of importance. In fact, that guiding document specifically proscribes the involvement of any of these sects in governance, and there was a particular wisdom in that decision by the Founding Fathers transcending the somewhat more limited span of religious perspectives of the day than what we know in these times...

We live in a complex society, and the fact that the Roman Catholic leadership can find congress with Southern Baptists on any subject at all is a perfect example of how crazy religious alliances can be and why governance should rightfully be secular. It's all well and good that the supposedly celibate Catholic leadership can come together with the wingnut Pharisee Republican base (where "Pope" = "Antichrist") to oppose the right for a woman to have a say over her reproductive choices to the point that The Church will deny the Eucharist to those public officials who fall short of its expectations, but somewhere down the road the issues of "just war" and the death penalty are going to mess up this comfy alliance and somebody is going to get poked in the eye and THEN where are you gonna be, Mr. Smartypants [/everymom]...

A more interesting set of questions in the face of this effort by The Church to influence secular public policy is that set of questions involving the composition of the Supreme Court of the United States. Six of the nine Justices are adherents to the Roman Catholic Church. Will any one or all of them be denied the Eucharist if they are to find that the US Constitution supports the idea of abortion? How does the Church-constructed threat to one's eternal soul at the risk of a Church-disapproved decision influence members of the judiciary who are obliged to render judgments in a secular setting? OK, so this is a pretty theoretical venue because we know how Scalia and those two Bushco backbenchers are going to vote - and Clarence Thomas is going to do whatever Fat Tony says in any case, but the Kennedy/Kerry/Sebelius experience raises some interesting issues regarding adherence to the First Amendment and the protections of the rights of those of us who don't want to be subject to the specific teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. My man Martin Luther started the Reformation over the selling of indulgences by Catholic leaders; the risk we run as a secular nation now is the specter of the Roman Catholic Church turning from the the retail sale of salvation to a more reliable act of extortion. What the Bishop in this Kennedy case is doing is nothing less than threatening a public official responsible for nonreligious crafting and administration of public law with eternal separation from his spiritual foundation because of actions taken on behalf of a population that in large part - if pure evidence is any judge - doesn't want to live in a Roman Catholic theocracy...

This all certainly does raise questions about how - or even if - we can live as a secular nation free from the influence of any particular religious sect...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:21 PM 0 comments

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