Mr. Bishop’s rebuttal to my letter demonstrates a lack of attention to the argument.
In regards to my first statement, that THE essential argument against gay marriage is not grounded in religious arguments, he is correct. My main opposition to gay marriage, as well as most everyone who is politically debating against it, is that it represents the creation of a right that is not implicit in the Constitution and serves no societal good. We also have major objections to how this “right” is being implemented, through the undemocratic court systems and not by legislation. Christianity provides a reason to be against homosexuality but has no political arguments against extending benefits and societal recognition to gay marriage.
The second statement I made was a warning to pro-gay marriage advocates to knock off their excessive and unwarranted Christian-baiting by protraying the opposition to gay marriage as nothing more than inbred Southern hicks who worship gawd and the baby Jesus. It had nothing to do with the actual argument against gay marriage. Nobody who is seriously debating against it is bringing up Leviticus in denouncing it. Those who bring it up are simply providing a red herring to distract from the real argument.
I was sad, though, to say that the Chronicle’s editorial staff followed up with its own piece of Christian-baiting. I was aghast to read Ms. McCullogh’s piece denouncing the Pledge of Allegiance as a piece of theocratic propaganda unworthy of the country.
First of all, the “peer pressure” that exists to say the Pledge can be dismissed as whining. We all had to do lots of things we didn’t want to do in high school; saying a pledge before school that takes up less than a minute is quite frankly the least of anyone’s problems at any time.
Second of all, the presence of “under God” in the Pledge, which was added in 1954 by act of Congress (not by God, or by some Christian brownshirts, nor by the KGB, Stasi, Gestapo, Republican Guard, or the Huns, but by the Congress) does not constitute a prayer because one does not pray to any deity when saying the Pledge. “I pledge allegiance” is not a prayer, unless pledging allegiance to a flag is the same as praying to it, which is absurd. It barely even counts as a creed. If a statement can become a prayer by virtue of containing the word “God,” then evidently this paragraph itself is a prayer. I’ll go add it to my Missal now.
Democracy is not threatened by Christians, either as citizens or in its government. Bill Clinton was a Christian, I don’t recall hell being raised over that. Kennedy was a Christian, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, in fact, I can’t think of a single President who was not a Christian. Obviously we’ve been living under a theocracy pretending to be a democracy the whole time. Maybe Florida in 2000 was an act of God. If so, then it would provide another reason for the Democrats to stop bringing it up.
Ms. McCullogh goes off the deep end when she begins to assault Christianity itself. Yes, Christian groups that preach abstinence instead of sex are indeed “crazy.” No, the smart thing to do is to have sex outside of marriage and get a disease. The smart thing to do is to oversexualize the country’s youth to the point that pre-puberty becomes meaningless, that’s not insane. How dare we fund groups that teach a means of avoiding STDs by doing something ludicrous like not having sex. It’s not like not having sex has ever prevented getting a disease, you know.
I have a hard time picturing Ms. McCullogh calling an atheist group “crazy” if they taught abstinence. Insanity, in her view, is clearly reserved only for people who read the Bible.
And Bush, for the crime of being openly Christian, is branded as being “more than friends” of “Jesus-loving fundamentalists.” If Bush was Jewish, would she use “Moses-loving fundamentalists” if he worked with Jewish groups? How about “Mohammed-loving fundamentalists” if Bush worked with Muslim charities? Dare we even think about a world where Bush worked with Vishnu-lovers?
Her attack on Bush’s reptition of the notion of the Pledge being an acknowledgement of God is also unwarranted. Since Washington’s inuagural, every President has invoked God at some time or another. Like it or not, our country was founded with Judeo-Christian principles in mind; democracies in Europe, the vaunted continent of which we’re to envy, also referred to Judeo-Christian principles when they formed their own republics (except for France, at first, and notice how disastrous their non-Christian version worked out). Christianity has shown a remarkable ability to create actual secular governments, or else Europe would be indistinguishable from the Middle East. That Ms. McCullogh blatantly ignores this shows that she knows how to pose her argument so that it can stand, at least until someone points out its fundamental flaws.
Lastly, Dr. Newdow is a fraud, someone hardly worthy of praise. His daughter is a Christian and has no problem with saying the Pledge; that her father is attempting to control what she may say and think is the height of hypocrisy. How would Ms. McCullogh feel if her father petitioned the court to make Hofstra a Christian academy, and spoke on her behalf?
“God in government is not a democracy,” she concludes. Well, if God is not to be in the government, then obviously we must follow in the footsteps of the Soviets and eliminate all religious symbols and ideas from the government, and since our government is of the people, that means we must eliminate all religious people from the government, starting with the Christians. Only atheists are fit to rule in a democracy.
Oh wait, I forgot, a democracy is a government where the people vote in their leaders. So, if people don’t mind having Christian leaders, almost all of which hardly even act remotely like die-hard Christians to begin with, then the people will very well elect Christian leaders, and if Ms. McCullogh doesn’t like it, well, tough. We’re in a democracy.