And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
9. And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?
In 2004, I, like a lot of people, were offended by the attention paid to exit polls that seemed to show that fundamentalist “values voters” handed Bush the election. Democrats didn't win, they tried to tell us, because they didn't have God, or at least morality, on their side. The implication was that people had voted for Bush because he was going bring fundamentalist-I hesitate to call them Christian--so-called morality back to America, eliminate “activist judges” and maybe even find some way to disband the Satanic, anti-Christian ACLU. When someone uses the phrase “activist judges” you can be assured that they know their agenda is illegal and unconstitutional and they are aware that the law will stand against them. It is an inconvenient reality they hope George Bush will eliminate for them.
Bush didn't give them what they wanted, radical extremists of from both the left or the right almost never get what they want. Now, four years later, we are watching that liberal and progressive politicians pandering to people who, when they say the words “moral values,” are referring to a laundry list of oppression, cruelty and outright superstition such as prayer in school (they assume Christian prayers), creationism instead of science, gun rights, banning sex education, birth control and abortion, and, of course, restricting gay rights and the rights of anyone else they don't approve of. Those things, to me, don't represent morality, they are morality stood in its head.
I don't want to hear any of that stuff out of the mouths of ostensibly left-leaning politicians. I don't want the Democrats to start larding their speeches with phony sermons as if to say “see? We're almost Republicans!” If they do, they will earn nothing but my contempt just as the right wing moralists do.
As liberals we don't think much about our morals. We just do them. We don't preach them much. We don't have a list of thou shalt nots. The religious right thinks we are an “anything goes” crowd and a surprisingly large number of liberals think the same thing. Because I enjoy my many gay friends and because I think they should marry whom they please, the fundamentalists think I'm depraved. I assure you the feeling is warmly mutual. They think they have true morality. I don't think so. My morality will not permit me to condemn a fellow human being to a life of misery and shame.
Now I want to pull my attention away from the fundamentalists and talk about the “anything goes” idea. It's true that we liberals do not have a sonorous list of forbidden activities, but our morality is not about punishment and guilt. It is about respect. If fundamentalists wish to live lives bound by artificial rules and restrictions. If they wish to allow fear and hatred to guide their lives. If they wish to believe twelve impossible things before breakfast, that is their right. It would not be respectful if I tried to force them to live the way I live and to care about the things that are important to me. They believe that secularists wish to destroy their religion. Secularists want no such thing, but fundamentalists of all kinds-religious, economic, left, right--don't understand respect. They only understand power. One of the ways we can tell creationism isn't scientific is that the fundamentalists are attempting to use political power to inject it into public schools. It can't compete in the marketplace of scientific ideas. They don't care, that's not important to them. All that is important is that you believe it. The lust for power is why they want the 10 commandments in the county courthouse and not on billboards along the highway. They don't want their ideas out there competing with all those other ideas, they don't care whether God is acknowledged in the public square, they want power. They want their religion to seem to have the trappings of power.
I want to mention here, that I am not talking about Christians. I know several wonderful Christians who don't see what the fundamentalists see in the Bible. I heard a Methodist minister once remark that he couldn't imagine which Bible the fundamentalists were reading, because it didn't resemble his.
