American Life

The Constitution Is Not A “Secular” Bible


Philadelphia - Old City: Independence Hall - T...

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Seems like a contradiction given the mythology of the Right that the United States was founded on Christian doctrine, but the Constitution is one of the most religion neutral documents in our history. The Founders’ religious beliefs ranged from very to not at all, but the majority were in agreement on the necessity of separating church (of any ilk) and state. Their handiwork was meant as a framework for a democracy and the idea that it would be used as some sort of stand in biblical text would have appalled them.

Newsweek published a rather good article on the complexity of the Tea Party and their relationship and mostly misunderstanding of the Constitution. Tea Partiers, it seems, are no different from other political folk in their ignorance and willingness to use this in promotion of their pet causes.

These causes are primarily money and power-driven. Tea Party leaders know how to use Americans’ greed in the form of “no taxes” against them as well as Republicans and Democrats. Americans are some of the least taxed people on the face of the earth. They are also – aside from health care for those under 65 or who aren’t disabled – some of the most privileged in terms of government sponsored/maintained amenities. Americans truly get something for next to nothing in ways that astound the rest of the world.

For the record, the Constitution was in fact intended to strengthen the federal government because an earlier stab of pulling together as a country – the Articles of Confederation – allowed the states too much wiggle room. The Articles was a weak document and the Founders purposely gave the Constitution muscle as a result.

The Constitution, for those who weren’t aware, is strident in its secularism. Not once does it mention God or Jesus. Not to invoke them or praise them or ask their blessing. It is a legal document that spells out the rights of the people and the duties of the state.

Literal adherence to the Constitution that Tea Partiers naively pound the drum for would upend most of the last hundred years or so of civil rights, worker’s rights, women’s rights and would give businesses the same kinds of overlord privileged status they had in the Gilded Age. I doubt many Tea Party enthusiasts even realize what they are in for if their wish was granted.

Though many look back at the Founders as sages guided by the Lord’s hand, Thomas Jefferson best summed up the reality in a letter to a friend in 1816,

he mocked “men [who] look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched”; “who ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.” “Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable as another of taking care of itself, and of ordering its own affairs,” he concluded. “Each generation is as independent as the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before.”

Good Ole slave-owning Tom was not blind to his, or his peers, shortcomings or human failings.

What I find most interesting in the Constitution worship is that those who champion its place as another book in the Christian Bible aren’t the least bit alarmed by the fact that it’s used to control and limit more than it is to uphold our freedoms.

When you go to the polls in a few weeks, think seriously about your freedom and who is most likely to vote in favor of maintaining that and who is most probably going to throw you, your family and your rights under the bus in the name of their idea of what your freedoms should be.

Just Saying.

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Jennifer Petkov is You


 

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Jennier Petkov has the dubious honor of being the 85th most googled term this afternoon thanks to her stunningly self-absorbed Housewife of New Jersey via Michigan turn on a local news channel.

In case you’ve missed Jennifer, she’s the trending troll de jour due to her harpy-ish harassment of her neighbor’s dying grand-daughter, and her relentless campaign to mock the death of the little girl’s mother.

Mother and daughter carried the deadly Huntington’s gene. The mother passed away at 24 and the now seven-year old daughter is in the last stages of a disease that eats away brain tissue.

What would drive someone to mock and torment the terminally ill?

It’s the culmination of a two-year feud that began when Jennifer mistakenly believed that her neighbors had deliberately excluded her son from a birthday party. I believe there was a bouncy house involved. The Trojan War and WWI were bouncy house snubs, I believe.

Regardless, the battle was afoot and has trampled all over Jennifer’s neighborhood and with a little help front Photoshop, she took it to Facebook even.

Enter the press. And cue the clever pot-stirrer who uploaded this clip to YouTube:

My favorite part … aside from the head bobbing – their heads always bob – why? … is when the near speechless reporter asks Jennifer why she would do such a thing.

Her answer was basically because she could and it was fun.

“Take it or leave it,” she says as her final justification.

And here is where she is you.

Just like Christine O’Donnell is you.

And Glenn Beck is you.

And that incredibly pouty, spoiled football player’s wife on The View is you.

The feeling that personal entitlement is all and that change, or meeting half way, is for the weak, those who aren’t strong enough (or too cognizant of the interconnectedness of humanity).

I wouldn’t defend Jennifer, but she is hardly an anomaly. The people bashing her today are Jennifer. Those who dedicated hate pages across the Social Mediascape to shame her and “give her a dose of her own medicine” are her too.

Jennifer’s mean girl ways are a timely find. Bullying is all over the news. Much hand-wringing and wondering why.

But there is nothing to wonder about. Bullying is part of who we are. It’s steeped in our culture of “take me or leave me”. The idea that we are free to impose, judge, forcibly coerce and bare our teeth like the Darwinian creatures we are is exactly what makes it possible for teens to mimic their same-sex fearing parents when they pick at their gay classmates until the whites of their bones show.

Sarah Palin‘s eye rolls. Rachel Maddow‘s contempt. Bill O’Reilly’s brow-beating. Jon Stewart‘s mockery. It’s Jennifer with a polish and book smarts, but it’s Jennifer no less. We are a nation of bullies. Our politics, our religions, our social fabric really is based on the idea that if the cause is perceived righteous – anything that has to be said or done to get the masses to line up and bleat is justified.

Just last evening, my oldest nephew pulled a “take it or leave it” on me. He’d spent the day before stirring the family crisis pot with teen angst and over-reaction that culminated in him “running away” for the night to make his point. When I talked with him the next day – after all the adults had made contact, assessed the actual facts and were on the same united page – he admitted that perhaps he’d gotten a bit overwrought,

“But it’s who I am,” he said, “and I can’t change it.”

I disagreed, and I still do. People are who they want to be. Their words and actions are who they are. Hurtfulness, manipulations that add up to bullying behavior aren’t justified by the ends no matter how heinous or righteous the cause. Jennifer was wrong, but the people who are harassing her right now are wrong too. They are bullies too.

Jennifer’s cause was the selfish preservation of face. She over-reacted two years ago but couldn’t admit it. She fell back on learned behavior that is not so different from what many people do on smaller scales in their places of work and within their families or social networks.

But any time words – or worse – are used to twist facts or to wound, it’s bullying. We Americans are mean girls at our core.  Hypocrites. Just like Jennifer.

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“Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” – author unknown

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Americans Know Nothing About Their Own Religions


 

(Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mohammedani...

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The latest Pew Research survey dove into religion. Specifically, researchers wanted to know just how much actual religious knowledge drives this most holy of lands.

Unsurprisingly, the answer was not so much.

Americans, who are religiously bent, are as ignorant of the tenets of their diverse faiths as they are of the Constitution’s purpose for the separation of those faiths from the workings of the state.

Who knows the most about religion in general?

Atheists.

Which makes total sense. A person has to know something about religion in order to conclude that it’s bigotry wrapped in superstition and basically a tool used to maintain some of the world’s more useful oppressions.

After the God deniers, Mormons and Jews knew more actual facts about the various religions of the world. I wonder if this isn’t because their faiths focus more attention on following the letter of their laws, as opposed to the nebulous, feel-good spirit of the rules that seem to change with each new evangelical schism.

Catholics didn’t know shit. How could they? They are apparently not being taught the most basic tenet of the religion – transubstantiation. You know, that icky sticking point with Protestants of all ilk? The fact that the wafer and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ during the consecration during mass.

41% of Catholics think the wafer and wine are … symbolic. The Pope must be breaking his own knuckles with hand-wringing over this big oops by his American clergy. Perhaps the bishops of America have been too occupied covering up the molestation thing, suppressing women and being all round tools of the man in the pointy hat to remind their parish priests about such an important topic?

Protestants fair a bit better but only if they are mainline and not evangelicals. Both groups, also unsurprisingly, gloss over the main point of Luther’s original break back in the middle-ages – “grace” can’t be earned. God gives or not. It’s a bleak outlook whose darkness varies according to the religious flavor. Evangelicals don’t bother with it at all because it’s simply too much for them and they prefer their view that everyone BUT them is a loser in the whole “God loves me better than you” grace race.

Curious about my own knowledge base, I took the quiz at the Pew Forum site.

I missed the last question on The Great Awakening. Not too strangely, this wasn’t covered in religion class at my Catholic high school.

My general distaste for the puritan streak that runs wide and uselessly through the American psyche means I haven’t spent much time trying to discover how such an atrocity happened. Frankly, I thought the whole “personal guilt” thing floated over with the Pilgrims, but it started here. We can’t blame the English for this.

The “awakening” was a clever assault on the god-fearing with the end result being that life generally sucked more than it should have for the early American colonists. Worst of all, it marked the beginning of that sing-song preaching style that’s punctuated with shrill notes and poignant silences.

At The Daily Dish, Sullivan linked to a blog that invited a bunch of scholars to apologize for the ignorant. One guy thought that the “spirit” of religion was probably more important than adherents actually knowing factual information or even, gasp, understanding what it was they professed to believe.

Seriously? If you are going to vote, persecute, impose or otherwise force your faith down the throats of those who worship, or not, then you had better know your shit.

Because it stinks.

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