Politics and Morality

This year’s political campaign has re-ignited the church/state issue, and has as usual established a synchronistic orbit around sex and the highest and best use of genitalia. It is strange that in our political corpus the larger field of morality is pristine grass and only the hectare of sexuality is trampled and muddy.

There are many bloggers I am familiar with who have indicated they have attended law school. They will tell you our jurisprudence is not centered on what is “moral” but rather what is “legal”. Nowhere in our body of secular laws does it say it is immoral to commit homicide, but it instead lays out when it is and is not legal to do so. Nowhere in the Bible does it say it is immoral to drive above the speed limit, but it is nonetheless illegal to do so. So, as a practical matter, since Sept. 17, 1787 there has been an effective separation of church and state – and it is as the Founders intended it to be. If you want to conflate church and state, and religious and legal morality then you simply can’t limit the process to the realm of sexuality. The Biblical prohibitions against usury would force the closing of banks. But of course capitalism overrules mere religion - and I’m not just being facetious. It is a legitimate example of the acceptance of the separation of church and civil society which has never been seriously questioned by our most Bible-thumping political panderers. And there are other examples that demonstrate the hypocrisy of our political clowns who imitate Jesus on the campaign trail but govern as Caesar once elected.

If you ask an ordinary American what would be their duty as a juror on a murder trial, they would say they would require proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict and take the freedom or life of the accused. Most would think this is a culturally mandated and legitimate commingling of religious and legal doctrine. They would be wrong. It can be easily demonstrated that the State has absolutely no interest in religious morality being the directing influence in various duties of citizenship. If the standard of reasonable doubt is not just a legal standard but a moral standard that must be met before the State kills, many actions of our nation would be immoral, and citizens preached-up to justify the rejection of contraceptives being funded via insurance policies purchased by religiously affiliated institutions would be equally justified, nee, required to refuse to participate in many actions initiated by the State.

In the case of Iraq for instance, given that there were no weapons of mass destruction or affiliation of the leadership of that nation with Al Qaeda or its alleged action on 9/11, and since there are ample publically available records documenting not only reasonable doubt of either of these allegations, but convincingly showing that the rationale presented to our nation and the world to justify our attack and occupation of Iraq was a blatant lie, then the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis would under civil legal and theoretically coterminous religious standards constitute both illegal and immoral murder. But the secular empire of the United States indubitably exempts itself from religious standards of morality, and like every empire preceding it unabashedly subordinates all legality or basic fairness to the greater imperative of geo-political advantage. If this is not separation of church and state, I don’t know what is. And self-identified “religious” (and volunteer) soldiers who kill in the service of a known lie are patriotically acknowledging their belief in the separation of Heaven and Earth, and are further choosing to lobotomize themselves from the awareness that the justifications for war and taking up arms peddled to them weren’t convincing enough to cause the children of the born-again Commander-in-Chief to do the same. Did they hear a different truth or a different lie? I suspect it is morally proper we don’t ask and don’t tell. After all, that has nothing to do with sex.