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.

Santorum's End Run

In the ongoing primary process a faction of the GOP camp has initiated a misguided witch hunt for religious heresy. This is an unfortunate political tactic to stimulate the nether regions of the brain where the neural neutrality providing accommodation for the illogic and irrationality, the special reserved space for the compartmentalization of belief unsupported by evidence or tangibility, the serene silence where notions of science can be suspended, is situated. It is the place where the conduct of human beings is dictated by a non-human entity, or possibly entities, and is monitored by the loudest and most vociferous acolytes of any particular permutation of supernatural themes. This is the region purposefully avoided by the authors of the Constitution when constructing a secular mechanism of civil earthly governance. Any cursory perusal of the Federalist Papers, or any half-hearted study of the on-goings at the original Constitutional Convention or subsequent ratification of the Bill of Rights, or any consideration of the academic resumes of the participants, must support the conclusion that they deliberately chose to confine their considerations to the arena of rationality common to all men. If, as Mr. Santorum has speculated, they intended for government and religion to be melded, I believe they had the intellectual fortitude and the literary ability to state such, if it were their intention to so do.

The first clause of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”, has been dissected and debated linguistically and legally for over two hundred and fifty years, and it has been politically and culturally accepted by successive generations, from agrarian to post-industrial, to infer “separation of church and state”, with government being a strictly secular compact between the state and the people, and religion being a personal compact between so-inclined individuals and spiritual and/or moral informants of personal conscience. If religion now wants to blend with government it must accept the foibles and vicissitudes of ever changing political dynamics and demographics, and subject itself and its practice to the legislative process and be held accountable to the requirements of Constitutional compatibility. I wonder if Mr. Santorum would really wish religion to devolve into the jetsam of the political hurly-burly.

Mr. Santorum’s calculated speciousness is unfortunate, insulting, and is nothing more than the meretricious piety of a venal professional politician with an anti-American agenda. I will defend this thesis by suggesting that Mr. Santorum seeks to advance not a Christian agenda, but a Papal agenda. The fallacious and tired argument that the Founders intended this nation to have some theocratic identity is belied by the text of the original document ratified Sept. 17, 1787, which lacks any theological theme in the design or process of state establishment or political procedure. If this omission together with the first ten words in the First Amendment of the subsequent Bill of Rights is not, for some, sufficient evidence of intent (and to Mr. Santorum they are not), we may still proceed by another route. If, for the sake of argument we concede to him the most favorable possible interpretation, and we accept the oft-made contention that the minds of the Founders were undergirded by deep Christian belief that was so central to any public or private casuistry it would present an ineluctable estoppels that needn’t be articulated or written, Mr. Santorum would still have a problem. If under his calculus we were founded as a Christian nation, then it will have to certainly be acknowledged that we were founded as a Protestant nation – since the Founding Fathers were Protestants. So if Mr. Santorum’s Catholicism is as he says it is, and he is as dedicated and subservient to the tenets and teachings of the Catholic Church as he purports and confesses to be, then we must assume as President he will give priority to the direction of the Pope over that of the Constitution since that is his unabashed stance as a candidate. More unfortunate for Mr. Santorum’s dialectic, if this nation can be legally declared a theocratic Christian domain, it is equally appropriate to declare it a Protestant domain. And wasn’t the Protestant Reformation about eliminating both the polluted Papal nexus interposed between God and man and the amalgamation of religious and civil authority? So if it is tolerable in our political contest to advance the dubious argument that President Obama is waging a war on religion, it may then be legitimate to question if Mr. Santorum, a brother of Opus Dei, is waging war on the Reformation. And if in his Papist consciousness he is waging a war on the Reformation and seeking to overturn the Protestant consciousness which prefers the separation of religious and civil authority, then it would be Mr. Santorum, the Republican and conservative, who is actually arguing against our American culture and tradition.

Mr. Santorum, in my mind, is a mediocre one-issue candidate who cynically knows that because of the increasing dullness of the American mind simply waving the Christian flag will cause a certain number of people to automatically salute without thinking about anything else they’re hearing. And of course if you convert from an ‘issue’ to a ‘religious issue’, the answers precede the questions, and the least complicated candidate conveniently excuses us from the effort of individual deliberation, and by guise lures us to indenture as the wards of theocracy and alienates us from the heritage of personal and intellectual freedom bestowed by the Constitution.

Supreme Decision

The impending Supreme Court consideration of the Universal Health Care legislation is certain to generate great debate in legal and ideological circles. The technicalities of the law will be a minor part of the popular discussion. But, we can be assured that the most caustic battles will occur on that field where the most paradoxical cognition and/or vacuous dogmatism will be ineluctable - the ideological front. Many have or will initiate their attack or defense of the program from an ideological set-point, but for me a synoptic understanding of the particulars of the issue necessitate a different process.

My secular mentality never allowed me to divinize the primacy of the free market and separate it from the working of common sense. The conceptualized new legislation was predicated on the fact that health care in this country is unaffordable for many and is on a trajectory to be out of reach for most, with little evidence that the unfettered free market will offer any special dispensation to meliorate this trend in the foreseeable future. So, the question then becomes what can or should be done about health care. Can it be an “industry” whose underlining raison d’être is the care of the corporeal body and relieving of physical suffering wrought by the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, which should legislatively be abandoned to fickle and uncaring winds of the marketplace, at the same time all manner of tax exemptions, perks, and privileges are granted to religious organizations whose mandates are the disposition of the intangible soul.

It is not my intent to attack religion, but I believe all the complexities of the debate ultimately boil down to the dichotomy of how we resolve our dealings with the same inheritances from the natural world and human awareness that teach us to esteem our bodies as well as our souls. If we include special indulgence for religion in the fabric of our social contract as integral to “the promotion of the general welfare”, how can we be so dissociative when it comes to mutual care of our brief mortality?

Whether we wish to associate ourselves with the implication of the phrase “promote the general welfare” or the legal delicacies of the Commerce Clause, it may be instructive to examine the passive acceptance of the body politic to the huge and indecent expenditure on our military, which is frittered away on non-existential threats, not to our nation, but to our world hegemony and empire. So, if it a matter of how our commonwealth is spent, and if we are a truly free people, not indentured to any ideological master, why can’t universal health care be a legitimate social construct simply because we want and need it?

AKA Voter Nullification

Today I was on a conservative blog site where there was an almost cult-like refutation of the NAACP's intent to challenge voter ID laws nationwide.Unfortunately my cynicism doesn't allow me to believe that this new urgency for voter ID is motivated by concern for the integrity of our elections. Although arguments about the ubiquity of identification or the ease of its acquisition in our society are compelling, the most egregious recent controversy over proper democracy was in the 2000 election where the votes of duly registered voters were not counted because of arbitariness with a distinctly partisan odor. I haven't been convinced of the new serious, compelling circumstances requiring this new scrutiny of individuals showing up at the polls to vote. And I marvel at the ideological divide of those who want more people to show up and cast votes and those who are threatened by it.


In the present environment where wealth and therefore power is so unequally partitioned, it would seem the rich and powerful would have the greater ability and incentive to encourage and stimulate fraudulent votes, and yet the party most closely identified with the financial and corporate elite, is the political party most closely identified with measures that would place barriers, however insignificant they are reputed to be, between living, breathing people and voting. And though many of the commentators on that site advanced the observation that it is politically incorrect to notice that most of those impacted by the new and necessary requirements are among the "brainwashed" black and brown populations, it is nonetheless hard not to notice.

It is also hard not to notice the results in Maine this past Tuesday.

Paterno's Lesson

There are several tragedies attached to the Penn State affair. The rape and maiming of children by a sexual predator is the most immediately egregious and monstrous. But for some reason all eyes are drawn to Coach Paterno, a man who used sport as his instrument to mentor boys into manhood. My brother, a Penn State alumnus, four decades removed, used to regale us with Paterno’s famous “football is like life” predicate to the similarities of the vicissitudes experienced on the football field and those inescapable in real life. Although we chuckled at his mimicry we nonetheless absorbed the sensibleness of many of the coach’s dictums and I, at least, have repeated the mantra silently in my mind at various points of decision and hardship where the hard-knock of conscious direction was required in resistance to the momentum of the flow. That is why this heinous fiasco has re-humanized and re-adultified the slumbering and rote activities of my moral senses.

Not to belittle the terrible and permanent scarring that will be borne by the actual victims, but we have all been injured in that our belief in ourselves must be challenged by Coach Paterno’s shortcoming. We are beset by a society and a culture that defines and rewards a conception of adult sophistication, personally and geo-politically, as measured by our bravery to do the naughty thing, and not by our courage to do the right thing. Mr. Paterno blessed with wealth, fame, family, and success, and after the Biblically allotted three score and ten years, presented with his test of morality, principle, and courage, pitted against friendship and legacy and loyalty to a university and football program, was confounded into inaction. It was a horrible choice much beyond the sniveling choices, that thankfully, most of us are accosted with, but I’m sure in retrospect Coach Paterno will admit the consequences of belittling morality and courage for a temporary convenience is a more horrible burden to bear than the weight of the decision he had been called upon to make.

It is a shame that the Michelangelo statue of Mr. Paterno’s life and career has been graffiti-ed by a man he called friend, but it was Mr. Paterno himself who caused the chip that forevermore will not allow his personal legacy to be appraised at its highest possible value.

The riotous overreaction is somewhat to be expected from a mob of deeply disappointed youth, but Mr. Paterno’s termination was a correct decision responsible adults were required to make. It is only debatable whether they are requiring a higher or minimal standard of us all.

Is Cain Sane?

Herman Cain repeated one of the calculated conservative talking points on Wednesday that blacks have been “brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view”. Although all reasonably sophisticated persons understand the Pavlovian tactic of stimulating a desired political response by redundant repeating of a constructed mantra – “Obamacare”, “socialism”, “class warfare” – Mr. Cain chose to mount an assault by insult, by the sweeping general conclusion that the majority of black Americans are minions in a mindless herd driven across the prairie of political and economic life by an unquestioned Svengali. He suggests that there is limited possibility that blacks could consider political options and then “choose” liberalism (in conjunction with roughly 50% of the national political body that doesn’t identify as conservative) as best serving their interests and concerns. It was a stunning affront that could stimulate the suspicion of “tokenism”, since Mr. Cain apparently gives due deference to white liberal’s ability at self-interested political thought. Why would a supposedly intelligent man say such a thing? What strings are the Koch Brothers pulling to make him proffer such an insulting stereotype out of a black mouth.

We un-sophisticates must assume Mr. Cain, the self-proclaimed “political outsider” is nonetheless playing the “inside” political game and saying the market and Limbaugh-tested things predominantly white conservative audiences want to hear. Granted Mr. Cain is clever enough to appropriate Mr.Obama's demonstration that blackness needn’t be a disadvantage, unless you make it one. Mr. Cain is certainly using race as an advantageous tool to promote a natural separation from the monotony of ideologically indistinguishable colleagues. Used in conjunction with the powerful tendency of idealouges to rally around whatever is said by a candidate waving a favored ideological flag, it can be a very effective tool to attract loyalty and votes, regardless of the factualness of what is said.

For example, recently in Florida Mr. Cain said the cancer he experienced in 2006 would have been fatal if “Obamacare” had been in force. He cited government imposed bureaucracy over the practice of medicine and the treatment options of doctors, and the infernal (and in his case ‘deadly’) delays inherent in Washington administered bureaucracy. In the interest of time and space I’ll just refer you to reportage by PolitFact seen at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/28/herman-cain-obamacare_n_985148.html as an alternative to Mr. Cain’s screed. If it is deemed meaningful and credible, what must we make of the man self-marketed as the ‘C.E.O. who is supposed to know’? Does it mean he actually knows very little about the nuts and bolts of what is strategically obscured as “Obamacare”, which he castigates at every opportunity? Does it mean he only knows what the minions of the Koch Brothers tell him? Or does it mean he constructed a tale and an appropriate black persona cynically designed to appeal to an audience prepped to detest “Obamacare”? Mr. Cain, by the way, won in that bastion of the senior vote, the Florida Straw Poll.

I am not opposed to clever electoral politics, I am in fact inured to it, as many Obama supporters and disappointees must be, but it only makes me more resolved to focus on the interests and concerns of my America - the middle class. In my opinion, as uncomfortable as it may be, we are not engaged in an ideological struggle, but a class struggle. And, as a political person, I believe what’s good for the middle class is good for America. The concrete instruction of history proves the fallacy of a scheme of thought whereby the prosperity of the majority is dependent on the altruism of the minority. History also delivers another lesson, to which 21st century humans are not immune, that the outsized economic dominance of a minority leads to the serfdom of the majority.

I would ask what would have been the health prospects of a man delivering pizzas for Godfathers in 2006 afflicted with the same form of cancer as Mr. Cain. Was he privy to the same quality of care for which C.E.O. Mr. Cain has expressed gratitude? Did he even have health benefits? Would he still be alive, and if so, are he and family financially viable after such a health catastrophe? Or would only a brainwashed person ask such questions?

Medicare or Not?

Government and society are continuous enterprises, with obligations and benefits shared by multiple generations. Should the generation that undertook the financing and construction of the Interstate Highway system have some special benefit from it or exclusivity to it because their expense in building it is greater than the present generation's per capita cost of maintaining it? Medicare is a benefit that is supposed to be perpetual, built on the assumption that there is or should be enough prosperity to afford some measure of health security to present and future Americans.

The typical attack against Medicare is the hint or suggestion of "socialism", as if the very word or concept is some toxic mist from a miasmal swamp of civil evil. Like everything, Medicare costs money, but it appears Americans, granted freedom by nature or nature's God, have established a 'people's priority' of mutuality of social welfare, to retain some portion of societal wealth that 'government' otherwise feels compelled to waste in militarism and imperialism. Why is the welfare of the people and not the waste of war always secondary in the opinions of amateur economists and sociologists, when it is hardly arguable which pursuit produces the most social and financial detriment?

Since there isn't any historical evidence that the world of unfettered capitalism, a hundred years ago, was a superior or preferable environment for the poor or elderly, we must account the newer elements in the social order, unions, collective bargaining, Social Security, and Medicare in some degree responsible for the qualitative improvement in the standard of living of those classes of people who would have had much bleaker prospects under the past socio-economic formula. A pertinent statement by Rudi Nussbaum highlights the socio-economic myopia and rote ideology of our amateur economists and sociologists. "Following a tradition illustrated nearly 400 years ago by Gallileo's fate, accepted beliefs and supporting theoretical models, combined with vested interests, trumped observation". It did, and it does.