Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Park Service Won’t Tell Grand Canyon’s Age

Saturday, December 30th, 2006

Update: It turns out the claims made by PEER are entirely bogus. For a complete debunking, see the Skeptics Magazine here. I apologize for getting duped.

Sure, some things have changed since the mid-term elections, but some things stay the same:

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”

Compared to federal funding for abstinence-only programs to combat AIDS in Africa, this is small beans. But it’s so symbolic of the Administration’s pandering to a small special interest group. Young-earth Christians are a minority of a minority – these fundamentalists reject even intelligent design, because it acknowledges the earth is more than 6,000 years old.

There are plenty of conservative Christian views worthy of theological refutation, but this isn’t one of them. As Pope John Paul wrote, “truth can not contradict truth”. Young earth creationism isn’t theology, it’s heresy, a doctrine that separates us from God. This doctrine forces a false choice: acceptance of a demonstrably erroneous proposition, or unbelief in God. If these were the only two choices, I’d have to go with unbelief in God. Young earth creationism denies the glory of God’s creation, of God’s divine work. It does this by promoting a literal reading of the Bible where none is necessary, negating a deeper appreciation of God’s creative act.

I guarantee you that Bush is not a young-earth creationist. But this is a political pay-off to a powerful special interest group that propagates this particular heresy. 2009 can’t come soon enough.

(Via Political Animal.)

Posted in Politics, Science and Religion, The Christian Right | 595 Comments »

America Has Changed

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

I have come to the conclusion that America has changed, and for the better.

After the election, I wrote about the change in the media perception of the Christian voter to a more moderate, compassionate view. Since then, it’s become even more apparent that this is the case. Articles like this one in the Christian Science Monitor are getting more frequent:

On World AIDS Day, Dec. 1, Evangelical superstar Rick Warren – author of the runaway bestseller “The Purpose Driven Life” – hosted an AIDS summit at his California megachurch. The keynoter? Sen. Barack Obama (D) of Illinois.

[...]

In recent decades, the political profile of white Evangelicals has been fairly predictable: strong allegiance to Republicans and focus on a few social concerns. James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson form the familiar trinity of the Christian Right.

Although embryonic, a remarkable trend is emerging among Evangelicals today: the embrace of a social agenda that includes not only abortion and marriage, but poverty, AIDS, the environment, and human rights.

To be clear, Evangelicals are not turning into liberal Democrats en masse. But I’ve never been hoping for that. All I’ve ever wanted is to see the authoritarian choke-hold that a very small number of politically minded conservative Christian leaders have had on the public conversation regarding Christianity end. Many articles have been written in conservative magazines (as well as comments on this blog) stating emphatically that true Christians can not be liberal. Of course many of these same people are now calling Richard Cizik, David Kuo or Rick Warren liberal apostates from the one true Christian faith. But no one believes them anymore. Joel Hunter, the megachurch pastor who turned down his appointment as president of the Christian Coalition rather than abandon a broader social agenda, can’t be dismissed as a liberal. Barack Obama, who clearly is a liberal, can’t be dismissed as less than Christian.

In retrospect, the Christian right’s authoritarian leaders (Falwell, Robertson, Dobson et al) never spoke even for all conservative Christians. But somehow the whole country acted as if they did. Their agenda became “the Christian agenda”. Dissent from their leadership among conservative Christians would supposedly harm the fight against godless secular humanism, so better to be quiet than be found on the side of Satan. They stoked the fear of secular society as the enemy, and pushed the imminence of the Rapture, to make sure the Christian troops didn’t stray from their battle plan. And conservative Christians complied, internalizing the message that to be Christian means accepting the entire conservative Christian orthodoxy as a package. Straying from this orthodoxy in part meant rejecting it in full, so the discipline was total.

This authoritarian discipline, it seems to me, has fallen apart, thanks be to God. But we also have to thank some very visible conservative Christians, people such as Warren, Kuo and Cizik. Then there have been Christian progressives, foremost among them Jim Wallis, but also Jimmy Carter, Bill Moyers and many like them, who preached a different gospel.

In a much darker sense, though, this fracturing of the conservative Christian base was inevitable. Bush’s compassionate conservatism turned into a morally failed war in Iraq while humanitarian needs have been starved for funds. His conservatism has been shown to be neither compassionate nor Christian in its impact. It’s become too difficult to pretend the emperor has clothes. But there have been other disasters — Terry Schiavo and Ted Haggard come to mind — that have made many Evangelicals question the conservative orthodoxy.

This doesn’t mean we Christian progressives can pack up our bags and go home. There are lots of fights yet to come. Conservative Christians are still pushing failed abstinence-only education in Africa, and working to block gay marriage and stem cell research. But my sense is that, now that the authoritarian orthodoxy has crumbled, we can have a much more open and respectful conversation with many Evangelicals about these issues without having the door closed in our faces before we even begin. The hard right is still clinging to the failed orthodoxy, but many others will be peeled away, persuaded by Christ’s call to care for the most vulnerable rather than the old Christian conservative leaders’ call to fight the culture wars.

Posted in Politics, The Christian Right | 5,158 Comments »

We Still Have to Change Some Minds on Gay Marriage

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

It was great to see the Arizona voters reject an initiative that would ban gay marriage. Unfortunately, seven other states approved similar initiatives.

I’ve long been optimistic regarding the legalization of gay marriage within the next decade or so, mainly for demographic reasons. Younger voters have much less of a problem with gay marriage than older voters. Since the exit poll data is available online, I figured this was a chance to test my theory. For the Arizona, Virginia and Wisconsin gay marriage ban propositions, here are the percentage voting yes for the four age bands provided in the exit polling data (they also have data on Tennessee’s ban initiative, but for some reason it isn’t broken out into these four age bands.)

gay marriage bans exit polling by ageIn each of these three states, voters under 30 are more open to gay marriage than voters over 60. There is a 15% drop in the percentage approving a gay marriage ban between those over 60 and under 30 in Arizona, an 11% drop in Virginia, and an astounding 27% drop in Wisconsin. (As an aside, it’s interesting that voters that came of age during the 60s and 70s had a lower percentage voting for the bans in every state than voters that came of age in the 80s and early 90s. My generation really is more tolerant and open-minded than the generation immediately following us.)

Given this generational shift in attitudes towards gay marriage, I’ve been thinking that we could just wait it out, since between elections some of the over 60 voters will have died, thereby becoming ineligible to vote (except in Chicago), and will have been replaced by new, younger voters. I did a quck back of the napkin calculation to see how rapidly the Wisconsin election results might change, assuming that on average voters stop voting at 75, new voters vote in the same proportions as the under 30 voters did in this election, and everyone else stays the same.

Unfortunately, this demographic shift only makes half a percentage point difference in the vote totals per year. This means that we would have to wait about 18 years for Wisconsin to move from 59% to 49.9% in favor of the gay marriage ban.

I can’t wait that long. And since a majority of under 30 voters in Virginia voted for the ban, they’ll never approve gay marriage at this rate.

So we can’t just sit back and let demography be our destiny. We have to change people’s minds about gay marriage now instead of letting nature take its course. We don’t have enough time to wait.

Posted in Gays in the Church, Politics | 173 Comments »