HEADLINE FROM CNN.COM 2/14/2000 "Bush allies hope to turn Christian conservatives against McCain."

FEBRUARY 17, 1600 AD - Ground-breaking astronomer Giordano Bruno is convicted of Heresy and burned at the stake for suggesting (E-Gad!) that stars might actually be distant suns.

We might as well discuss it now. Because it's going to come up sooner or later. Probably in the exact microsecond after the Republicans crown their candidate for President at the convention in August…if I had to guess. At that moment, as sure as there's a Bible in every motel dresser, the Religious Right, led by the Christian Coalition, will start asking the Republican leadership to include all sorts of wackiness in the party platform. You know the drill, a "moment of silence" (read: forced prayer) in school, Ten Commandments on the blackboard, teacher-led prayers before, during, and after every sporting, graduation, or remotely-school-related event, bible study classes in schools, burnings at the stake for anyone who even dares to utter the word "abortion." Blah blah God. Blah blah Bible. Blah blah blah blah blah.

All of which adds up to one thing: certain elements within the far religious right continue to seek ways to use the Republican Party to further their agenda of injecting Church into every State function they can think of.

Now, I apologize in advance if it sounds like The Pen is going after Christians in particular but…well, I am. To be frank, I was baptised Catholic and spent twenty years in and out of Episcopal churches and it's the only major religion I know anything about. And besides, it ain't the Muslims who exert de-facto control over one of the only two viable political parties in our nation, now is it?

The reason we separate Church and State in this country is very simple: we do it because religions are like assholes…everybody's got one. Even within very specific branches of Christianity, nobody can agree on the rules. Take two die-hard Baptists, happily singing along next to each other in the same pew. Without first being prompted by the nearest Church official, would they agree on the specific meaning of every single phrase in the Bible? Of course not.

Take "Thou shalt not kill" for example. OK, fine…sounds good to me. Simple, unambiguous, clear, to the point. But wait, is it really? What about in war? Is that kind of killing OK with God? What about if the war is over oil? Is cheap gas of equal or lesser value than a human life? What about self-defense? Is it OK to kill somebody who is about to stab my sister to death? What about hunting? You know, the words "human beings" are not actually in that sentence. The Pen thinks that if someone subscribes to a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible on things like abortion and homosexuality, then they ought to be forced to interpret this Commandment literally as well. I mean, maybe God meant to say "Thou shalt not kill anything, anytime" but ran out of room on the tablet, and figured we'd get the idea.

"Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy." Huh? I mean, I know what the Sabbath is, but as for keeping it holy, well that could mean just about anything. Point being, if there's a rule with more leeway as to how it could be interpreted, I have yet to hear it. Are these the kinds of rules upon which we should be basing important public policies? By contrast, "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech" is about as specific as they come, and even that one causes us trouble now and again.

And then of course there's everyone's favorite, "Thou shalt not commit adultery", which just cracks me up, especially when I see folks like Newt gettin' all Biblical on us. I wonder how many people know that the Church of England, one of the most powerful religious organizations in the world, exists primarily because King Henry VIII wanted to get laid by someone other than his wife?

And what about all those silly procedural rules like not eating certain kinds of meat on certain days? Does God really care when we eat pork chops? Does he have nothing more important occupying his time? Shouldn't he be out making sure that football players who make the sign of the cross on camera catch more touchdown passes than those who don't? Seriously though, isn't it possible that during the Middle Ages, when most of these bizarre rules were "handed down by God", the Church was simply using its role as the most powerful single force in the lives of a largely illiterate populace to exert control over physically dangerous behavior, like eating bacteria-laden pork? And that now that we have technologies like pasteurization and refrigeration, it's maybe not so important to adhere so strictly to those kinds of rules?

The Pen thinks so.

The most popular attack on the Church and State separation issue comes in the form of attempts to insert religion into our public schools. I believe the reasoning goes something like this: the rules of Christianity, guys like Pat Robertson will say, are nothing more than a way of teaching people to treat their fellow man with kindness and respect. "The Golden Rule," if you will. So why are we separatists so threatened by the thought of including these ideas in our children's education? In this era of Columbine and soaring drug abuse and teen pregnancy rates, how could a little education in Christian values possibly hurt anybody? Well, the answer is surprisingly simple and I can even explain it in terms of the Bible.

Is anyone familiar with the passage, "What you do to the least of my people, you do unto me?" Well, if you force non-Christian kids (the least of God's people, presumably) to take Bible study classes, or to stare at the Ten Commandments all day long, or to participate in a prayer in which they do not believe, you are persecuting them. And if you persecute someone because they don't believe the way you believe, aren't you, by God's transitive property, persecuting God? Silly argument? Well of course it is, it's based on a 3,000-year-old Biblical fable.

Here's a more practical argument, one based entirely in reality. Imagine you're Jewish. There are a lot of them out there, you know. I myself know and love many Jews and have yet to discover one with horns on his or her head. Now imagine you play football at a public high school and your team captain calls everybody together for a pre-game Christian prayer. What do you do? You're sixteen and all your friends are doing it. Do you go along with the crowd, even though the prayer is incompatible with your heritage, with everything your parents have taught you? What if you're in Kansas, or Texas, where they're particularly nutty about things like this? Does that change your answer?

The Christian Right would say that nobody is forcing anyone to participate, that it's all supposed to be voluntary and student-led. But c'mon! What is a kid to do in a situation like this? Everybody else is doing it, and when the team captain asks, probably with a disapproving frown on his face, "Aren't you going to pray, little Johnny?", the poor kid has to tell the guy, in front of all his friends, that he's not going to pray, and why he's not going to. I think kids have enough peer pressure in their lives. Why give them one more thing to worry about?

And in any case, we all know that the real goal of Pat Robertson's fundamentalist right is not altruistic education of a secular point of view, but parochial indoctrination. Nobody's being fooled here.

We need Church and State to remain separate in this nation because there is no more personal thing in the entire universe than one's religious faith. Likewise, there is no more public thing than any entity run by a Government. And between those two extremes lies a vast cultural divide that should never, ever, be crossed.

In fact, maybe it's time we added a Commandment. The Eleventh Commandment: stay out of your fellow man's religious business, just as you would expect him to stay out of yours.

Angry Pen out.  

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