Last night, I was having dinner with two friends and a
friend of theirs—who, as it turns out, is a neighbor of mine. We’re all artists and teachers of one kind or
another so, as you can imagine, topics of our conversation included writers and
writing, education and politics.
The friends are a couple; I met them in the church I’ve
been attending. Their friend—a nice
straight woman who grew up Roman Catholic—is not religious but seems to be a
theist of some sort.
Anyway, at one point, the conversation turned to the
influence of religion in politics and what that’s meant for us. One of the couple mentioned Michelle
Bachmann, and talked about how she’s emblematic of what’s corrupting both
education and politics: She, like some
other politicians and others working behind-the-scenes, attended fundamentalist
Christian colleges and law schools.
“They want to run this country according to their version of Biblical
law,” my friend exclaimed.
Of course, any time anyone tries to run anything
according to the letter of any sort of scripture—religious or secular—said
scripture is filtered through the mind of whoever is interpreting it. We all have prejudices, but I am coming to
realize that’s not the real problem of trying to run a country according to
Mosaic or Sharia or whatever kind of law.
Instead, the real danger comes when someone tries to use a text—whether
it’s the Bible or the Constitution or the Communist Manifesto—to support a
particular agenda that has little or nothing to do with the text itself.
Here’s an example of what I mean: Many well-intentioned people harbor
unconscious prejudices against people whose races, nationalities, gender
identities and expressions, beliefs or sexuality differ from their own. Most of us learn those prejudices long before
we learn even the words for them, let alone the intellectual tools to take
those biases apart. Being aware of, and
fighting, them is all we can do. On the
other hand, some people will try to institutionalize those prejudices, whether
through Biblical rationales for slavery or Koranic (Is that the proper word?)
justifications for killing infidels—or using some interpretation of the Talmud
as a basis for isolating themselves and their fellow believers from everyone
else.
Essentially, Michelle Bachmann and her ilk are among
those who are trying to use the Bible as a legal basis for discriminating
against LGBT people. What’s even worse,
though, is that people like her have joined forces with lawyers and politician
whose legal education is based mainly on property rights (or, again, someone’s
notion of them) as well as laws and interpretations of laws designed to allow
very wealthy people to gamble with what little people poorer than themselves
have.
Why is the situation I’ve described so dangerous? Well, making this country into a
fundamentalist (again, according to someone’s interpretation) Christian state
can leave us disenfranchised: Enforcing
bans on same-sex marriage, and repealing laws that allow it in some states,
will be just the beginning. Call me paranoid,
but I can imagine someone creating a “heterosexuality test” or some
determination of how closely someone conforms to accepted notions of gender
identity and expression. What will
happen if such tests are used to determine whether someone can vote or get a
job, loan or place to live?
Such a test might be devised by Bachmann’s husband, a
“psychotherapist” who practices “conversion therapy.”
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