Well, this column makes more connections that some of us have worried about. (Thanks to Bad Catholic for the link, btw.) He starts by pointing out that many of the Ten Commandments statues around the country were put there by Cecille B. DeMille to promote his movie. That's right, these weren't put there to worship God, but to worship Hollywood.
But, as Rich notes, that is nothing compared to what we have today. "The religio-hucksterism surrounding the Schiavo case makes DeMille's Hollywood crusades look like amateur night." Politicians from all over the map are lining up to profit from this family's tragedy. Bill Frist, heart surgeon, senator, and presidential hopeful, said that watching video tapes of Shiavo allowed him to second guess doctors who actually examined the woman. Nice. Tom Delay has been even worse. When he isn't doing his best Barry Bond's imitation, he is jumping all over the Shiavo case. "DeLay, last seen on "60 Minutes" a few weeks ago deflecting Lesley Stahl's questions about his proximity to allegedly criminal fund-raising by saying he would talk only about children stranded by the tsunami. Those kids were quickly forgotten as he hitched his own political rehabilitation to a brain-damaged patient's feeding tube. Adopting a prayerful tone, the former exterminator from Sugar Land, Tex., took it upon himself to instruct "millions of people praying around the world this Palm Sunday weekend" to "not be afraid."
And this from our compassionate commander in chief:
The president was not about to be outpreached by these saps. The same Mr. Bush who couldn't be bothered to interrupt his vacation during the darkening summer of 2001, not even when he received a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," flew from his Crawford ranch to Washington to sign Congress's Schiavo bill into law. The bill could have been flown to him in Texas, but his ceremonial arrival and departure by helicopter on the White House lawn allowed him to showboat as if he had just landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Within hours he turned Ms. Schiavo into a slick applause line at a Social Security rally. "It is wise to always err on the side of life," he said, wisdom that apparently had not occurred to him in 1999, when he mocked the failed pleas for clemency of Karla Faye Tucker, the born-again Texas death-row inmate, in a magazine interview with Tucker Carlson." (emphasis mine)
The rest of the column is worth reading. Rich connects all this to the growing concern public school teachers have about mentioning evolution; the IMAX theaters not showing films on the Galapagos islands because real evidence might offend religious fundamentalists who cling to a 6,000 year old earth. Science is being traded for faith in what is a fool's bargain. There is no need to exchange one for the other, but lacking both is a detriment to us all.
As Rich notes, the polls show that only 20 percent of Americans really believe what these Republican politicians pretend to believe. Most Americans don't want their government overriding state courts time and time again, and certainly not to force a politically charged outcome on an intensely painful private tragedy. That won't stop them from doing it. As the West Wing said last night on tv, people who demand expressions of faith also demand to be lied to and manipulated. I don't understand why they want that outcome, but they seem to line up to have someone like Delay--a person they would not want as a friend, colleague, church member, or neighbor--pander to their most inner beliefs. In the end, politics is undermined, but faith is sold.
2 comments:
I still don't understand how the fundamentalists can reconcile their claims that they are both the "moral majority" and a persecuted minority (did I read that on your blog or someone else's?). The full NYT article on evolution concerns impacting IMAX distribution is also illuminating.
don't think I wrote that, but wish I had.
Post a Comment