Politics as Holy War

    I am thinking these days about two particular friends of mine.  They are middle-aged men, professional men both.  They are family men and homeowners.  They are diligent citizens, kind and caring human beings -- just the sort we'd all be glad to have to have, say,  as neighbors.
    My two friends  are homosexual.  They have been together in a loving, monogamous relationship for 26 years. They live in a state that now permits same-sex unions, and they are about to be married.
    They are on my mind in a bittersweet way. I'm delighted that they are finally able to place upon their relationship the seal that so many of us take for granted.  But I'm sad that they have had to wait so very long to be allowed this opportunity.
    Other homosexual Americans continue waiting, as the rest of the country snarls through decisions about the posture of law and politics toward personal matters.   Our civic conversation is roiled by dubious moralizing and overcooked religiosity. Religious factions offer themselves as voting blocs, and their leaders offer themselves as power brokers. Our politicians stir the pot, as they declaim about preserving family values and protecting marriage. Some of them seem actually to believe that marriage is under attack, and that family values can be usefully framed in the vocabulary of politics. Others are only pandering.
    Toxic mixtures of religion and politics are not new.  Consider Prohibition. And one's definition of appropriate preacher behavior can depend on one's point of view. I might have favored the clergy who energized the American Revolution. I did favor the ones who energized the American civil rights movement.
    Still, it appears to me that the likes of John Hagee and Jerry Falwell have crossed into mere partisanship.  And in any case the nation does seem to have been running an especially high fever for a while.  The sanctimonious right has contorted Republican politics with a striking irony. In it, the supposed apostles of limited government labor to push government into the most intimate aspects of personal life.  Political pandering has reached such lows that a sitting president, the second President  Bush, endorsed the crackpot notion of writing a Judeo-Christian definition or marriage into the Constitution of the United States.
    It's a strong brew, this notion that some political opinions (and the people who hold them) are morally superior to other political opinions (and the people who hold those.)  Some of our leaders are bingeing on it.  Under the influence, they have turned politics into a kind of holy war across a broad front. A faction in Congress has relentlessly connived to undermine the work of a duly elected president. In one revealing extreme, they shut down the government rather than tolerate the implementation of a duly enacted law.
    And so the rest of us are subjected to the obverse of what our system of government is supposed to be about.  It is supposed to shelter and accommodate competing values.  But Washington's hotheads of the moment want to use it to enshrine some values and drive others out.  In other times and places there was a word for people who took the law into their own hands and trampled opposition down. They were called vigilantes.  The analogy is extreme, but it is not irrelevant.
    This spree of intolerance won't last, and we must hope that other politicians will then forego tit for tat. (My compatriots on the leftward side of things have shown that we are not above taking our own taste of the brew.  But that's a discussion for another time.) My particular hope is for broader recognition that  heedless commerce between religion and government is dangerously foolhardy. Preachers who want churches to elevate politics of their choosing invite politicians to think they might elevate churches of their choosing.
    Meanwhile, in one corner of the country, my two friends have finally escaped having dogma enforced upon them through civil law.  Godspeed to them, and may many others follow.