The way that the nominal left loves to throw the real left on the sword over the most ephemeral and pointless issues would almost make you believe that they don't really care about taking power to put a real leftist agenda into effect. And there are few issues more clearly illustrative of that than the pandering to the tender feelings of the anti-religious fringe over issues such as the recent Greece v. Galloway ruling.
I certainly don't like it when a bunch of politicians get up and make a display of religiosity that their actions and private lives seldom live up to. There is something distasteful about the hypocritical use of religious display, especially in politics, there is every reason for a religious person to oppose it. But this is not an especially important issue as compared to what politicians do in the course of their official duties. The plaintiffs in the case said that they were "uncomfortable" with the prayers at the beginning of the town council meeting, which I get. But, really, this issue isn't what's important, what they do after that is what is important. If the price of avoiding Republicans in office is tolerating a minimal amount of that display, it is certainly worth it. If atheists are offended, well, join the club. I'm a lot more offended by cuts to general assistance, tax giveaways to the wealthy and just the other genuinely important actions of government than I am the thirty seconds of meaningless gesture at the start of the meeting. I care about that entirely more than I care about your or my discomfort for thirty seconds at the beginning of the meeting. For the record, the Pledge of Allegiance they say as they don't pray, around here, makes me uncomfortable but not enough to make me mistake the empty gesture as an important issue.
The ruling on allowing prayer at the beginning of a town council meeting has nothing, whatsoever, to do with religion as religion but, as with just about everything this court does, it has everything to do with the use of religion as a political tool. And, I'm sorry to have to point it out again, the right's use of religion has been far more effective than the dogmatism of the left has been. A lot of the blame for that success is due to the corporate media's reporting of those issues, but that will get me onto the fact that the left has been the media's sucker as well, even as it delivers the punches.
If the left had decided to spend its resources wasted on unimportant stuff like this on pushing economic justice, it would have a lot more success. We have not only wasted our time on marginal issues like this one, we have enabled the right to portray the left as being anti-religious. Which is a problem in a country where the vast majority of people are religious, religious belief pervades the country.
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If the five conservative Catholics on the Supreme Court are as influenced by what the Pope says as the anti-Catholic blog babblers claim, they would have abolished the death penalty instead of being its greatest supporters. They would have supported the right of effective collective bargaining and social justice, on which even the conservative Popes of the last century and a quarter are down right radical by the standards that prevail in the United States today. Only, that hasn't happened, has it. The sixth Catholic on the court, Justice Sotomayor, has been far more in tune with the Vatican in her decisions on those issues than the right wingers have but on issues of reproductive rights and GLBT rights, she hasn't been.
As I said, yesterday, I remember Catholic bashers complaining that Sotomayor would be another Catholic on the court. I have to say that reading comments at Eschaton, Hullabaloo, and other leftish blogs that sounded like Southern Baptists c. 1960 was another clue that they weren't the liberals they believed they were. It was about the same time I realized a lot of them were actually just a different variety of libertarians who really weren't much interested in the central agenda of the kind of liberalism that was once successful. I don't think people who focus on issues like this do, actually, care about that agenda, their ilk were the same kind who ruined the Democratic coalition in the 1960s.
I have to agree, on both points.
ReplyDeletePrayers before meetings are an empty gesture, to me. The Court justifies them with appeals to "tradition" or "custom," draining the very words of content so they can be accepted under the 1st Amendment. I would rather they were banned outright, but that ban would never take hold and would cause too much turmoil over far too small an issue.
Besides, a "prayer" before a public meeting involving all manner of believers and non-believers is not an ecumenical gesture, either. It's an imposition, and frankly I feel as imposed upon when the prayer is by a Southern Baptist as a Jew would feel during a Christian prayer (I once offered a prayer in an ecumenical service that included a rabbi and some of his congregants. He had asked that the prayer not include the Trinitarian formula, IIRC, so I left it out even though the organizer of the service thought it was no problem, since we were in a Christian church. Close as I've ever gotten to a public prayer for non-Christians and Christians. I see no reason to have prayers before governmental meetings at all, and I think of that rabbi's gratitude as I sat down after that prayer when the subject comes up.)
But is it a hill worth dying on?
I'd rather the Supreme Court had ruled differently, but more and more I see the legacy of the Warren Court now is the belief that the Court is where we go to bypass politics. Only that doesn't work anymore, and Court rulings are harder to repeal than bad legislation. So I agree with you: the fight is for justice, not for a court judgment.
And as for the Supremes on the Court: the idea that being Catholic clouds your perception of others or of the wider world is a pernicious one. Justices can be blind (Thomas, Scalia), or they can learn from the world (Sotomayor, Kagan).
Being raised Catholic is no more a barrier to reason than being raised Jewish; but, again, one prejudice is still acceptable, and the other so ugly to even raise it as a counter-example is to be accused of condemning others as "anti-semitic."
Something really screwy, there.
I remember, somewhere, John Kenneth Galbraith warned about the folly of relying on the courts instead of political organization. I think it might have been as far back as the 60s I read it. He once said that the greatest asset an economist could have was a broad reading of history, which he said was regarded as a quaint notion in his profession. Apparently it's so quaint that you can get a PhD in econ these days without a knowledge of history that would include the Knownothings, the further depravity of nativist bigotry, though the movies have included the Klan so the kewl kids know something like that happened. Though I suspect they don't know it was as anti-Catholic as they are.
ReplyDeleteI'm told that Duncan has made a snarky comment about my post. I haven't bothered to look at it yet. The kind of wit that an affluent, blase, milddle-age, white, hipster comes up with has ceased to interest me enough to click on the link.
I don't even follow links to there anymore. Not interested.
ReplyDeleteI think it was their comments on the Oklahoma tornado that put the final nail in that coffin for me.
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