People who thought the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was the final word on discrimination against gay and lesbian soldiers were mistaken. As the House of Representatives debates the National Defense Authorization Act this week, Republicans will push for two amendments to permit the military to discriminate against gay and lesbian service members, using “religious freedom” as a cover.
One amendment, offered by Mississippi Republican Steven Palazzo, would prohibit the use of military property to “officiate, solemnize, or perform a marriage or marriage-like ceremony, involving anything other than the union of one man with one woman,” even on bases in states in which same-sex marriage is legal. Rep. Todd Akin’s, R-Mo., amendment would require the military to “accommodate the conscience and sincerely held moral principles and religious beliefs of the members of the Armed Forces concerning the appropriate and inappropriate expression of human sexuality” and would prohibit “adverse personnel actions” against them.
The amendments are another step in a campaign waged by congressional Republicans, religious right activists and their allies in a new organization, the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty, to protect military chaplains who discriminate against gay and lesbian service members. This campaign — infused with overheated rhetoric about repression and persecution of Christians — has emerged as a key piece of the religious right’s strategy of portraying the Obama administration and its allies as hostile to religion.
House Republicans have sought to portray anti-gay military chaplains as in need of protection to freely express their belief that homosexuality is a sin. Akin’s effort to protect the “conscience” rights of chaplains and religious service members “is trying to solve a problem that does not exist,” Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which fought for DADT repeal, said in a statement. Sarvis added that there are already adequate protections for chaplains’ and other service members’ consciences, and no one is being punished for their personal religious beliefs. Palazzo’s amendment conflicts with Defense Department policy requiring neutral use of facilities, according to SDLN.
Last year, similar amendments in the House version of the NDAA were stripped out in conference committee. But House Republicans have persisted in their push for “religious freedom” against the rights of gay and lesbian service members to be free of discrimination, harassment and stigmatization. It’s a fight, in Akin’s words, against “[t]his liberal agenda” that “has infiltrated our military, where service members and chaplains are facing recrimination for their sincerely held moral and religious beliefs.” Akin claimed that raising “moral or religious concerns” about same sex marriage or the DADT repeal “have become potentially career-ending” for some chaplains and charged that Obama’s support for same-sex marriage “will only add fuel to this fire.”
President Obama’s new position on marriage equality, the anti-gay activists claim, is yet more evidence that the government seeks to repress their religious speech and practices and eventually drive them out of the military.
“In part this was triggered by repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” said Ron Crews, a retired military chaplain and executive director of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty. But he, too, tied his group’s activism to the broader claim that Obama is hostile to religious freedom.
“There’s just concern right now about this administration’s seeming lack of understanding of religious liberty issues, and this is just one symptom of that,” Crews told me. He cited the administration’s contraception coverage policy as another example. Since senior Defense Department officials are political appointees, he added, the legislative efforts are an attempt to “counterbalance” administration policy.
The Chaplain Alliance is made up of retired chaplains who are now “endorsing agents” for active military chaplains serving as representatives of their religious group or denomination. The Alliance is entirely Christian and represents 2,500 active chaplains, said Crews.
The military, said Crews, “has become another laboratory for social engineering” as the DADT repeal “validated behavior in the military that a good number of faith groups acknowledge as sinful behavior and so the government has put its stamp of approval on behavior that faith groups find sinful and harmful, actually, to the individual and to the broader society.”
To advocates for the rights of non-theists and non-Christians to be free from evangelism in the military, though, the military chaplains’ complaints ring hollow. “Chaplains are senior officers with their commanders’ ear, unfettered access to service members, and the right to preach their beliefs from the pulpit,” said Jason Torpy, president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, which opposes the amendments and has worked to end discrimination against non-theists in the military. The MAAF has documented and advocated against aggressive evangelizing in the military, including command promotion of prayer, disparagement of non-believers, religious counseling and “spiritual fitness” programs (which promote Christianity as an essential part of military service), evangelical concerts and baptism of troops.
“These amendments are intended to give chaplains the additional power to force their beliefs on others by belittling and ridiculing fellow service members,” Torpy added. “When did the honorable concept of free exercise of religion give way to the free infliction of religion?”
“We think the language they have put forth would allow people the license to bully, and then blame it on their religion requires them to do this,” said Edwina Rogers, executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, which also opposes the amendments.
The Chaplain Alliance claims, however, that chaplains are the ones at risk of being bullied. In a letter to the House Armed Services Committee supporting a similar, stand-alone bill, the Military Religious Freedom Protection Act, the Chaplain Alliance ominously warned of a “hostility” to the chaplaincy that could cause them to lose their endorsements “because of their inability to preach, teach, or share with their fellow servants the full counsel of God,” leading to a “constitutional crisis” because “the military cannot function without the chaplaincy, much less a partial chaplaincy.”
But when I asked Crews about retaliation, he said, “we have not had any chaplains reprimanded as yet for anything they’ve said in the pulpit,” and admitted there are protections for chaplains speaking at a worship service. But, he added, “we’re not just concerned with what happens inside the walls of the chapel,” but with “the overall ministry of a chaplain.”
Crews pointed to the Strong Bonds program, which sponsors military retreats to help service members “strengthen” their marriages under the stress of multiple deployments. “The question becomes will chaplains be required to take same-sex soldiers on those retreats if the chaplain upholds the view of the definition of marriage from a biblical perspective that marriage is between one man and one woman. We’re just waiting right now for an incident to occur. This is one of the unknowns.”
Crews’ worry that chaplains will be forced, against their religious beliefs, to provide marriage counseling to same-sex couples underscores how the religious right has disregarded the Establishment Clause as it complains of religious persecution. Strong Bonds, which uses Christian materials, has long been a target of criticism from the Secular Coalition, the MAAF, and other advocates of church-state separation, for using federal money to lecture service members with sectarian religious advice.
Several years ago, Laurel Williams, an Army major who attended a Strong Bonds retreat in Orlando, Fla., in 2008, showed me an array of evangelistic materials she received there. One item was a book by Gary Chapman, described as the “leading biblical marriage counselor in the U.S.,” whose phrase “love your partner like Jesus loved the church was repeated over and over throughout the weekend seminar,” Williams told me. One book used in the program promised its readers that “you can be equipped to develop an affair with the one and only lover who can satisfy all your innermost desires: Jesus Christ.”
Torpy, of the military atheist group, obtained a copy of a strategy memorandum sent by an Akins aide to House staff and several religious right leaders, which shows Republicans decided to offer two separate amendments because it “gives us the strongest hand going into conference with the Senate.”
But Rogers said she had “high hopes” that the Senate would not adopt the amendments, even if they are passed by the House, and that they would once again be removed in conference. “To roll the clock back and say, now you can discriminate based on what you believe,” said Rogers, “sounds like a serious problem.” But discriminating based on their religion is exactly what the “religious freedom” crusaders want to achieve, and it doesn’t look like they’re going to give up any time soon.
“God is the author of marriage,” came the declaration of National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown moments after President Obama’s historic ABC News interview aired this afternoon. It cannot be redefined, Brown charged, “according to presidential whim.”
Indeed not, but while Obama’s expressed support for marriage equality changes nothing legally, his words — and particularly those about how his faith informed his views — signal a new direction away from kowtowing to a religiously narrow concept of marriage. In previous statements Obama had parroted the conservative line about “one man and one woman” and just two years ago paid homage to “traditional marriage.” Today Obama explicitly rejected the idea that religious conservatives have a monopoly, either legally or rhetorically, on defining marriage as a straights-only institution.
As the Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance pointed out, “it is the Constitution, not his religion that should form the basis of his position.” Yet while Obama certainly shouldn’t say that his religious views dictate policy or legislation, his discussion of how his faith informed his own thinking may signal a political turning point. By rejecting the idea that “true” Christianity demands fealty to “one man and one woman,” Obama appeared less invested in pandering to religious conservatives like Rick Warren, Jim Wallis or Joel Hunter, Obama’s spiritual advisor, who say they’re concerned about issues beyond the culture war but nonetheless remain opposed to marriage equality.
Somehow, though, Obama will have to square this newfound position with his allegiance to anti-equality religious figures. The director of the Democratic National Committee’s faith outreach, the Rev. Derrick Harkins, for example, is opposed to same-sex marriage. While he’s not “a bomb-thrower in terms of saying things that will get a rise out of a crowd,” he told me last year, he is still opposed to same-sex marriage, calling it a “vexing” theological issue. Now the president is for it, but the director of the party’s faith outreach is not.
Republicans, though, are gloating, because they think Obama’s change of heart will energize voters to pull the lever for the flip-flopping Mitt Romney. Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, whose chief talking point following the 2010 midterms was that evangelical turnout decides elections, threatened that Obama’s turnabout “is certain to fuel a record turnout of voters of faith to the polls this November.” Romney, said Family Research Council president Tony Perkins in a statement, “may have been handed the key to social conservative support by President Obama.” And Mike Huckabee, whose name was floated earlier in the day by National Review as a possible Romney running mate to energize the social conservative base, maintained that marriage “is going to be a defining issue this election.”
There are already signs that conservatives are going to taunt Obama with predictions of losing black voters. In his statement, Perkins took pains to point out that majority-black counties in North Carolina voted in favor of Amendment 1, the constitutional amendment that will ban not just same-sex marriage, but civil unions and domestic partnerships as well. (Obama opposed the amendment, although his decision not to campaign in North Carolina in the days before the vote was seen as skittishness over alienating voters in a traditionally Republican state that gave him its electoral votes in 2008.)
Perhaps any black and Latino voters who might be moved to vote against Obama over this single issue should take a look at NOM’s own strategy document, in which the organization admits it aims to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies.” Targeting Latinos, NOM wants to “interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity — a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.” And it wants to portray Obama as a “social radical” unfit for the presidency.
Picking up on that last theme, Rick Santorum accused Obama of “radical social engineering” and blamed “cultural elites” for undermining “the institution that gives the best opportunity for healthy, happy children and a just and prosperous society.”
But public opinion is not on NOM’s side, except for the base it already attracts. While a vast majority (77-21 percent) of white evangelicals remain steadfastly opposed to marriage equality and a smaller segment of minority Christians (50-43 percent) oppose it, other groups — Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews and the unaffiliated — support it, according to recent data from the Public Religion Research Institute. And a recent polling analysis by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that “since 2008, the proportion of African Americans favoring gay marriage has increased from 26 percent to 39 percent, while opposition has fallen from 63 percent to 49 percent.” Another PRRI analysis found that “younger black Millennials (age 18-24) and younger black Protestant Millennials demonstrate more support for same-sex marriage than black Americans overall.” The younger someone is, the more likely he or she is to support same-sex marriage, although young white evangelicals remain the most resistant.
Before Obama’s announcement, the Romney campaign had been reaching out to the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, an outspoken opponent of marriage equality and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which claims to represent 16 million Latino evangelicals. There’s a conventional wisdom that these voters matter a lot in swing states like Florida, or Colorado. But polling data on the religious breakdown of Latinos is hard to come by; a spokesperson for the Pew Hispanic Center told me the organization “does not have any data on the religious composition of Hispanics by state.” Rodriguez’s actual sway over or representation of voters has never been measured.
To be sure, the religious right is going to make as much hay over this as it can, through fundraising, campaigning, moralizing and browbeating. But in the end, it will probably turn out to be a definitive case of preaching to the choir.
“Compassionate conservatism” may seem a relic of the Bush era, but one of its signatures — the so-called faith-based initiatives — quietly persist under President Obama.
The Obama administration’s Friday night news dump of recommendations for reforming faith-based initiatives was yet another frustrating disappointment in the sad history of the president’s faith-based effort. More than a year late, the recommendations were reportedly delayed because the administration wanted to avoid further inflaming the fevered imaginations of those who claim he’s waging a “war on religion.” Insurance coverage for contraception and guaranteeing constitutional rights for Americans who receive taxpayer-funded social services from faith-based organizations are apparently two great tastes that don’t taste great together.
A little history is in order. As a candidate, Obama pledged, “if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs.” Church-state separation advocates cheered; the center-right religious coalition Obama was assiduously courting objected mightily.
And yet, nearly four years after Obama’s campaign trail pledge to reform the faith-based office, beneficiaries of federally funded faith-based social services — people seeking drug treatment, mental health services, marriage counseling, pregnancy prevention services, prenatal care and more — have insufficient legal guarantees that their constitutional right to be free from government-funded, imposed religion will be protected. Today, your tax dollars can still fund, under a George W. Bush executive order, a religious organization that decides, for example, that it can fire the gay employee because its religion so dictates or that it will only hire people of the same faith. Its supporters call it “co-religionist hiring,” but that’s just a polite term for taxpayer-supported discrimination.
For three years the advocacy groups that make up the Coalition Against Religion Discrimination have prevailed on the administration to change this rule — after all, it would only take a stroke of the pen to undo the Bush executive order — and the president has done nothing. Obama has tried to claim the administration “has struck the right balance” by requiring a nebulous “case-by-case” review of instances of discrimination rather than prohibiting it altogether, an assertion the Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance (a CARD member) has called “misguided and untrue. There is no such thing as balance when it comes to discrimination supported by government funding.”
Instead of tasking administration lawyers to draft new regulations, shortly after taking office Obama appointed an Advisory Council of liberals and conservatives, which he dispatched to offer its own recommendations. Contentious issues, such as discriminatory hiring, were not part of its dossier. While the 2010 Advisory Council report addressed another contentious issue — whether religious organizations receiving federal grants should be required to form a separate nonprofit organization in order to segregate public and private funds — when Obama issued an executive order six months later, it was silent on that matter. Under the executive order, the Interagency Working Group, chaired by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and the Office of Management and Budget, was formed to draft uniform model regulations across the 15 federal agencies with faith-based offices. Because Obama left that crucial question out of his executive order, the Working Group, which included representatives from each of those 15 agencies, did not address it in its mishmash of model guidance and regulations.
By offering model “guidance” in some areas and model regulations in others, the Interagency Working Group’s report, church-state separation advocates say, actually weakens some of the recommendations of the Advisory Council in some areas.
“For a year and a half’s worth of work,” said Maggie Garrett, legislative director at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, also a CARD member, “there’s nothing in there that says, ‘we’ve identified all the regulations that apply to faith-based social services. Here are all the regulations that actually conflict with the Obama executive order and what we need to do to conform.’
“Any time a difficult issue came up, or any time it seemed like there would be the slightest burden on faith-based groups in order to adhere to the Constitution, the issue was sort of dropped,” Garrett added. While the Advisory Council report said that beneficiaries must be given the option of an alternative provider, the model regulations in the Interagency Working Group report only require that the federally funded faith-based organization “undertake reasonable efforts to identify and refer the beneficiary to an alternative provider to which the prospective beneficiary has no objection.” That’s different, Garrett said, from saying, “You must have an alternative provider.” And what constitutes “reasonable” is left vague.
None of this, of course, is designed to accomplish anything before the election. Obama’s November 2010 executive order calls for another round of guidance from the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Justice after the Working Group report. “It seems like we’re never going to get to rule-making,” said ACLU legislative counsel Dena Sher. “Meanwhile beneficiaries are left without important protections — the right to be referred to an alternative service provider, and improved rules on prohibited uses of federal funds that clarifies they don’t have to pray before receiving government-funded services.”
On the whole, Sher added, because the Working Group proposed only non-binding model guidance, rather than regulations, on crucial issues, the “teeth seem to be missing” from the report.
In attempting to clarify some issues (although not by regulation), the report further muddied the waters on how scriptural materials can be used in federally funded programs. In one example, in a question and answer appendix intended to clarify prohibited uses of federal funds, the report states:
[S]taff in Federally-funded programs may not provide devotional religious instruction, but, where consistent with the purposes of the program, they may teach about religion, such as the history of religion, comparative religion, literary and other analysis of the Bible and other scripture, and the role of religion in the history of the United States and other countries. Such instruction may make use of the Bible or other scripture. Similarly, it is permissible for staff in Federally-funded programs to discuss any topics consistent with the program’s purposes, including religious influences on art, music, literature, and social studies.
Got that? I’m sure the line between “analysis of the Bible” and “devotional religious instruction” is abundantly clear to a faith-driven provider, and to a client who is in many cases in dire need of social services.
Those clients, it should be pointed out, are frequently seeking intensely personal services, such as a variety of counseling, and may be in distress or in desperate situations. A government employee, even if there were resources to staff such a thing, cannot exactly sit in on a counseling session to make sure that the counselor is merely analyzing the Bible rather than preaching to her.
The reason why church-state separation advocates have pressed for bright lines — a clear prohibition on hiring discrimination, and separate incorporation to ensure federal funding is not mixed private funding that can be used to proselytize — is that once you start to blur those lines, the rules become far less clear. And when faith-based providers insist that their essential religious character must be preserved even if they’re receiving federal funds, you start to wonder: Which is more important, bolstering the faith-based organization, or protecting the rights of the clients it serves?
While the Advisory Council’s report addressed many of these issues imperfectly, at least it did so with some clarity. The Interagency Working Group’s report is a muddle that fails to track the recommendations it was ordered to follow. It seems unlikely that federal agencies will be implementing regulations any time soon. And it’s starting to feel like it was intended to be that way.
In his last public speech before he died on Saturday at the age of 80, evangelical hero Chuck Colson lambasted the Department of Health and Human Services regulation requiring employers to provide co-pay-free insurance coverage for contraception to their employees. The HHS mandate, said Colson, according to a transcript of the speech posted by World magazine, “is but the tip of the iceberg. It’s the latest manifestation of a growing hostility to Christianity.”
Colson is best known as Nixon’s hatchet man and Watergate felon turned prison evangelist. For his admirers, though, he was even bigger than his larger-than-life tale of redemption by salvation alone. He was not merely living proof of the salvific power of Christ; not merely a rescuer of the heretics; not merely a coalition builder of Catholics and evangelicals once divided by theological differences. He was nothing short of a battle commander in the cosmic culture wars, the manufactured showdown between the “Christian worldview” — the only “true” way to see things — and other “worldviews” he insisted were antithetical to it.
Colson is probably best known to the general public for his Prison Fellowship Ministries, but he has left an indelible mark on the culture-war battles that will define the 2012 election. It was Colson, after all, who helped forge the Catholic-evangelical alliance against abortion that is now finding enduring potency in fighting the HHS mandate. It’s a battle that is framed — as Colson would have it — as one waged by the voracious, anti-Christian government against the religious liberty of besieged believers.
“Government, theologically, has two major roles,” Colson told Jeff Sharlet, author of the book “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” “to preserve order — we can only have freedom out of order — and to do justice, to restrain evil.” Colson did not invent this theological justification for this ideologically driven argument for small government, but he was articulating a religious-right article of faith.
In this telling, a government not operated according to a “Christian worldview” is not the defender of First Amendment freedoms but a violator of them. “Biblical disobedience,” writes Sharlet, distilling Colson’s work, “should be — must be — the cornerstone of ‘the West’s stand against the ‘new barbarians,’ whether they come in the form of Muslims or secular schoolteachers.” Or HHS secretaries or presidents or legislators crafting healthcare reform.
Colson was one of the drafters of the 2009 manifesto, the Manhattan Declaration, which, in hindsight, forecast how the religious right would react to the HHS mandate. Assembled by what was billed as an ecumenical group of evangelicals, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, it was released at the height of the legislative showdown over the Stupak Amendment, offered at the behest of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to eliminate nonexistent federal funding of abortions. The signatories — today they number over half a million — pledged unspecified civil disobedience in response to laws they assert violate religious liberty, the “sanctity of life” and “the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.”
In the Manhattan Declaration, victims are not women who can’t access healthcare or a gay couple that can’t get married. The victims are Christians, and their freedom from laws not crafted from a biblical worldview. (The website of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview says its job is “to expose the Lie and replace it with the Truth of a biblical understanding of all of reality.”)
On the day the Manhattan Declaration was unveiled, to much fanfare, in a jammed room at the National Press Club in Washington, Colson released one of his popular weekly “Two Minute Warning” videos. In that video, he blamed government for the breakdown of “the organs of civil society,” the “clubs, the political parties, the grassroots organizations, the local government, particularly the church and the family, those are the two most vital,” he said. When those institutions break down, Colson added, “what you have is tyranny.”
Colson didn’t stop there, though, nor did he stop at quoting de Tocqueville on the possibilities of the collapse of civil society causing “benevolent despotism.” Colson had the audacity to compare America to Nazi Germany, and to urge his listeners to read Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which he called “prophetic in its application to today … The destruction of civil society has always been prelude to a totalitarian government.”
The website of the Manhattan Declaration has continued this tradition. The title of a post about protesting the HHS mandate, “First they came for the Catholics….” was a deliberate echoing of the pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous appeal against inaction in the face of Nazism. It linked to Colson’s video, in which he decried a “steady drumbeat of attacks on the Christian church and on freedom of religion.”
“We have come to the point,” said Colson, “where if there isn’t a dramatic change of circumstances, we, as Christians, may well be called upon to stand in civil disobedience against the action of our own government.”
Colson was hardly unaware of how actual abuse of government power happens — he did, after all, plead guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Yet Colson did not devote his life to exposing actual exploitations of political power. Instead, he portrayed legitimate actions of a democratic government to advance the rights and welfare of its citizens as antithetical to Christianity and the freedom of Christians.
Colson’s legacy is far more than Watergate felon turned prison evangelist. Next time you see protesters against the HHS mandate, or a pundit claiming President Obama is waging a “war on religion,” or an activist threatening to engage in civil disobedience to a “tyrannical” law such as one permitting adoption by same-sex couples, remember Chuck Colson.
At first blush, Mitt Romney’s reluctance to talk about his faith might seem like a positive development to any supporter of secularism in presidential politics. But he’s only tight-lipped about his Mormonism, not about religious right causes, which he is more than happy to take up. Even when the teachings of his own faith intersect, quite neatly on matters of sex and gender in particular, with the theo-politics of the Republican Party, he’s more likely to defend the Catholic Church than his own. If the past is any guide, at his upcoming commencement address at Liberty University, he’s more likely to invoke the religious right’s “Christian nation” mythology than to talk about Mormon values.
Channeling the worst of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, Romney has accused President Obama of trying to impose the “religion of secularism.” He has signed the pledge of the anti-gay group the National Organization for Marriage and accepted its endorsement, along with endorsements from antiabortion groups. He has stumped for the position of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops framing insurance coverage for contraception as a “war on religion.” At the same NRA convention at which Ted Nugent reveled in violence against Obama and Democrats generally, Romney called contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act a “threat and insult to every religious group.”
This transparent pandering is clearly aimed at the conservative evangelicals and Catholics he needs to energize in November, whose approval — and enthusiasm — is essential for a Republican presidential candidate to win. While Romney obviously doesn’t need to do much pandering to win over conservative Mormons, voters surely wonder: Once he brings up religion, where does his Mormonism fit?
Conservatives are starting to take notice of Romney’s mystifying refusal to highlight how Mormonism dovetails with their own ideology, leading some to suggest he should just “own” his Mormonism. Indeed you’d think that he’d take them up on it, since Mormon doctrine on motherhood, for example, shares some notable similarities with that of, say, the 19 Kids and Counting Duggar family, who stumped for Santorum (whom Ralph Reed says Romney should mimic), and have since thrown their support behind Romney.
Yet in the latest Mormon dust-up this week, the Washington Post’s conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin accused BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins (who is Mormon) of anti-Mormonism after he wrote a piece, “Why Ann Stayed Home.” Coppins’ explanation of Mormon history and doctrine (and Mormon feminist objections to it) provoked Rubin, a Romney defender, to fret that it “foreshadows, I fear, of what is to come — effort to portray Mormons as weirdly out of step and unmodern, and by implication, Romney as being unfit for the presidency.”
Oh, but why single out Romney, or Mormonism, for being “weirdly out of step and unmodern”? It’s almost as if Rubin is unaware of what the Republican Party is.
The Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis came to Coppins’ defense, and even expressed admiration for Mormon ideals of motherhood. “I found the piece to be a positive portrayal of Mormon theology, motherhood and Ann Romney,” Lewis wrote.
That “positive” portrayal included a discussion of the late LDS prophet Ezra Taft Benson’s 1987 lecture on the role of women as mothers. In that “Fireside for Parents,” Benson echoed the teaching of former president Spencer W. Kimball, another LDS prophet, “whose counsel,” Benson said, “has gone unheeded, and families have suffered because of it.”
That counsel, of course, is that mothers should stay home. “The Lord has so stated,” Kimball wrote, that women “are to take care of the family,” and “be an assistant to the husband” but “not to earn the living, except in unusual circumstances.”
Kimball wrote those words in 1977, the same year in which the Church, in opposing the Equal Rights Amendment, worried that it would “stifle many God-given feminine instincts.”
“Too many women,” Kimball scolded, “spend their time in socializing, in politicking, in public services when they should be home to teach and train and receive and love their children into security.”
Kimball, Benson declared 10 years later, “spoke the truth. His words are prophetic.”
Tresa Edmunds, a co-founder of the feminist group LDS Wave and a blogger at Feminist Mormon Housewives, told me this week that in Mormonism, motherhood plays a divine role in nurturing souls for eternity. “Over the years, Mormon women have felt — I would personally say a backlash is too strong a word, I would say, some friction, about their role in motherhood.” For Mormon women who work, she said, there is still “static” and “stigma” over it.
Given that so much of Mormon teaching on marriage and family — the core of the religious right’s incursion into politics — is in line with Republican orthodoxy, one would think that Romney would jump at the chance to demonstrate a Mormon-evangelical-Catholic alliance.
As Kathryn Joyce, author of the book “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement,” which details the anti-contraception, uber-mothering movement within evangelicalism, has reported, such an alliance already exists. Religious right doyen Francis Schaeffer, an important driver of the antiabortion movement, advocated for ecumenical “co-belligerency” decades ago, and anti-feminist, anti-secularist religious activists have heeded the call. “A chief example of this,” Joyce has written, “is ‘The Natural Family Manifesto’ … [an] ecumenical call to arms [that] extols a conservative lifestyle where fathers lead and women honor their highest domestic calling by becoming ‘prolific mothers’ of ‘full quivers of children.’”
The unanswered question here is how much Romney adheres to his church’s teachings, and whether he agrees with the relationships some Mormons have forged with conservative Catholics and evangelicals on matters relating to the family, gender and sexuality. So far he’s jumped on the most obvious bandwagons of religious right causes. But as the campaign drags on, both progressives and conservatives will no doubt want to know more about where his own faith fits in the hot-button debates his party has placed front and center in the campaign.
Rep. Paul Ryan R-Wis., the mastermind of what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls an “inconceivably cruel” budget, has once again tried to claim that Jesus would approve of it. Speaking to David Brody of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network this week, Ryan described how his Catholic faith, particularly the tradition of subsidiarity, is reflected in his scheme to cut the deficit by slashing programs like Medicaid, Pell Grants, food stamps and job training.
Subsidiarity, Ryan contends, is nothing more than the theological justification for shrinking the federal government down to a size that will fit in Grover Norquist’s bathtub. If I were a cartoonist, I’d draw Ryan dreamily doodling Jesus’ name on the Federalist Society masthead.
For many Catholic scholars and theologians, though, Ryan’s views are both laughably and dangerously wrong. As Daniel Maguire, a Catholic ethicist, wrote even before Ryan’s interview with Brody, subsidiarity “means that nothing should be done by a higher authority that can be done by active participation at lower levels. Right-wingers like Paul Ryan grab that one word, ‘subsidiarity,’ and claim it supports their maniacal hatred of government. It doesn’t.”
Joseph Palacios, Adjunct Professor of Latin American Studies at Georgetown University, told me, “Historically, Christian Democratic parties in Europe and Latin America have used subsidiarity to highlight the need for a social safety net to guarantee the common good that gets organized and guaranteed through state functions such as healthcare, education, economic development, housing, transportation.” Here in the U.S., though, Palacios says, “a lot of progressive
Catholics are unfamiliar with this principle and have allowed it to be usurped by conservatives and libertarians in the Church,” who attempt to lend religious justification for the position of Catholic Republicans like Ryan.
These disputes — particularly for a religion reporter like me — are the stuff of fascinating and illuminating stories on religious history, theology and political gamesmanship. In a pluralistic democracy, though, they have no place in determining the federal budget.
No one’s religious view is entitled to preference when Congress is crafting the federal budget. To be sure, given the attention paid to the plight of the poor by the most prevalent religions in the United States, there are many politicians, and many citizens, whose faith would inform how they evaluate the priorities — or lack thereof — in the Ryan budget. At the same time, secular humanists, atheists, and other varieties of the non-religious also have a set of values on income and wealth inequality.
Progressives and conservatives should duke it out — but without invoking religion. The budget should be based on shared concepts of fairness and justice, not whether Jesus or God or Allah (oh, never mind, the Republicans would never go for that!) approves.
But Ryan, who did not invoke his faith when first offering his budget proposal, is now scrambling to devise a post-hoc theological justification for it. This week’s revelations to Brody were hardly his first salvo. Last spring, he and his fellow Catholic, Speaker John Boehner, sought approval from clerical authorities.
Boehner, for his part, already had come under fire from Catholic academics for his deviation from church teachings. In a May 2011 letter reacting to his upcoming commencement address at Catholic University, the academics told Boehner, “[f]rom the apostles to the present, the magisterium of the church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor” (a principle Ryan claims his budget upholds). Boehner’s record on addressing “the desperate needs of the poor,” the academics charged, “is among the worst in Congress.”
Ryan and Boehner dashed off a letter of their own, to then-Archbishop (now Cardinal) Timothy Dolan, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Dolan, of course, does not mince words when reacting to perceived transgressions by elected officials. In January, he pronounced the Department of Health and Human Services requirement for insurance coverage for contraception “literally unconscionable” and on Easter Sunday described it as a “dramatic, radical intrusion of a government bureaucracy into the internal life of the Church.”
Such bombast was notably missing from his letter responding to Ryan and Boehner. It’s true that Dolan’s letter didn’t directly say Ryan’s budget was in line with Catholic teaching, only that Dolan appreciated Ryan’s effort to claim (however disingenuously) that it was. But given that Obama made significant efforts to yield to religious objections to the contraception rule and has been treated only to vitriol from the bishops and their Republican allies, it was significant that Dolan was far more gentle with Ryan: “Care must be taken that those currently in need not be left to suffer. I appreciate your assurance that your budget would be attentive to such considerations and would protect those at risk in the processes and programs of such a transition.” Not, take note, “literally unconscionable.” Even though it is.
Liberals, for their part, have sought to counter Ryan with more religion. Last year, in a stunt staged at Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, fellow Catholics confronted Ryan and tried to give him a Bible with passages on the poor highlighted. An anti-Ryan advertisement was critical of his admiration for Tea Party heroine Ayn Rand — not because of her cruelly libertarian views on economics, but because she was an atheist.
More recently, a coalition of Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders known as the Faithful Budget Campaign have pushed back against Ryan with their own Faithful Budget. The coalition says its “faithful” budget “protects the common good, values every individual and lifts the burden on the poor.” These are worthy goals, but shouldn’t be elevated merely because they have a religious imprimatur.
Surely it’s understandable that liberal Catholics are angry that Ryan is misrepresenting their faith to justify his punishing and heartless assault on his fellow Americans. They should — and they will — persist in protest, in discussion and in argument. But just as Ryan shouldn’t run to Cardinal Dolan for approval, or at least acquiescence, nor should liberals seek religious cover for their counter-proposals. Religious leaders and voters are free to have their say, but when it comes down to the rationale for defeating Ryan’s budget, it should be based on the economic realities of the people whose lives would be destroyed by it, coupled with a cogent case for the role of government, and not on theology.
(Credit: AP/David Lewis) 
Rick Warren and Barack Obama (Credit: AP/Alex Brandon) 
(Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque) 
Chuck Colson in 1974 (Credit: AP/Bob Daugherty) 
U.S. Republican presidential candidate and former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney speaks during a campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware April 10, 2012. REUTERS/Tim Shaffer (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS ELECTIONS HEADSHOT) (Credit: Reuters) 
Paul Ryan (Credit: AP) 