Do you sodomize your wife?
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia thinks that the government has the right to know — unless he’s the one being probed about it. When a New York University law student asked Scalia this brazen question last week, the Justice refused to answer.
Scalia, who viciously dissented from the recent ruling that finally overturned anti-sodomy laws, apparently feels entitled to a right to privacy that he actively denies the rest of America.
Scalia pretends that subordinating the Constitution to his narrow moral and religious worldview is rooted in the “original intent” of the Constitution — as if the United States sprang forth fully-formed and in accordance with the ideals of its founding. Like many of his extremist compatriots, he puts the fun in Christian fundamentalism by pretending his push for theocracy stems from a respect for American tradition.
But the most grotesque perversion of American tradition isn’t sodomy, secularism or the sixties generation — it’s the idea that our label as a “Christian nation” is anything more than simple commentary on the religious inclination of the majority. This arrogant notion insults America’s religious pluralism and threatens the democratic basis of our political system.
One such threat comes from Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who has declared a congressional jihad by calling Democratic opposition to a small portion of Bush’s judicial nominees a vicious assault “against people of faith.” Indeed, a cottage industry has sprung up around dismantling the trappings of democracy — like bipartisanism, the judicial branch and the First Amendment — that rudely interfere with the imposition of one religious viewpoint on the American people.
The fable of “America, the Christian Nation” is the ultimate in political convenience. It justifies messy, complicated foreign policy initiatives — ‘containing’ communism and ‘democratizing’ Iraq – to the public as a natural extension of America’s wholesome Christ-like global goodwill. The Christian nation myth serves an equally useful domestic purpose. The fiction of our Christian founding allows for the justification of a right-wing extremist social agenda, ranging from state-sponsored Christianity to state-sponsored homophobia.
Every time the classroom or the legislative chamber is prevented from turning into a Bible study, the conservative echo chamber becomes predictably huffy. I can almost hear their invectives now: heinous judicial activism! Secularists gone wild! God-hating leftists denying Americans their faith and heritage! To buttress their outrage, they claim that a complete separation of religion and government goes against the wishes of the founding fathers.
Unfortunately for the propaganda efforts of the religious right, the founding fathers were not Christians interested in mixing government with Biblical principles. They were Deists — the metaphysical chic of the day — who rejected the mysticism of the Bible in favor of reason and natural law. “In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. “He is always in alliance with the despot.”
Jefferson also referred to the majority of the Bible as a dungheap. It’s easy to pretend that the founders would be outraged by whatever outrages your right-wing sensibilities — if you forget that you’d likely find their sensibilities equally offensive.
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of the conservative war on religious liberty is that the flipside of separation of church and state — protecting religion from government prying — has been ignored. Those arguing as proponents of religion have become its enemies.
Take, for example, when the U.S. Supreme Court was considering whether “under God” should be stricken from the pledge. To defend the religious language of the pledge, the Bush administration held that there is no religious language — “under God” was referred to as merely “descriptive,” an innocuous statement on the nation’s allegedly Christian historical origins.
One Supreme Court justice posed an extraordinary question: “Is God so generic in this context that it could be that inclusive, and if it is, then does your objection disappear?” God as generic, God as descriptive, God as a reference to a reference — this confirmed observing journalist Leon Wieseltier’s belief that the “surest way to steal the meaning, and therefore the power, from religion is to deliver it to politics, to enslave it to public life.”