Former Republican Senator and Ambassador to the U.N. Denounces Stronghanded Christian Politics
Did we mention that he is also an Episcopal minister? Wow!
John C. Danforth, a former United States senator from Missouri, resigned in January as United States ambassador to the United Nations.
From the March 30 New York Times
In the Name of Politics
By JOHN C. DANFORTH
St. Louis - By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.
Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond. But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party.
Christian activists, eager to take credit for recent electoral successes, would not be likely to concede that Republican adoption of their political agenda is merely the natural convergence of conservative religious and political values. Correctly, they would see a causal relationship between the activism of the churches and the responsiveness of Republican politicians. In turn, pragmatic Republicans would agree that motivating Christian conservatives has contributed to their successes.
High-profile Republican efforts to prolong the life of Ms. Schiavo, including departures from Republican principles like approving Congressional involvement in private decisions and empowering a federal court to overrule a state court, can rightfully be interpreted as yielding to the pressure of religious power blocs.
In my state, Missouri, Republicans in the General Assembly have advanced legislation to criminalize even stem cell research in which the cells are artificially produced in petri dishes and will never be transplanted into the human uterus. They argue that such cells are human life that must be protected, by threat of criminal prosecution, from promising research on diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes.
It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases. I am and have always been pro-life. But the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in the womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law.
I do not fault religious people for political action. Since Moses confronted the pharaoh, faithful people have heard God's call to political involvement. Nor has political action been unique to conservative Christians. Religious liberals have been politically active in support of gay rights and against nuclear weapons and the death penalty. In America, everyone has the right to try to influence political issues, regardless of his religious motivations.
The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.
When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another.
Take stem cell research. Criminalizing the work of scientists doing such research would give strong support to one religious doctrine, and it would punish people who believe it is their religious duty to use science to heal the sick.
During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were principles shared by virtually all Republicans.
But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.
The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.
John C. Danforth, a former United States senator from Missouri, resigned in January as United States ambassador to the United Nations.
From the March 30 New York Times
In the Name of Politics
By JOHN C. DANFORTH
St. Louis - By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.
Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond. But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party.
Christian activists, eager to take credit for recent electoral successes, would not be likely to concede that Republican adoption of their political agenda is merely the natural convergence of conservative religious and political values. Correctly, they would see a causal relationship between the activism of the churches and the responsiveness of Republican politicians. In turn, pragmatic Republicans would agree that motivating Christian conservatives has contributed to their successes.
High-profile Republican efforts to prolong the life of Ms. Schiavo, including departures from Republican principles like approving Congressional involvement in private decisions and empowering a federal court to overrule a state court, can rightfully be interpreted as yielding to the pressure of religious power blocs.
In my state, Missouri, Republicans in the General Assembly have advanced legislation to criminalize even stem cell research in which the cells are artificially produced in petri dishes and will never be transplanted into the human uterus. They argue that such cells are human life that must be protected, by threat of criminal prosecution, from promising research on diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes.
It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases. I am and have always been pro-life. But the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in the womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law.
I do not fault religious people for political action. Since Moses confronted the pharaoh, faithful people have heard God's call to political involvement. Nor has political action been unique to conservative Christians. Religious liberals have been politically active in support of gay rights and against nuclear weapons and the death penalty. In America, everyone has the right to try to influence political issues, regardless of his religious motivations.
The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.
When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another.
Take stem cell research. Criminalizing the work of scientists doing such research would give strong support to one religious doctrine, and it would punish people who believe it is their religious duty to use science to heal the sick.
During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were principles shared by virtually all Republicans.
But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.
The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.
1 Comments:
Danforth’s comments echo those made by John McCain six years ago when he was running for President. Danforth said it is time for Republicans to rediscover their roots.
It is time for America to rediscover its roots. In his last days, the great ambassador George Kennan wrote that he believed that America was losing its bearings and that we might consider a Council of Elders as a permanent part of government to find our way again. We have listened to the voice of the Common Man for longer than a century now and at different times it has driven both Democratic and Republican agendas. Sometimes it has led us well, sometimes not. The recent Terri Schiavo case was perhaps the most extreme case of a President of the United States and a sitting governor avidly engaged and ready and willing to abandon the Constitution and all of the Western traditions which formed our thinking and way of life for 400 years in northern Europe and America. Never in our history have such high officials been so willing to get down and dirty and participate hands-on and interfere in a sad, utterly personal family tragedy and in a classic neighborhood vendetta so tawdry and passionately misguided that is could well qualify for an episode of The Sopranos if it took place in urban New Jersey or South Philadelphia.
So let’s now begin to listen to some of the wise and uncommon voices. My Council of Elders would ignore party lines completely and simply seek out the smartest and most able women and men available. Those with great abilities who found within themselves the singular motive of seeing things clearly and doing the right thing at every turn – people like Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall and great and practical thinkers like Ruth Benedict, Andre Malraux and Hannah Ahrendt. I’d start with Wesley Clark who may have been the first pushed out of the way by a United States Army determined to set the world to its own clock no matter what time it was. And I would add the first politician silenced by the Southern populist Jesse Helms; the libertarian Governor of Massachusetts, William Weld. I would also include McCain, Danforth and Robert Rubin because he is as smart as paint. But for my First Among Elders I would seek out Indian activist and Libertarian Russell Means who has said, “Freedom is for everyone, whatever lifestyle they choose, as long as it's peaceful and honest -- from high-tech entrepreneur to hippie in a commune and everyone in between . . .”
Chief Joseph said, “Our spirit will walk among you,” and the Native American ancestors and their sacred tradition make us – all of us - our own people on this continent and a unique people in the modern world. As Col. Ely Parker, the Seneca Indian who traveled with Grant said to Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, “We’re all Americans here.”
It is one of the ironies of history that the public avatar of the Southern populist movement which blends itself seamlessly today in religion and politics, is from an old Yankee family, reared in private schools, and is the native son of the Northern Industrial. This is a different South than Robert E. Lee’s. And it should be pointed out that the South that has risen to a world vision on the tail of comets like Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, The Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis and lesser lights like the Rev. Jimmy Swaggert and Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, is not the South of the Virginia gentry, but that of Jerry Falwell. This has come to be know as faith-based politics, and some would say faith-based economics and foreign policy as well.
But the Virginians are still with us, and Senator John McCain is one by tradition, although Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the engineers of the faith-based movement and key advisors to President Bush, have proclaimed him to be unfit for public service.
“They distort my pro-life positions and smear the reputations of my supporters,” McCain said in February, 2000, when he was running for president. “Because I don't pander to them, because I don't ascribe to their failed philosophy that money is our message. I believe in the cause of conservative reform. I believe that because we are right we will prevail in the battle of ideas . . . because that's what it's about, my friends—principles, not special interest money or empire or ego.”
McCain’s family records go back in Augusta County, Virginia. In 1824 a direct ancestor was recorded as having been an aid to General George Washington. But principle did not carry this audience in Virginia Beach, Virginia, a state that once claimed that in poverty, in despair, in Faulkenerian madness and in humiliation, the South still had principle and needed little else.
When the South rose in this new populist movement of Falwell and Robertson it rejected the best part of itself – principle - the part claimed by McCain and all of Virginia’s greatest sons and daughters.
A Council of Elders could restore that. The only requirement of the Elders would be to think and live on principle – to take at every turn, the path of integrity.
Populist movements come and go quickly into the night. After some great and inspired moments, the Sixties ended in madness and squalor with the likes of Charles Manson, who felt driven to kill by lyrics he overheard in a pop tune on the radio, and daughters of wealthy industrialists and bankers joining arms with racial hate groups and Maoist insurrectionists. With the so-called cultural conservatives we are almost there as well – we have heard the call to use nuclear weapons against Islamic terrorists by “men of faith,” we have had explained to us systems of divine cosmology that appear to be weaved together at the feed store, and we have been dictated foreign policy objectives which are irrelevant, absurd, illegal, which isolate us from the rest of the world and place our nation in grave danger.
But perhaps we are nearing the end of it. The Gray Champion, the Episcopalian minister John Danforth may have turned the tide.
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