ROGER SIMON COLUMN
MARCH 30, 2005
WASHINGTON - - I never imagined that when I became a fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics this semester I would get a spring break.
Break from what? While everyone around me has been working feverishly, I have been spending these last weeks smelling the flowers. (Or at least I would have been smelling the flowers had they not been covered by several feet of snow.)
In any case, I am on spring break for a week and am celebrating by presenting the work of another one of my liaisons, one of the six undergraduates who have volunteered to work with me.
Matt Anderson is 19, a sophomore in government at Harvard, and is from Guilderland, N.Y., a suburb of Albany. Here is his essay:
By Matt Anderson
My grandfather hated Notre Dame's football team. While this wasn't a unique opinion back when the Fighting Irish were winning countless national championships, he despised that team for a different reason than most people.
My grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, and he thought it was inappropriate for a football team to invoke the name of God. He believed "Touchdown Jesus" and all its variants cheapened the Lord's message.
If my grandfather was alive today, I think he would have felt a similar way about Congress' recent attempts to co-opt God for political purposes during the Terri Schiavo controversy. Though Congress' decision to pass unconstitutional legislation extending Mary and Bob Schindler's right to federal appeal was masked in quasi-secular rhetoric, there was no mistaking the Republican leadership's motives for championing that bill.
Kowtowing to the radical Religious Right is an art form in the Republican Party. In Washington, every year is an election year, even when there's no election being held. It's never too early to start currying favor with your base - - or in the case of the feckless Democrats who supported the Schiavo legislation, diffusing your opponent's potential points of attack.
Heck, the 2008 presidential election is only a little more than 1,300 days away. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's transparent attempt to secure the support of members of the Religious Right, (who still hold a veto over the nomination process) with his stunningly irresponsible videotape diagnosis of Terri Schiavo's condition, plainly reminds us of this fact. In a 2008 field likely to contain high-profile moderates Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, Frist is positioning himself as a true social conservative by prescribing the far right its favorite brand of medicine: a not so subtle dose of Old Time Religion.
This type of base politics is nothing new - - the 2004 election just proved its efficacy. Whether supporting vouchers for sectarian institutions, or fighting to place the Ten Commandments in court houses, blurring the line between church and state is a Washington pastime that the Nationals have little chance of supplanting in popularity. Convening a special session of Congress (during that body's Easter recess no less) to pass a bill that affects only a single family, is just one particularly blatant example of this tendency.
This type of pandering needs to stop. It's disrespectful to God, and it's disrespectful to our democracy.
God doesn't take sides in football games and he doesn't take sides in politics. To assume otherwise exhibits an extreme and prideful arrogance.
The Bible, after all, isn't an easy book to decipher. Though President Bush declared that his decision to go to war with Iraq was a divinely-sanctioned part of bestowing "the Almighty's gift [of democracy] to every man and woman in this world," God is rarely clear about His intentions.
The same God that told my grandfather to sermonize against the Vietnam War, told President Bush to invade Iraq. The same God that told my grandfather be tolerant of the way other people lived their lives, told President Bush to cater to the "God Hates Fags" crowd by using gay marriage as election-year boilerplate.
We need to get God out of politics. While we can't ask voters to leave their deeply-felt religious convictions outside of the voting booth, (everyone is entitled to vote on whatever basis they choose) we can ask public figures to stop exploiting God for electoral gain. The Republican Party needs to start respecting the faithful religious individuals they supposedly represent, and resist the temptation to use God to score cheap political points.