Partners In Crime: Immigration, Prop8, & The Religious Right
Over the past two weeks the cause of Christian Reconstuctionists has been bolstered by proponents of Prop8 in California, as well as the supporters of SB1070 in Arizona, taking aim at the Fourteenth Amendment. While the subjects of their derision are different, the need to undermine the fundamental principles of equal, inalienable rights, and protection under the law, and weaken the foundations of the Constitution, are shared necessities for all of them.
These three movements share fundamental similarities that make it unsurprising that they have many, though certainly not all, supporters in common. In each case, there is a fundamental desire to make conditional and exclusive those rights deemed equal and inalienable by the Constitution. In each case, those that are most like them are considered more worthy of rights than those that are unlike them.
Although the immigration battle lacks the overtly religious overtones of the Prop8 campaign, Nationalist Christians easily reconcile the two issues as part of their divinely inspired vision for America. Both policies are exclusive, and both are heavily reliant on an ‘us vs them’ mentality; ‘Us’ being right, and worthy of individual rights and freedoms, and ‘them,’ not. More importantly, their combined assault on the Fourteenth Amendment provides each other with an increased margin for success. In turn, their potential success would provide the Christian Reconstructionists another avenue for the subversion of Constitutional protections against the tyranny of the majority, and for the separation of church and state.
Christian Reconstructionists have long sought to redefine freedom of religion as freedom to impose their religion on society without interference. The success of the Prop8 campaign would serve to further this goal by effectively doing precisely that. The entire argument for the discrimination of homosexuals, and the denial of their civil rights, is based on Fundamentalist Christian doctrine. If this doctrine can be imposed in this case, it can be imposed in others.
The First Amendment to the Constitution protects the free exercise of religion. It does not protect only the free exercise of Christianity, the free exercise of Christians to force others to live by their doctrine, or the preference of Christianity and Christians that they should have special protections and privileges. The founding fathers used the term ‘religion’ in order to express the principle that all religions, beliefs, and world views, have exactly the same status before the law and the government. Had their intention been that Christians, and the Christian church, were exceptional, they would have made at least one specific reference to the religion. Instead, they made no such identification whatsoever of Christianity, Jesus, or the Christian God, and only referred to religion in general. There are no references to Christianity or Jesus in the Declaration of independence or the Constitution.
The laws of the United States are not based on the Christian Bible or any other religious scripture. The principles of American law can be traced through English Common Law back to Roman law, not Hebrew. It was the non-Christian Romans who introduced civil law, trials by jury, and the concept of innocent until proven guilty. These principles are found nowhere in the Bible. The purpose of a written law was to protect people from the potentially abusive power of the state, or a majority; not to define a god’s rules and religious prescriptions for his subjects. Where these principles are clearly evident in the Constitution and the development of American law, they are clearly absent and often contradicted in the Christian Bible and Decalogue.
Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment reads as follows;
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
While it is the first sentence of this section that anti-immigration nationalists find problematic, it’s the second sentence that causes such consternation for the religiously motivated, Proposition 8, anti-homosexual crusaders.
Supporters of Proposition 8 disguise their prejudice by trying to frame it in positive terms. They claim that the motivation behind their efforts is not to discriminate against homosexuals, per se, but to protect marriage and families. If this were the case, one would think that their efforts would be better spent decreasing the divorce rate among their fellow Christians rather than trying to deny others their right to marry whomever they choose.
The Proposition 8 campaign is about imposing Fundamentalist, anti-gay, Christian doctrine on American society. This campaign is about making an inalienable right conditional, based on the tenets of a religion. This campaign is about decimating the principles of the Constitution by subjecting the rights of a minority to the approval of the majority and establishing a law respecting religion; something the constitution clearly prohibits.
While anti-immigration forces differ from anti-gay activists in many ways, the principles of exclusion and the desire to codify majority bias are common to both. The targeted areas of change to the Fourteenth Amendment, purportedly designed to protect this country of immigrants from other immigrants, would create an insurmountable weakness in the American Constitution. American citizenship would become something that could be denied an individual born in America, who has never resided in, nor been the citizen of, any other country, because of the non-violent crime of a parent, and their ethnic or racial heritage.
This is worth reiterating. Citizenship would be denied to an individual born in American based on the non-violent crime of a parent, and because of that individual’s ethnic or racial heritage. This is unconscionable. As disgusting as the term ‘anchor baby’ is, those who would propose such measures deserve a far less complimentary description.
All three of these movements have in common a desire to deny to some the rights that the Constitution guarantees to all. All of these movements attempt to deny individual rights and freedoms, and replace them with conditional privileges, subject to either Christian Doctrine or Majority rule.
Conservative politicians revel in the distractions that divert attention from their lack of a proactive platform and the Democrats seem easily led into the fog they’ve created. Conservatives are fueling the flames of discontent with misinformation, propaganda, and religious rhetoric, while the Democrats are running around after them trying to stomp out the fire with paper shoes. The immigration battle and culture wars are nothing more to the Right Wing than a convenient political situation to exploit in an election year when they seem to have no other tools in the shed. They are either oblivious or unconcerned about the impact these movements could have on the foundation of American society. Their only objective is to win elections, all else be damned. The Democrats need to stop messing around and extinguish the flames at their source.
Christian Reconstructionists, homophobic zealots, and xenophobic nationalists cannot be allowed to erode and subvert the Constitution. While their identified targets seem different, their strategy and desired outcome is very much the same. The inalienable rights guaranteed to all American citizens are viewed as conditional allowances that they want to control. They want to protect their existing majority through their version of ‘14th Amendment’ immigration reform, and then use that majority to deny equal rights, and true freedom of and from religion, to minorities.
The rights of a minority cannot be subjected to a general vote. This is nothing more than a cruel joke to remind the minority that they are in fact a minority, and therefore will loose such a vote because they are.
Americans cannot be denied citizenship based on the crimes of their parents or their racial or ethnic heritage. This violates so many principles of the constitution, let alone principles of justice and human decency, that it boggles the mind that elected officials such as Mitch McConnell would have the gall to suggest such a thing.
Religious doctrine cannot be imposed on American citizens as law, or used to deny the civil rights or liberties of those citizens. Despite the fictitious claims of the Christian Reconstructionists, America has never been, nor was it ever meant to be, a Christian nation where democracy is replaced with theocracy and the Constitution of the Republic is supplanted by religious doctrine and dogma.
The Fourteenth Amendment must be upheld and protected, and the Religious-Right, xenophobic homophobes rebuked for their subversive attempts. The American Constitution was framed and worded with specific intent and the principle of equality is neither negotiable nor expendable. There is no secret meaning known only to Glenn Beck or any other self-proclaimed and discredited scholar with a nefarious agenda. If there is one thing that encapsulates what it means to be an American, it’s the Constitution. Trying to undermine or destroy that is down-right criminal.
Partners In Crime: Immigration, Prop8, & the Religious Right ……
I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog
…
I’ve tweeted link.
Between ‘Digg Patriots’ & ‘The Yahweh Clan’ on youtube it seems FundiRepublicons are desperate as society gets more secular and Science & Technology progress our culture forward while religion is seen for what it is, backward superstition.