The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [105]
If a sense of proportion should guide Christian activism, then it must also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach in the wall of separation; as the Supreme Court has properly recognized, context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed as a consequence of muttering the phrase “under God”; I didn’t. Allowing the use of school property for meetings by voluntary student prayer groups should not be a threat, any more than its use by the high school Republican Club should threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs—targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers—that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems and hence merit carefully tailored support.
THESE BROAD PRINCIPLES for discussing faith within a democracy are not all-inclusive. It would be helpful, for example, if in debates about matters touching on religion—as in all of democratic discourse—we could resist the temptation to impute bad faith to those who disagree with us. In judging the persuasiveness of various moral claims, we should be on the lookout for inconsistency in how such claims are applied: As a general rule, I am more prone to listen to those who are as outraged by the indecency of homelessness as they are by the indecency of music videos. And we need to recognize that sometimes our argument is less about what is right than about who makes the final determination—whether we need the coercive arm of the state to enforce our values, or whether the subject is one best left to individual conscience and evolving norms.
Of course, even steadfast application of these principles won’t resolve every conflict. The willingness of many who oppose abortion to make an exception for rape and incest indicates a willingness to bend principle for the sake of practical considerations; the willingness of even the most ardent prochoice advocates to accept some restrictions on late-term abortion marks a recognition that a fetus is more than a body part and that society has some interest in its development. Still, between those who believe that life begins at conception and those who consider the fetus an extension of the woman’s body until birth, a point is rapidly reached at which compromise is not possible. At that point, the best we can do is ensure that persuasion rather than violence or intimidation determines the political outcome—and that we refocus at least some of our energies on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies through education (including about abstinence), contraception, adoption, or any other strategies that have broad support and have been proven to work.
For many practicing Christians, the same inability to compromise may apply to gay marriage. I find such a position troublesome, particularly in a society in which Christian men and women have been known to engage in adultery or other violations of their faith without civil penalty. All too often I have sat in a church and heard a pastor use gay bashing as a cheap parlor trick—“It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” he will shout, usually when the sermon is not going so well. I believe that American society can choose to carve out a special place for the union of a man and a woman as the unit of child rearing most common to every culture. I am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights on such basic matters as hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are of the same sex—nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount.
Perhaps I am sensitive on this issue because I have seen the pain my own