I don’t like to mix religion with politics. When I do so, I do it always in an entirely defensive manner. I want to prevent our government from enacting legislation which enshrines one idiosyncratic religious view as the law of the land. I majored in philosophy and I studied the ancient Greek of the Gospels. I consider myself about as well versed in scriptural matters as your average first-year divinity student. I’ve read the Dead Sea Scrolls and the heretical gospels. I think I am qualified to argue matters of religion. I am pretty confident that I have never brought out philosophical arguments to make political points. I have never said that so-and-so is wrong and here is the passage from Nietzsche that proves it.
For me, politics exist on somewhat of a non-rational plane. You don’t win elections or political disputes by besting your opponents on debating points. Nevertheless, I want to make an exception tonight. I want to quote a bit of Bertrand Russell’s 1927 essay, Why I am Not a Christian.
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, “This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children.” Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.
That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. “What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.”
Now, it is no longer 1927, and the Catholic Church has moderated its policies. You need not agree with Russell’s justifications for eschewing Christianity. I make no argument against the religion or any of its varied sects. That is not my intention in quoting Russell. In 1879, Connecticut enacted a law that prohibited the use of “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.” It was an “uncommonly silly” law. In 1965, the Supreme Court of the United States struck it down in a 7-2 decision called Griswold v. Connecticut. They reasoned that the government could not so intrude into the privacy of married couples as to prosecute them for using contraception. In other words, they found a right to privacy in the Constitution.
And, really, without getting overly legal with you, the Constitution authorizes the government to act to benefit the general welfare and prohibits them from infringing on our liberties without due process of law. Those two principles, taken in tandem, ought to prevent the government from passing moral regulations that are impossible to enforce without prying deeply into your personal and family life. But that argument does not appear to have been too convincing to Bob McDonnell, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia.
After, in 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that Connecticut couldn’t deny the right to contraception to married couples, it ruled in 1972 that Massachusetts could not deny the right to unmarried couples. Bob McDonnell, in a 93-page Master’s Thesis for Pat Robertson’s Regent University, objected to the 1972 ruling.
He described as “illogical” a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples
This was consistent with McDonnell’s overall hostility to female autonomy.
His 1989 thesis — “The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of The Decade” — was on the subject he wanted to explore at Regent: the link between Christianity and U.S. law. The document was written to fulfill the requirements of the two degrees he was seeking at Regent, a master of arts in public policy and a juris doctor in law.
The thesis wasn’t so much a case against government as a blueprint to change what he saw as a liberal model into one that actively promoted conservative, faith-based principles through tax policy, the public schools, welfare reform and other avenues.
“Leaders must correct the conventional folklore about the separation of church and state,” he wrote. “Historically, the religious liberty guarantees of the First Amendment were intended to prevent government encroachment upon the free church, not eliminate the impact of religion on society.”
He argued for covenant marriage, a legally distinct type of marriage intended to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce. He advocated character education programs in public schools to teach “traditional Judeo-Christian values” and other principles that he thought many youths were not learning in their homes. He called for less government encroachment on parental authority, for example, redefining child abuse to “exclude parental spanking.” He lamented the “purging of religious influence” from public schools. And he criticized federal tax credits for child care expenditures because they encouraged women to enter the workforce.
“Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching status-quo of nonparental primary nurture of children,” he wrote.
He went on to say feminism is among the “real enemies of the traditional family.”
What I find really problematic with McDonnell’s youthful views is that they so closely resembles the views that Bertrand Russell found so objectionable in 1927. A woman that is locked into a marriage and forbidden from using birth control (and unable to legally decline sexual advances from her husband) is a total victim of circumstance. Even if a doctor tells her that she may not survive another childbirth, so has no legal way of avoiding becoming pregnant or of terminating the pregnancy. Her life may be sacrificed to the adherence of a particular dogma. Even if she is in good health, her husband may have syphilis or AIDS or some other condition that could affect the health of a baby. But she is legally powerless.
I don’t care if you want to be a Christian or not. But if you want to know why I am not a Republican, this is why.
