Eddie Tabash on the Presidential Election

My friend Eddie Tabash is one of the leading defenders of the separation of church and state in America today. You can see him argue for it here. I think this is an idea that should be accepted whether a person is religious or not. So although I've declared politics off limits here in the past, since this is a very important election year and since the separation of church and state is so very important to me, I'll be posting a few things from time to time that I find interesting in this year's Presidential election.

From the Secular Humanism Online News

Vol.4 No.9

The Danger of the Religious Right in this Presidential Election
By Edward Tabash.

The fact that Barack Obama and John McCain had their first joint appearance, sort of, at an evangelical church has ominous implications. It shows that both candidates know that evangelicals are still recognized as the largest single voting block in these elections cycles. This is bolstered by the way McCain’s unabashed embracing of the religious right agenda only helped him in the national polls. Obama’s more measured and somewhat hesitant way of answering questions regarding abortion and gay rights did not sell with biblical literalist voters who want an absolute commitment that the next president of the United States will be devoted to infusing religious dogma into the law of the land, under which we all must live.

McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, a truly inexperienced first-term governor of a remote and sparsely populated state, primarily because she is a Christian fundamentalist, shows that the religious right has not lost power but has more political might than ever before. Most news reports have claimed, and McCain has never denied it, that he would have preferred the pro-choice Orthodox Jewish Democrat Joe Lieberman as his running mate. However, the Christian right nixed this because Lieberman supports abortion rights. If McCain dies in office, Lieberman as the new president would put church-state separationists on the Supreme Court, regardless of his own frequently overblown religious rhetoric.

As secularists, however, our concern cannot be with the rhetoric of a campaign. Our concern can only be with the Supreme Court. We shouldn’t care what a candidate says in order to get elected in a nation where religious voters are still the most powerful plurality. We should rather focus on the type of justices that a candidate would appoint to the Supreme Court. Right now, with a shift of even one vote on the Court, we would lose, entirely, government neutrality in matters of religion, which is the core of church-state separation.

During the joint appearance at Saddleback Church, McCain stated unambiguously that he views life as beginning at the moment of conception. If this view prevails not only is abortion outlawed but so are all post-fertilization means of birth control. When the anti-abortion movement was initially gaining power from about 1973 onward, there were some anti-abortion members of the United States Senate who would not ban anything that destroyed a fertilized egg prior to implantation. Republican Mark Hatfield of Oregon was an example of this type of politician. With the McCain view, many birth-control pills and all IUDs would be banned because they prevent an already fertilized egg from implanting on the uterine wall. The only means of contraception that would still remain legal would be those that prevented the union of sperm and egg.

Some people are very optimistic about an impending expansion of secularism in American culture. I am afraid that I do not share this optimism. The only way that secularism stands a chance is if we continue to have in place a Supreme Court that continuously says, as has been the case since 1947, that no branch of government can favor the believer over the nonbeliever. Once a new Court majority would allow branches of government to favor belief, collectively, over nonbelief, the floodgates of religion-favoring legislation would open in virtually every state.

The ideal would be to achieve a political culture in which, if someone declares themselves to be a resolute supporter of secular government and church-state separation, we could not predict from that, alone, if the person were otherwise a liberal or a conservative. Someone can have very right-wing views on many issues and still demand secular government and even be a total nonbeliever. There is no internal inconsistency, for instance, in being a member of the National Rifle Association and opposing the agenda of the religious right.There is no internal inconsistency between supporting the war in Iraq and being an atheist, as Christopher Hitchens demonstrates. However, we are a long way from the goal of attaining a society in which support for secular government is a frequently seen universal view. It is our task to make sure that such a society becomes a reality.

Edward Tabash is Chair of the First Amendment Task Force, a project of the Council for Secular Humanism.