Sunday Morning Ramblings

This photo probably needs an explanation.

A crowd at the 50th Annual Bradley County, Arkansas Pink Tomato Festival watched candidates for governor, attorney general, lieutenant governor, state treasurer and the U.S. Congress stuff pounds of the official state fruit into their maws, in an effort to demonstrate reverence for the Natural State’s peculiar brand of retail politics.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Attorney General Mike Beebe said he was hoping to avoid the fate of former Arkansas governor and U.S. president, Bill Clinton, who, he said, “did something unbecoming of a governor” after eating too many tomatoes one year.

Can we get some additional details? I'm curious!



Also from today's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is this column by Philip Martin, and worth the read.

Fred Phelps’ God isn’t the one for the rest of us

I note with relief that not too much attention was paid to the visit by the Westboro Baptist folks of Topeka, Kan., to the funeral of the serviceman in Beebe last week. Half a dozen kookballs venting their hatefulness is more circus than news event; the First Amendment might protect their speech but it shouldn’t guarantee them an audience.

Apparently it wasn’t even the first team; Fred Phelps wasn’t there, just some of his kinfolk. There are lots of funerals to cover these days, lots of occasions to preach the bad news about the irascibility of Old Testament Jehovah—who hates America and anyone with half an ounce of compassion.

It has been suggested—and not just by conservative commentators, who recognize the damage Phelps and his brood inflict on their cause—the Westboro bunch are engaged in some elaborate scheme to discredit evangelical Christians. So extreme are their actions and words that it’s not difficult to see their shtick as satire, a disturbing bit of Andy Kaufmanesque performance art. (If you can think of a greater obscenity than picketing the funerals of the Iraqi war dead than proclaiming that God has sent these young men and women to hell because America is still a relatively tolerant country, please keep it to yourself. )

I prefer the simpler explanation: Fred Phelps is mad and evil. And sufficiently charismatic to have assembled a small group of followers. He is a petty Hitler, without the political gift. He will come to a bad end someday, and he will leave no lasting mark upon the planet. He is more to be pitied than despised; however, I’ve not evolved to the point that I can weep for him.

It seems only fair to recognize that he is no Baptist—he runs his “church” from his home and is not affiliated with any real Baptist organization—and certainly no follower of Christ. He is an extremist who speaks for no one but himself. No decent person could buy into his creepy theology.

Yet last week the U.S. Senate came quite close to voting on a proposed Constitutional amendment that would restrict marriage to “one man and one woman.” Forty-nine senators voted for cloture—basically in favor of the amendment—while 48 voted against it. Three senators didn’t vote; Arkansas senators Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor cast “no” votes.

But Arkansas senators had political cover—our state is one of 11 that have passed amendments prohibiting gay marriage. So Lincoln and Pryor can safely claim that while they personally oppose gay marriage, they see no need for a federal amendment. (Who are we to presume to tell the citizens of Massachusetts or New York or California what to do?)

In the past I’ve suggested that most Arkansans aren’t really interested in denying gay people the rights, privileges and obligations that redound to the legally coupled; they simply don’t like the idea of gay folks being “married.” If it’s the semantics that bother them, the solution is apparent: Civil unions for everyone. If you decide you want to spend your life in partnership with another consenting adult, fine—you go down to the courthouse and file the paperwork. Civil unions are secular and legally binding contracts.

(The state could even continue to allow consenting adults to enter contracts tantamount to what we now call “covenant marriages”—all we’re altering is the semantics and leaving the “marriage” designation to spiritual institutions.)

If you want to have that union sanctified by a religious entity—if you want to be “married”—then you go to a priest or rabbi or prophet or shaman or Uncle Doug and sanctify your civil union by getting married. The state has nothing to do with “marriage”; it’s a sacrament, and its between the people who enter into the covenant and their God.

And yes, one supposes that under this system it would be possible for one to “marry” a toaster or a blue tick hound (or, as Pee Wee Herman once did, a bowl of fruit salad), but one still couldn’t enter into a civil union with anyone or thing other than a single adult. And purely sacramental “marriage” wouldn’t exempt the parties from any secular laws.

Does this effectively nullify the meaning of marriage? I don’t think it does. While certain people might make a mockery of the institution in the same way Fred Phelps makes a mockery of Christianity, most of us would go on with our lives without giving it too much thought. Gay folks would have their marriages acknowledged and respected by most folks—and those who oppose the idea would be free to consider those kinds of marriages illegitimate.

Some citizens prefer to live secular lives; they mightn’t seek for their union to be recognized by anyone. But others wouldn’t be forced to set aside their convictions to accommodate someone else’s idea of what marriage means. Any congregation would be free to recognize and welcome anyone it chooses.

Divorcing marriage from state sanction makes sense, because the state has no legitimate interest in what consenting adults do in the bedroom or how they arrange their domestic lives. Separating the religious aspects and returning them to the churches—endowing clergy with the power to solemnize these civil unions as they simultaneous perform the marriage—would only seem to strengthen the role of religious institutions in our lives.

Certainly there are sexual practices unworthy of society’s support and protection. Not all sex is loving, not all arrangements are supportable, but whoever and however an adult human being loves is at least none of the state’s business; adults can decide.

Not that anybody with any sense really believes this is about protecting marriage anyway—what it’s about is appealing to the sort of voters who tend to see politics as a Manechian struggle between good and evil. For there are people who are deathly afraid of things they don’t understand, who are reassured by the soothing tones of freshscrubbed TV demagogues. I don’t know that there’s anyone in public life today who genuinely believes gay marriage or flag burning is anything but a strategic issue, but there are plenty willing to use such issues to their political advantage.

It’s an un-American strategy, but it works. But only for now, and only with a frightened minority, the sort of people susceptible to revisionist history who are eager to believe they’re being persecuted because victimhood absolves them of any responsibility for their thwarted lives. The sort of people who might entertain the theology of a Fred Phelps or, in another day and age, a Gerald L.K. Smith. Or someone worse.

If you pander to these interests, you run the risk of becoming their hostage—there’s a part of the Republican party I don’t recognize anymore, a scary fringe with rictus grins and hearts embalmed with malignity and cynicism.

In time, the politicians who have exploited the fearful ignorance of this ugly, dangerous minority for political gain will be shown to have been desperately out of touch with mainstream American values. For most of us who believe in God believe in a God of love, not the primitive monster that stalks the fetid imagination of Fred Phelps.