Spong: Mr. Bush is a Public Embarrassment

A recent column from retired Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong,  one of this godless heathen’s favorite people of faith. 

Shill moment:  I am glad to pay for content when it’s consistently this thoughtful and full of insight.  If  you appreciate Spong and want to read more and think you might even be willing to pay to do that, go here. First month is free. 

Ok, over to Spong:

June 21, 2006 

Mr. Bush: A Public Embarrassment  

I find myself deeply embarrassed today by the President of the United States. It is a new feeling. I do not pretend to be a Bush fan. I have many disagreements with him on many issues. I do not share or appreciate his political philosophy. I count myself as part of the loyal opposition, and believe that this country is always at its best where there is rigorous public debate. Mr. Bush ran as a “conservative” and he has governed as a conservative. That is a legitimate position even if it is not my position. In other periods of history, such as 1932-1952 liberals have won and have governed from a liberal perspective with conservatives in the opposition. That is not the cause of my present embarrassment. It is also not the first time that I have been embarrassed by my president. I had similar feelings when I had to observe the tawdry behavior of President Clinton misusing the Oval Office with his compliant intern, Monica Lewinsky. I expect better behavior than that from the one into whose hands we, the voters, place the destiny of our nation.  Mr. Bush is now the recipient of that sense of embarrassment that almost reaches the level of being sickening. I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Bush has been guilty of some similar sexual indiscretion. Non-sexual behavior, however, can be equally embarrassing and in most cases far more destructive. I now recoil at this president’s blatant and overt act of seeking to rally his political base by turning the wrath of prejudice and fear, always latent in the human psyche, toward a designated victim, in this case the gay and lesbian population of the country.  His motivation is overt and obvious. His ratings in the polls have plummeted to the lowest point of a president in decades. The war in Iraq is going poorly. The casualties continue to mount. The attempt to form a government made up of those who will cooperate with the American military presence is delusional since every poll shows that a vast majority of Iraqis want the Americans out. His words, “mission accomplished,” spoken on the aircraft carrier only a few months after the successful sweep into Baghdad in 2003, have proved to be disastrously empty. His claim to be strong on national security went down the drain when this administration proved to be woefully unprepared to deal with a natural disaster called Hurricane Katrina about which there had been weeks of warning as that storm journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Caribbean. When an administration is that inept in dealing with a natural disaster, its claim to be ready to deal with another terrorist attack, for which there will be no warning, sounds empty. Again the words of an administration badly out of touch with reality haunt this president: “You did a helluva job, Brownie.”    

Next there was the sudden passion to fix the long term immigration problem ignored by this administration for six full years. Mr. Bush’s reluctance to address this issue came because it is splitting his party in two. His southern right wing religious base is made up of the old George Wallace vote where tribal feelings and racial prejudices run deep. They see a tide of brown-skinned Mexicans threatening their economic security and they respond viscerally. They want a fence built along the line between the United States and Mexico. They perfume their racism by saying that this is a ‘national security issue.’ It is noteworthy, however, that no one is proposing a fence across the United States border with Canada, which is equally as porous for those who want access to this nation. The other side of the Republican Party is made up of American business corporations who have long encouraged the illegal hiring of thousands of undocumented laborers, who work for low wages and receive no benefits. These businesses do not want this source of cheap labor either publicized or stopped. It is a battle between prejudice and greed. This administration is now caught in a lose-lose situation and its wiggle room has been greatly diminished.

  The combination of these political realities in conjunction with the approaching mid-term elections in November in which control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate will be at stake panicked this administration. Republican strategists began to try to rouse their base by saying publicly that control of the Congress by Democrats might result in the “impeachment of the president.” That is hardly a positive campaign theme. Next, Mr. Bush and his strategists, decided to act in a way that is simply without character. A campaign of victimization is now being orchestrated and in the process this noble office is being brought to a new low. It is a well-known political tactic to divert attention from all political problems by playing to the base instincts of the voters. It is an easy tactic to adopt. First, identify a popular enemy whom it is easy to hate. Second, build your following by attacking that enemy. The hope is that by playing to people’s emotional fears, the voters will forget all other issues. George Wallace employed this tactic with blacks as his victims in the 50’s and 60’s before the Voter Rights Law of 1965 had enrolled masses of black voters in the political process. He had little to lose with these prejudiced attacks. Hitler did it to the Jews in the 1930’s, when Europe contained less than ten million Jews. A history of anti-Semitic rhetoric and persecution lay in the background. Almost every nation on that continent had at one time expelled its Jewish citizens. Those who had not expelled them ghettoized them. Jews were an easy target and so Hitler blamed “the International Zionist Conspiracy” for the economic depression in Germany. The German people, with their base emotions raised to a fever pitch of hatred for Jews, proved pliable enough to accept dictatorship as the price for ridding the nation of those deemed to be unacceptable. The Christian Church of Europe, fed for centuries on the anti-Semitism of Christian leaders from Polycarp and Jerome to Martin Luther and Pius XII, offered no resistance. President Bush’s victims in this cheap and dangerous political game are the homosexuals of America, a group numbering perhaps 5-10% of the population, who have perennially been feared and hated because they were different and thought to be “unnatural, deviant and immoral.” Around homosexual persons, the president and his chief political policy advisor, Karl Rove, could weave the subliminal fears of the sexually insecure. The campaign was on. The desire of homosexual people to be accorded the same legal rights as their heterosexual counterparts was said by this president to be “a threat to the institution of marriage.” That in itself is irrational, emotionally charged hype. How is it possible that people who are struggling to be allowed to enter the status of marriage, and are thus seeking to uphold its sacredness, are a threat to marriage? Adultery is a threat to marriage. Spousal abuse is a threat to marriage. Divorce is a threat to marriage. Gay and lesbian people who desire to secure legal and religious sanctions for their sacred commitments seem to be far from constituting a threat to this institution. They actually are bearing witness to its importance and its desirability.  The next red flag that this president waved before his emotional followers was the presence on the benches of our courts of “activist judges.” That was also a well known code word and a subliminal appeal to the racism of his supporters. It was “activist judges legislating from the bench,” who struck down segregation in schools, declared poll taxes and other tactics of voter discrimination to be illegal and opened public accommodations to all citizens. “Activist judges” are those who force the population to change, to obey the law, to abandon prejudice and illegal discrimination. Attacking “activist judges,” who are unnamed and unidentified resonates well in prejudiced America. One has to wonder who these activist judges are. Are they the seven out of nine members of the Supreme Court who have been appointed by conservative Republican presidents? Are they the conservative Republican-appointed judges who refused to let Tom Delay and Bill Frist keep Terri Schiavo alive long after her brain was clinically destroyed? Are they the ones who in a religiously pluralistic society, decided that the religious symbols from one faith tradition should not be imposed on all others in the public schools that are financed by the taxes of all?  The final blatant appeal by this president to the meanness of the mass spirit was to say these issues should be decided not by the courts, but by the legislative process where the will of people can be heard. President Bush and his aides act as if they do not understand the basic lesson of American history. The difference between a democracy and a ‘mobocracy’ is that in a democracy the rights of the minority are protected by the courts and the constitution. Those basic human rights are not voted on by the legislative process. Only in a ‘mobocracy’ does one allow the rights of a citizen to be destroyed by the tyranny of the masses expressed through the vote of the people. Perhaps a rereading of the Federalist Papers might refresh their memory. The appeal of this president was to those who would prevent the courts from deciding on basic human rights by subjecting those rights to a popular referendum. To attempt to amend the constitution of the United States so that it strips away forever from some of our citizens’ the rights guaranteed to others would be nothing less than the beginning of the end of this noble experiment called the United States of America.  

When I add to this list of presidential statements the known political fact that a bill to amend the Constitution to prohibit gay marriage, which requires a two-thirds vote in the senate where it was introduced, had absolutely no chance of winning, my embarrassment became acute. This is little more than an empty political gesture, red meat for the prejudiced foot soldiers of the religious right. It is an attempt to manipulate emotions and passions with false hope. The price of this cheap trick has been to unleash more hatred and homophobia into the bloodstream of America and to victimize yet again those people whose only “sin” is that they were born with a minority orientation. This blatant political exercise is without character. It is indeed evil. Mr. Bush should be ashamed of himself. I am deeply embarrassed to have this kind of behavior present in the highest elective office of this land.

 John Shelby Spong