And it’s not just changing culture. Over the last half century, various branches of government have also taken plenty of proactive steps to marginalize religion. Prayer in public school has been banned. Creches can no longer be set up in front of city hall. Parochial schools are forbidden from receiving public funds. The Ten Commandments can’t be displayed in courtrooms. Catholic hospitals are required to cover contraceptives for their employees. Gay marriage is legal in more than a dozen states and the number is growing rapidly.
In order:
“Gay marriage” being legal doesn’t marginalize “religion,” just some flavors of some faiths, not all of which have made up their doctrinal minds on the subject.
Marginalizing cetain ostentatious displays of faux Christianity isn’t marginalizing “religion,” either, unless you define religion down to the six things your sanctimonious sister-in-law is pissed about this week. Taking a bunch of fake issues that have fuck-all to do with the actual practice of religion in this country and using incorrect assumptions about them to agree with the general wingnut position that Christianity is somehow under siege, is … reductive, at best.
I expect this kind of half-assed shorhand from middlebrow media outlets and commentators whose audiences are just biding time until the orderly comes round with the pudding, but my standards for Mother Jones are a little bit higher.
A.
While I read Kevin and generally like him he has an unfortunate tendency towards Sensible Centrism™, a political ideology I despise more than even wingnutism.
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Yeah, that article caused me to raise an eyebrow, too. There really hasn’t been an attack on organized religion. The religious are still free to exercise their religion in any way they see fit (even to the extent of politicking from the pulpit without much interference in their tax-exempt status by the IRS). They’ve just not been as successful in using secular law to impose sect-specific dogma on the rest of us.
What Drum seems to forget (or not take into account) is that any attempt by any religion to use secular law to impose its views on society as a whole is unseemly and contrary to our Constitution. That religion in this country has been successful in doing so in the past, but is not succeeding to their liking now is not an attack on religion. Quite the opposite–it is secular society defending itself against attack by religion.
That shouldn’t be a difficult concept to either understand or embrace.
Actually, an argument can be made that Christianity has been completely marginalized by right-wing “religious” ideology.
Or at least, the Christianity *I* was raised on and read in the Gospels. Which is the Christianity that didn’t spend all its time worrying about sex but instead was all about caring for the sick and the poor and each other and stuff like that. With the Jesus that told the rich man that if he wanted to follow him, he should give all his money away.
The Christianity that seems to be on the ascendant in the United States is like the opposite of that Christianity.
I haven’t told you this in a while, but I love you.
Half-ass middlebrow “both sides do it”-ism has been K. Drum’s stock in trade since he started blogging. Though the Pollyanna historical revisionism is a late addition, and makes me think Drum is itching to replace Bobo Brooks.