Saturday Hodgepodge

I don’t see the religious schism as a right/left or conservative/liberal one, anyway. To me, what it appears to be is a schism between those religious people who are concerned with justice, and those who are concerned with power. The contemporary religious right is tremendously politically powerful, but it is almost wholly unconcerned about justice — it has political and social policies that explicitly abandon or punish those who do not share its worldview, and it has a worldview which is not notably compassionate or charitable, so that leaves out quite a lot. Promoting a discriminatory agenda, promoting ignorance in public education and promoting one’s religion above all others in the political arena is not justice in any moral sense of the word.

I think many of the religious people who are rebelling against the religious right’s agenda are doing so because they see the lack of justice in it; a lack of the charity and compassion and love that is explicit in the message of Christianity, for one, and in most other religions as well. And it’s not about political positions, per se. One may believe abortion is wrong, but be opposed to a political agenda that explicitly denies to the poor the access to family planning that the middle and upper classes have as a matter of course. One may believe that homosexuality is morally wrong but be opposed to the political agenda that works to have gay Americans permanently branded as second class citizens.

The funny thing about all this is how closely it parallels the xenophobic hysteria that was raised almost exactly a century ago, during the initial wave of Japanese immigration. It was called the "Yellow Peril."

Prejudice against Asian immigrants had a long history, particularly against the Chinese. During the successful drive to exclude them—culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—popular prejudices of the nativist variety came into full play, such as a labor organizer’s screed warning of "China’s Menace to the World"…