Mississippi allows religious documents posted on public property

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/thesunherald/11454833.htm

 

Sounds like a violation of the no-establishment clause. Unless this means that I could organize some groups that would move en masse to Mississippi and petition the mayors and city councils of Tupelo, Biloxi, et al, to allow us to dedicate huge marble or granite monuments with quotes from the Vedic texts to be plopped right out in front of City Hall. - Ted.

 

Why?

I really get the impression that George Bush's election victory has given the religious right a bad case of hubris.

If they overreach, if they are perceived as trying to enforce some kind of theocratic Bible agenda on the rest of the United States, then they are apt to drive more moderate and secular Republican voters into the arms of the Democrats.

The Democrats already have lots of advantages.
There's California, with 1/8 of the US population (and growing). That's 1/4 of the electoral votes necessary to elect a president right there. And California is increasingly a one-party blue state. It's true that Schwarzenegger won the governorship, but he has unique celebrity and a social agenda 180 degrees the reverse of the religious right's.

The populous urban Northeast is blue territory. And the Democrats have major areas of strength in the industrial urban Midwest.

Immigration continues on a large scale and it helps the Democrats long term. Immigrants naturally feel alienated in a new culture and naturally gravitate to the Democrats' outsiders' coalition.

Given how close the last couple of elections were, it wouldn't take much of a shift to sink the Republicans. Florida is a big-state that's a toss-up. (Surrealistically so in the first Bush election.) Colorado. Arizona. And more.

In other words, I don't know how well overreaching by the Bible-boys will play with what by its very nature HAS to be a Republican "big tent".

What "thrills" fundies in rural Mississippi is less likely to work with the Giuliani and Schwarzenegger-style urban Republicans. It isn't going to thrill the upscale Republican prep-school patricians. It won't make Western 'don't-tread-on-me' libertarians very comfortable. And it might not play well with the Midwestern Bob Dole Rotary club crowd.

It's ironic that the Southern New Republicans were post-Civil-War Democrats who bloc-voted for that party for generations, until the civil rights movement drove large numbers of white segregationists to switch their allegiance to a party that they perceived was more friendly to state's rights.

Now they are trying to piss all over the Republican party as if it were their personal fire hydrant, while they simultaneously piss on state and local governments in their determination to Biblicize them.

Well, why in hell should I even consider voting for Haley Barbour if he runs for president? Is there some reason why I should favor him? I don't think that my misgivings are unusual among the kind of moderate voters that the Republicans must have if they want to win national elections.

It's very easy for the religious right to overreach in their triumphalist euphoria right now, but if they do it will be a gift sent from heaven to the Democrats.

 

This is interesting. When I first read this post, I wondered what the Mississippi STATE constitution had to say on the subject.

Well! I should have guessed!

Art III Section 18 of the Miss. Const. has the usual "no religious test for office" language and some anti-astablishment stuff but THEN it says that nothing in this section shall forbid the use of the Holy Bible in public classrooms!

I'd guess that any challenge to the Governor's act will lie under the U.S. Constitution ONLY instead of the more usual double argument.

What IS it about the Deep South? A long history of legal discrimination and denial of civil and political rights but every effort possible to enshrine Christianity in public life. I really don't get it.

 

1. Because the good white Southern Christians who do things their own way down there have not given up their slave-owner arrogance?

2. Because the poor whites don't realize that they are being used in the rich whites' power games?

3. Because the rich whites know that it is easy to convince people of a so-called truth by telling the people one big lie and repeating it often: hence the poor whites have been convinced that they are priviliged because they have white skin when economically and socially they probably have much more in common with many minority groups (i.e., the poor whites have become victims of false consciousness)?

 

thanks but no thanks

There are also some theologically ultraconservative Christians who have no use for Caesar's coin or Caesar's pietism or Caesar's enshrinements on public property. We need and ask no help from Caesar in proclaiming the faith once delivered to the saints. Who made him a theologian? Who entrusted Torah to him? Who called him to Gospel ministry?

Caesar has his God-given responsibility: to be the best Caesar in statecraft he can manage. But the proclamation of Law and Gospel is none of his.

Cobbler, stick to your last!

 

Ya know, Uncle, I think I need to draw a distinction between ultraconservative Christians and politicians who cynically USE ultraconservative Christian "talk" to gull people into conferring political power on them.

I object to the politician, not the preacher.