By CLIFF DUNN
Something this week put me in mind of how long can be the passage of just 40 years. Those of us who were alive during the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade may be shocked—shocked!—to learn that people sitting right next to you at this very moment may not have been alive 39 years ago. I don’t mean to sound like a drama queen here, but the truth is that today we take for granted many things that weren’t remotely on the radar—not to mention gaydar— screen 50 years ago.
Take the current presidential election year. In 2012, Lord Alfred Douglas’ “love that dare not speak its name” is sounding a loud blast on both ends of the political spectrum, with religious and social conservatives mobilizing to keep marriage equality out of the state house law books from sea to shining sea, while the Democratic National Committee deliberates including the issue as part of its national Party Platform (see inside this week’s Agenda National News story, “Democratic Leadership Considers Adding Marriage Equality to Party Platform”).
And—seriously—it’s only a matter of time before President Obama comes out squarely in support of gay marriage (my from-the-hip guess would be on Nov. 7, the day after he wins—or loses—reelection).
Now let’s stretch back a few years B.C. (“Before Cliff”) to 1962—precisely 50 years ago–when the White House was occupied by another “minority,” the Roman Catholic John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The fallen JFK–a wounded combat veteran who served his country in World War II and whose assassination threw his nation into a depth of despair that had never been felt since the murder of Lincoln—has been a fairly regular punching bag for GOP presidential candidate and fellow Roman Catholic Rick Santorum—a lawyer and failed professional politician whose “service” to his nation includes sponsorship of failed 2005 legislation would have prohibited the National Weather Service from releasing weather data to the public without charge where private-sector entities perform the same function for profit. Santorum took campaign money from the bill’s backers but hey, whatever: service is service).
Santorum got into ideological as well as the stylistic kind of hot water last month when he criticized Kennedy’s call for a strict “separation of church and state” that is “absolute” during his successful 1960 presidential campaign. JFK, of course, was trying to assuage the concerns of Protestant America, who were concerned that, if elected, he would take his marching orders from the Pope.
Santorum, in a cheap effort to cull support from the base of social conservatives that has entrapped his candidacy, said that Kennedy’s enjoinder made him want to “throw up,” and that it represented an early liberal effort to “force God out of the public square.”
I don’t mind so much that Santorum has clearly never picked up a history book; nor apparently watched a movie. For those of us who have done both, it seems pretty clear that the Founders meant to allow religion in the public square, but they were afraid—terrified might be a better word—that it would become the largest, most oppressive building in that square.
Hoping to clarify things—but in many ways, muddying them up—Thomas Jefferson responded in 1801 to a letter written by a group of religious supporters. These included a group of Danbury, Connecticut, Baptist ministers who wrote to congratulate the new president on his election, and to express a feeling of insecurity. As Baptists, they were a minority in Connecticut, sandwiched between the much larger— and much better politically connected— Congregationalists and Episcopalians (the latter formerly Church of England, don’t you know?).
A little-known fact about prerevolutionary America is that nine of the original 13 colonies had “statesponsored” religions that were supported financially by the colonies’ governments. Those Christians (and Heaven help those Jews) who weren’t members of the dominant two faiths faced hostility and even outright persecution.
The Baptists of Connecticut were concerned about the nation’s guarantee of religious freedoms. “Our constitution of government is not specific” on this crucial point, they wrote. In his response the following year to the Danbury Baptist Association, America’s third president wrote “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
It’s true that John Jay, post-colonial America’s great jurist, urged the people “of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers,” and that the Declaration of Independence cites “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” but it didn’t specify the name of that God or his son as “Jesus Christ,” or in any way connected to him. Don’t get me wrong: for every Jefferson (Deist), there were ten Jays and John Adams (Episcopalian and Congregationalist/Puritan, respectively).
But all of them came out of the 18th Century Enlightenment as much as they emerged from the Second Great Awakening, and although George Washington refers to God in his letters, they are vague references to things like a “Grand Architect,” all of which made for an accessibility for all Americans to practice their religion in the public square—an accessibility thatSantorum and his ilk seem to seek to diminish. God help them.