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Religious Extremism Comes Out of the Closet
Religious Extremism Comes Out of the Closet
by Skeeter Sanders
More than eight months after the September 11 attacks, it is becoming increasingly clear to most Americans that religious extremism is on the rise around the world. However, we Americans are not immune. There is evidence that religious extremism is also on the rise here at home.
Case No. 1: Two judges – both in the Deep South, but doubtless there will be more elsewhere – have come out of the religious-extremist closet, making public statements (one of them in his official capacity) that openly invoke the Bible to justify their virulent prejudice against homosexuals.
Case No. 2: A fundamentalist Baptist preacher in Vermont has launched a nasty radio advertising campaign attacking a conservative state senator and other Republican members of the Legislature for not acting to repeal Vermont’s nearly two-year-old landmark civil-union law.
A Mississippi newspaper, The <I>George County Times<I> of Lucedale, published on March 28 a letter to the editor from Mississippi Justice Court Judge Connie Glenn Wilkerson, in which the judge writes: “In my opinion, gays and lesbians should be put in some type of mental institute instead of having a [domestic partnership] law like this passed for them.”
Wilkerson was referring to a recent Associated Press article about the ability of gay and lesbian survivors to sue for the wrongful death of their partners. “I got sick to my stomach as I read the news story,” Wilkerson wrote.
The judge invoked the Bible – specifically Romans 1:32, which suggests that those who break God’s law “are worthy of death.”
Wilkerson’s remarks come on the heels of a judicial opinion laced with anti-gay invectives issued by the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court – the same justice who made headlines last year with his insistence on posting the Ten Commandments in courtrooms and in public schools.
In a ruling by the court that denied a lesbian mother custody of her children, Chief Justice Roy Moore wrote a concurring opinion that called homosexuals “abhorrent,” “immoral,” “detestable,” “an inherent evil” and “inherently destructive to the natural order of society.”
In Vermont, the Rev. David Stertzbach, pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Williston, has launched a nasty radio ad campaign attacking conservative state Sen. Julius Canns (R-Caledonia) and other GOP members of the Legislature.
The reason for Stertzbach’s wrath? A decision by Canns to not follow through on a promise made last year to repeal Act 91, the state’s landmark civil-union statute that granted to same-gender couples nearly all of the benefits accorded to married opposite-gender couples.
Stertzbach vowed to campaign to defeat Canns and every other GOP member of the Legislature in this fall’s election unless “they put the Lord above political expediency” and repeal civil unions. Canns, an opponent of civil unions himself, nonetheless insists the votes in the Democratic-controlled Senate “are simply not there” to pass a repeal measure.
A conservative who pushed through a resolution earlier this year condemning the desecration of the American flag, Canns is Vermont’s only African-American state senator. He vowed that he would not be “intimidated” by Stertzbach.
That the two southern judges and the Vermont minister are militantly anti-gay is beside the point. Homophobic bigots are a dime a dozen. Gay people are a convenient scapegoat for them.
The REAL issue here is these powerful and influential individuals’ public declaration of their belief that the Ten Commandments and the Bible trump the Constitution and the rights that the Constitution guarantees to all Americans – including those Americans these individuals personally despise.
What really makes Mississippi Judge Wilkerson, Alabama Chief Justice Moore and Vermont Rev. Stertzbach so dangerous is that they are ultra-fundamentalist Christian theocrats who categorically reject the First Amendment separation of church and state and are willing – indeed, determined – to employ the full power of the state to impose their extremist religious beliefs on all Americans, especially on those Americans who, in the theocrats’ view, do not conform to “God’s Law.”
That is not only an affront to the freedoms that our Constitution guarantees and for which generations of Americans have fought and died, but it is also a recipe for the kind of sectarian conflict that has racked the Middle East and Northern Ireland for decades.
America in 2002 is a country that is more religiously and spiritually diverse today than at any other time in its more than 225-year history. While Christians of all denominations remain the vast majority of Americans (78 percent, according to the 2000 Census), they are a majority that is slowly and steadily shrinking.
Millions of Americans, both native-born and foreign-born, are following other religious and spiritual pathways: Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, New Age, Unitarian Universalism, Paganism and many others. The moral teachings of these other pathways do not necessarily agree with those of Christian fundamentalists – and indeed, in some cases (even within Christendom itself), may be in diametric opposition.
In the face of America’s increasing religious, spiritual and lifestyle diversity, it is more imperative than ever that the people who hold important positions of authority in government (especially the judiciary) be mindful of that diversity and fully uphold the rights of all Americans that are guaranteed by the Constitution they are sworn by oath to uphold and protect.
The Constitution makes it abundantly clear that while we Americans all have the right to freedom of religious liberty, we Americans also have the right to freedom from religious tyranny.
Skeeter Sanders lives in Essex Junction.