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What Speaker Johnson Doesn't Get About Religion and Politics [1]
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Date: 2023-11-07
I’m going to say something not everybody will agree with, and no, not my usual thing about the concept of table manners being a Deep State plot to keep me from getting invited to dinner parties. Although that is true. What I’m going to say is even crazier than that. I miss Rick Perry.
For those too young to remember, or those who had their mind scrubbed “Eternal-Sunshine-of-the-Spotless-Mind” style specifically to forget Rick Perry, he was the multi-term governor of Texas who ran for President twice.
The first time he seemingly ran on a “Can you believe a person this dumb could be president” platform and his second race was about how wearing glasses can make even the dumbest person look like he can read books with small print. Neither run was particularly successful.
Come to think of it, I don’t actually miss Rick Perry at all.
But he does still serve as a useful example of a point I want to make about the juxtaposition (try reading THAT word Glasses Man!) between religion and politics. This point should be obvious to anyone who wears glasses for reasons not having to do with winning the Iowa Caucuses. But recent comments by our new Speaker of House MAGA Mike Johnson make me fear that maybe we aren’t doing a particularly bang-up job of teaching civics in our schools.
When Perry was running his first race in 2012, the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell legalizing same-sex marriage had not yet been handed down. Rick was at a town hall taking questions, trying to remember what federal agencies he promised to shut down, what federal agencies there are, what the words “federal” and “agency” meant, etc, when someone confronted him with one of his policy positions:
A young person in the audience asked: “Governor Perry, I am a gay man, and you support a federal ban on same-sex marriage…”
Before the man could finish, Perry interrupted, seeming to be somewhat offended. “Hey now. That’s my faith”.
The import of Perry’s statement appeared to be “how dare you question my faith?” And herein lies the lesson. This lesson is on the huge pile of lessons that Perry never learned. Your faith should have absolutely nothing to do with your policy positions.
Perry’s faith apparently taught him that his God doesn’t approve of dudes marrying other dudes. And regardless of what I may think of this, there is a totally appropriate role for Perry’s faith to have in his life. Specifically, Rick Perry, being a dude, shouldn’t marry a dude.
No matter how many mustachioed, besotted suiters defenestrate themselves at Perry’s door, bonnetiere-festooned, and florally-laden, to beg for his troth, Rick is perfectly within his rights to forcefully gainsay their entireties, and leave them as forlorn and desolate as the surface of Neptune. He’ll get no argument from me, whether or not I ultimately choose to be one of those suiters or not. (Could go either way).
But whatever rules your particular dictatorial deity lays down, you have no right to use the power of the state to foist those directives on others. I am Jewish. My faith teaches me not to eat cheeseburgers. And I don’t, although, to be fair, mostly for other reasons. But if I were suddenly imbued with dictatorial powers, I would not use them to ban cheeseburgers across the land. (although I make no similar promise regarding Klezmer music).
No matter what I may think God says, it’s simply not my place to shove my personal religious views down the cheeseburger gobbling throats of my fellow Americans
This seems to be a simple concept. Your religion governs YOUR life, not mine. Yet even today, people even smarter than Rick Perry, (the Venn Diagram between such people and everyone ever born is just a large circle), don’t seem to understand this.
Just yesterday, I saw new House Speaker Mike Johnson interviewed on Fox News (apparently the only network he’ll go on). He was asked about his voting history of opposition to abortion, marriage equality, and contraception and tied his opposition to all of them in one neat package. “Well hey, I’m a Bible Believing Christian”.
This is a classic Perryism. And nobody wants to be known for committing one of those.
What religion Johnson believes in should not be a factor as to what bills he will bring to the floor of the US Congress. You can’t use your personal, subjective belief in a sky-God who may talk to you, but is silent and invisible to much of the rest of the population, to force people to live according to your beliefs rather than theirs. If some God talks to you, by all means, listen. But he, she, they or it have not spoken to me, and I am not interested in the police and the courts enforcing your God’s edicts.
So, if Speaker Johnson is against abortion, or LGBT rights, or the Panama Canal Treaty (yeah, apparently God’s still pissed about that one), he must make a rational, persuasive case, based on true facts and shared logic. Nobody cares, and nobody should care, what the big guy in the sky told him.
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