Religion must not be the definition of morality.
What happens when you take the most powerful nation in the world, and put it in the hands of a man who believes that God wants him to be president, and that he is doing God’s work? Unfortunately, we are already finding out the answer to that question. President Bush, by his own words, believes that God wanted him to be the president of the United States of America. If you walked in to any emergency room in this country, and said that God wanted you to be the president, you would be given a diagnosis of some kind of neurosis or psychosis, and on your way to a nice little behavioral health center somewhere. If he said that God wanted him to be a teacher, or a preacher, or a healer of some kind, it wouldn’t be so scary. But no, this man believes that God wanted him to be the leader of the greatest democracy in the world, and the commander and chief of the most dangerous military arsenal in the world.
Now, only he could tell the world why he believes that God so favors him, and frankly that explanation would be even more frightening than the assertion itself to me. That one simple assertion that God placed him there for some self perceived purpose is to me the single most upsetting, and potentially dangerous situation that this country has faced since the end of the cold war. What a sense of power it must be to sit in an office such as the Presidency of the United and States and believe in your own mind that you sit their by God’s desire. Surely if you believed that, you to would believe that you had the right to force your religious convictions on others as President Bush seems to believe.
The Pilgrims first came to this continent trying to escape King James, who blurred the lines of church and state, and made religious doctrine a matter of law rather than choice. The founders of our nation, while being mindful of their own beliefs, were aware of the need to prevent the church from having control of the laws that would govern us. The first sentence of the first amendment to our constitution tells us that even then they realized that it was important that laws not be made to favor one church or religion, nor to persecute it.
It isn’t easy to respect the views of other people, especially when they don’t agree with your own. What makes this country so great is that not only do we respect the right of every individual to their own beliefs, and opinions, but that we have fought and died for their rights to express them Now, we have a president who would take us back over two hundred years, and not only assert his own religious beliefs on others, but write them into the very constitution that was meant to protect us from such tyranny. I don’t need religion to tell me what is right, and what is wrong. My Mother and Father did that for me, and I do it for myself every day of my life. I certainly don’t need President Bush to do it for me either. I respect his right to believe that my being a lesbian is somehow immoral, or a sin, or perverse, or whatever it is he believes. I disagree with him, but I know he has a right to that belief. I would not want to see a law that denied him the right to express his opinion, nor denied him any rights based on his belief. I just wish he had that kind of respect for me, and for my right to be who God made me.
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