Running for Grand Inquisitor?

By Paul Haist

article created on:

One of the Jewish Review's far-flung correspondents recently returned to Portland and delivered on our desk a few pages of a recent Orlando, Florida, Sentinel.
The point she wanted us not to miss was in an article by Sentinel writer Jim Stratton.
Stratton provided a straight-ahead news report about remarks attributed to Florida U.S. Senate candidate Katherine Harris, who currently is in her second term as the Republican emissary of Florida's 13th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Her name may echo faintly in one's memory in connection with the disputed Florida vote tally in the 2000 presidential election.
Yes, that Katherine Harris, the Sunshine State's then secretary of state who certified that George W. Bush had defeated Al Gore in the White House sweepstakes in Florida and, hence, all across the United States.

Now, let it be said at the outset, that we always would give the honorable Ms. Harris the same benefit of the doubt that we would give to anyone, and especially to someone whose life achievements have allowed them to ascend to an exalted position of leadership in our nation.
One does not go the U.S. House of Representatives, usually, without having distinguished oneself in the eyes of many.
So, why did an Orlando Sentinel reporter choose to write about Harris recently?
Harris was quoted, in a collection of candidate interviews in a journal called The Florida Baptist Witness, as having said, "If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you're not electing Christians then in essence you are going to legislate sin."
She said more that all of us should find interesting.
She said, "?we have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers. And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren't involved in helping godly men in getting elected then we're going to have a nation of secular laws. That's not what our founding fathers intended and that's certainly isn't what God intended" (The punctuation in this quote is that of its original publisher).
Thank God for the likes of Rep. Harris who can assure us what God intended.
Perhaps the Supreme Court can call on her to help them interpret what our founding fathers meant when they said this and that, regardless of the fact that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and some others among the founders were not Christians, but deists or Unitarians, men who believed in God, but not in the divinity ascribed to Christ by Christians.
The interview of Harris in the Florida Baptist Witness was extensive and included many additional comments that elaborate on the two key perspectives in her above-cited quotes.
The Witness was at least professional and possibly courageous in publishing these remarks. Those who are not Baptist or, more generally, not Christian or who are otherwise generally cynical about politics might have expected them to tone down the Harris remarks in the interest of political sensitivity and what might reasonably be assumed as their own institutional politics.
It is to the credit of that Baptist journal that its editors chose to make the professionally correct journalistic choice—which I say as the editor of a Jewish journal where similar issues could arise and where I know opinions differ on what would be the proper course of action in our pages, the proper editorial choice in the environment of special-interest journalism attached to religious views.
It's important for Jews and Baptists and others to have their voice, but it needs to be tempered by good judgment, which, in this case, the Florida Baptist Witness exercised.
Back to Harris.
Her remarks about the association of religion and government in America amount to nothing less than a smugly sanctimonious and dangerously selfish application of her personal sectarian beliefs on a society more diverse than she apparently is aware of or acknowledges.
America today is hugely more culturally complex than the fledgling nation our founding fathers fashioned as men of white European descent. It is consistent with the principles they laid down for us to recognize our diversity today and to govern accordingly.
Failure to do so either is a mistake by one who is out of touch with reality, or something more pernicious, such as chauvinism, to put it delicately.
Rep. Harris either is out of touch with reality or something more pernicious. In either case, I wonder if such a person makes a good leader in modern America.
There are vitally important issues that divide our nation today. They are divisions that seem irreconcilable. They are frightening for the monumental harm that may accrue to our country from irrational, unwise or unfair attempts to resolve them.
One such irrational, unwise and unfair attempt at resolving our difference is to force those who are not like us—whoever we are—to become like us.
Many have tried this over the centuries. The Inquisition comes first to mind, then there are the Taliban and the horror that continues to unfold in Darfur. There are the Serbs and Croats, Tutsis and Hutus, Sunnis and Shiites, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, to name a recent few.
It would be wrong to paint as intolerant all the people included in these groups. But their presence in today's and yesterday's headlines usually has had to do with the intolerance of some among them.
Such intolerance is not unique to these people.
Intolerance, of the sort that leads to ethnic cleansing and genocide is all around us. In America, it is kept more in check than not most of the time by the principles set down by our founding fathers and the system of laws that has arisen from those principles.
I suspect Rep. Harris would deny vehemently an accusation of intolerance of the sort I refer to. She might be proudly intolerant of some secular humanist ideals, but I am fairly certain she would never see in herself the seeds of racial or cultural hatred, which is what I see.
I also suspect that I am not alone in finding fault with her stated views about what kind of country America is or should be.

Jewish Review reader Joan Teller is the far-flung correspondent who brought this issue to our attention.