by - Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – January
02, 2008
In his speech last month on "freedom" of religion, Mit
Romney really said: "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires
freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his
most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure
together, or perish alone."
I have been a skier for close to 50 years. For the first 30 of those I skied in
the Northeast, where I live. For the last 20 or so, I have been lucky enough to
be able to ski in the Colorado Rockies, mainly at Breckenridge. I am
occasionally asked if I have ever skied in Utah (which does have excellent
skiing, so I am told). "No," I reply, hoping to be jocular, "I
don't ski in theocracies." Well, now I know that I haven’t been being
funny all of these years.
The true intent of Romney's speech was not to deal with
religious freedom, which in the American tradition is as much about the freedom from religion as about freedom of religion. For Romney, it is now
quite clear, what he oddly calls "freedom" requires religious
belief, which, in his terms, in turn requires belief in something he calls
"God." (The Mormons, I have only recently found out, actually believe
in a flesh and blood God, in human form, and a male for sure.) He also
makes it quite clear that if you don't believe in a Goddist form of "religion"
as he defines it (no Buddhists allowed, apparently), you are not entitled to
freedom.
Freedom (with help from the Encarta dictionary http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/Freedom.html) can be defined as “a state in which somebody is able to act,
think, speak, and live as he or she chooses, without being subject to any undue restraints or restrictions, as long as such expressions do not do not
unreasonably impinge upon someone else’s freedom.” In a nation with a
government of laws, which lives under the rule of law, the freedom of all
persons, which requires balance in the society, can be guaranteed only through
the provision of liberty.
Liberty (again with help from the Encarta
dictionary, http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/Liberty.html) is “a political, social, and economic
right that belongs to the citizens of a state, and is guaranteed by it.”
Providing, protecting, and guaranteeing liberty, without which, in the modern
state, freedom cannot exist, is a function of government. Some
governments do it better than others. Under Romney, as noted above,
unless you are a Goddist you are not entitled to freedom, and thus neither are
you entitled to liberty, that is governmental protection for your beliefs and
actions that do not unreasonably harm others.
Romney’s philosophy and thus his theory of government is the
essence of theocracy: the melding of government and religion. He says that that
would be any religion, just as long as it was a Goddist one, of course.
However, practitioners of what he later in his speech (http://www.mittromney.com/News/Speeches/Faith_In_America)
most peculiarly characterized as the “secular religion,” wouldn’t
qualify. Even more importantly, historically it happens that it has
always turned out that theocracy means government under a particular religion, with the formulation of that government's rules determined by what
that particular religion says they should be. Contemporary examples are Islamic
theocratic states such as (oh my, talk about irony) Iran and Saudi
Arabia, which have no (in Saudi Arabia) or quite limited (in Iran)
"freedom" in the traditional American sense. For Romney,
as he said in responding to Mike Huckabee’s direct and indirect attacks on
Mormonism, “Attacking someone’s religion is really going too far” (Gordon, C.,
“Mike to Mitt: I’m Sorry,” Newsday, Dec. 13, 2007). However,
attacking someone for not being a Goddist and then going further to say that
they are not entitled to freedom, isn’t going too far.
Although this statement of Romney's surprises some, we
should not be surprised. The most important thing about him, the element of him
that in my view totally disqualifies him to be President of the United States
is that he grew up in a theocracy and obviously thinks that that form of
government and governing is the most natural thing in the world. Unusually for
this classic flip-flopper on so many issues, on this one he is being entirely
consistent. Which brings us to the spelling of his nickname above with only one
"T." Why on the belt buckle of every Nazi Wehrmacht soldier was the
slogan: "Gott mit Uns." Which brings us to Ann Coulter.
As I wrote on TPJ on October 3, 2007 and earlier, on July
13, 2006, Ann Coulter is the coming new face of the Republican Party.
Consider her recent book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. In
typical Coulter style, it is filled with rage. In fact a discussion of
Ann Coulter's rage became all the rage on the Left when the book came out. Even
Hillary Clinton (hardly on the left of anything) went after her for the remarks
she made about those 9/11 widows who have become strong critics of the Georgites
on a variety of fronts. But those remarks, intentionally in my view,
distract from the book's central message: “Liberals” (undefined) are not like
Coulter’s US; they are demons, they are untermenschen (sound
familiar), they are, as Mark Levin a New York Right-Wing ABC Screamer who often
sounds as if he were doing a self-parody, cockroaches who need to be squashed
underfoot.
In a previous book Coulter defined “liberals” as
traitors. In our country, the penalty for treason is death. Coulter
is wildly popular in the Republican Party. Perhaps the worst thing about
her remark some months ago at a Republican gathering in South Carolina that
John Edwards is gay is that it was greeted with thunderous applause and gales
of laughter from the assembled throng. For the "goddist" of the
Coulter variety one deals with the “godless” by force. If Coulter has her way,
the "traitorous" and "godless" "liberals"
(whoever they are) would be going perhaps to the camps, going perhaps before
the firing squads, perhaps becoming the targets of Death Squads. (That, by the
way, was advocated by the video game “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” developed
from the “Christian” Tim LaHaye’s best-selling “Left Behind” series, that came
to a store near you in October, 2006 just in time for that year’s
Christmas.) Or perhaps it might be burning to death at the stake, which
is what militant Christian Churches of a variety of stripes did to such persons
who didn’t express their “goddistness” in quite the right way over a period of
hundreds of years into the 17th century.
As Coulter has said, "Although my Christianity is
somewhat more explicit in this book, Christianity fuels everything I
write." Whatever else it is or is not, Coulter's version of Christianity
is surely militant and doesn’t seem to have too much Christ in it.
While Romney’s does, their views of who qualifies as citizens are all too much
the same. For Romney, “freedom and religion” go together. For
Coulter, if you are “godless,” and “soulless,” and clueless,” as she has also
defined what she calls “liberals” (that is, in fact, anyone who doesn’t agree
with modern Republican, CheneyBush, policy), you are a traitor and therefore by
definitely not entitled to either freedom or liberty.
Back in October, on these pages I said: “The face of Ann
Coulter is not funny. In no more than a few years, even perhaps by 2008 at the
rate Giuliani is going, all of the Republican veneer will be gone, with
Coulterian rage, total intolerance of difference, rampant corporatism at center
stage, and demonization of any opposition at the center of the message. The
message will clearly be backed up by policy. And force, it is clear, is
to be used against any and all opposition. At least the target for those of us
Americans who believe in Constitutional Democracy will be clear and clearly out
in the open.”
I was wrong about two things. We
don’t have to wait until 2008. And Romney got there first (with Huckabee
with his “I’m in front of the cross, see” ad not far behind. In fact, on
“Morning Joe,” MSNBC, Dec. 20, 2007, Chris Matthews characterized the
Republican Party as the “Christian Republican Party.” In his 1996 book, The
15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022, Jonathan
Westminster wrote that by 2004 the Republican Party would officially known as
the Republican-Christian Alliance, and by 2008 as the American Christian Nation
Party). Mit Romney, meet Ann Coulter. Soul mates, it would
appear.
Addendum: But hey, you never know. Here’s what Coulter
had to say about Huckabee (!) in her weekly Human (sic) Events column
for 12/20/07: “There’s a Huckabee Born Every Minute “
“To paraphrase the Jews, [he] is ‘bad for the evangelicals.’
As far as I can tell, it's mostly secular liberals swooning over Huckabee.
Liberals adore Huckabee because he fits their image of what an evangelical
should be: stupid and easily led. . . . The media are transfixed by the fact
that Huckabee says he doesn't believe in evolution. . . . [But] Huckabee [has,
according to Coulter] dropped his alleged skepticism of Darwinism. . . .
Huckabee claims he opposes gay marriage and says Scalia is his favorite
justice, but he supports a Supreme Court decision denounced by Scalia for
paving the way to a ‘constitutional right’ to gay marriage. I guess Huckabee is
one of those pro-sodomy, pro-gay marriage, pro-evolution evangelical Christians. . . . No wonder Huckabee is the evangelical
liberals like. [WE DO?!?]”
It will be interesting to see who Coulter supports for the Presidency. A resurrected
Magister of the Spanish Inquisition, no doubt.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This column is based in part on: “Dr. J.'s 'He
Really Said That': Willard 'Mit' Romney and the Case for Theocracy,” which
appeared on BuzzFlash on Tue, 12/11/2007, http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/087;
“ANN COULTER: THE NEW FACE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY,” TPJ, July 13, 2006; and
“UNDERSTANDING ANN COULTER,” TPJ, Oct. 3, 2007.