[Mb-civic] Bishop Spong: The Right to Live and Die

[Reeeees at aol.com]

     (https://secure.agoramedia.com/trackpromo.asp?pi=10&promo=10)  
(http://forums.prospero.com/sp-bishopspong)       

 (http://click.atdmt.com/AGM/go/ain00800001agm/direct/01/) Carol from Florida 
 writes: 
"Several years ago, I was interviewed at a pro-choice event for  Republicans. 
Being well past any likelihood of pregnancy, I linked my  concern about my 
right to die with my right to decide about my fertility.  Both ends of life are 
clearly the prime battlegrounds of the "Right to  Life" groups, yet they 
assert that an embryo or a fetus and a person who  cannot survive without heroic, 
indefinite intervention are fully alive and  must be saved. I said then that I 
was as appalled at the notion that the  government might decide if I should 
live or die, just as they might decide  if my daughters could have an abortion 
within the reasonable parameters  set by Roe v. Wade. People at that event 
thought I was "stretching it."   
"Since then I have been proven tragically correct.  Attorney General John 
Ashcroft has challenged Oregon on its right to death  with dignity law. Abortion 
conditions continue to be eroded by the radical  conservatives who seem to 
know better than the family in question what is  best. People in nursing homes 
often have to be resuscitated at hospitals  because, even with written 
directives otherwise, the nursing home is  required to send the patient to the hospital 
to be "saved." Can you  explain how it is that the Republican Party that has 
historically stood  for limited government is now inserting itself into the 
most personal of  issues?"  
Dear Carol,Politics is always more  about power than principle. You should 
not expect consistency from either  party. If you go back into the 30s, the 
Democrats were in power and met  the Depression with massive spending programs and 
rising deficits. Today  the Republicans are in power and the Democrats are 
complaining about  bigger and bigger government and massive deficits. In the 
days of Abraham  Lincoln, the Republicans were the party of civil rights and 
justice for  black Americans. Today, black Americans tend to vote about 90% 
Democratic.  In the days of Theodore Roosevelt, Republicans were the environmental  
champions. Today most environmental groups endorse Democratic candidates.  
These things may be ideological for some but I am convinced that they  result 
more from the desire to ride issues into political power more than  anything 
else. That is not cynical so much as it is realistic. Power is  the name of the 
primary goal of politics.  
When I lived in Virginia in the fifties and sixties, the  Democrats tended to 
be "States Rights, Anti-integration, Anti-Union,  Conservatives." During that 
time, the best governor of that state was, in  my opinion, A. Linwood Holton, 
a Republican. As a citizen now of New  Jersey, I still regard Republican 
Thomas H. Kean as the most effective  governor in the past thirty years.  
What is now going on in American politics is, I believe, a  reaction to the 
fast pace of change that always creates uncertainty and  fear. It has been 
building since shortly after World War II. It began with  the post World War II 
massive migration of black Americans out of the  south into urban America. Next 
came the morally correct, but culturally  destabilizing ruling of the Supreme 
Court against segregation in 1954.  This was followed by urban unrest and 
riots in the sixties, created in  part by the pressure on social systems in 
northern cities with the arrival  of black migrants who, as products of a cruel and 
dehumanizing  segregation, were generally poorly trained and poorly educated. 
Next came  the disillusioning war in Vietnam that we could not win, we could 
not lose  and from which we did not seem to know how to extricate ourselves. 
This  was followed by the Watergate scandal in which, for the first time in  
American history, a sitting president was expelled from office. These  forces 
came together to create great insecurity, great anxiety and great  fear. It also 
caused our nation as a whole to search for leaders who  reflected the values 
of our past that, by comparison, looked calm and  peaceful where values were 
not in doubt. Since it is far more difficult to  articulate new values than to 
retreat into the past, this nation turned  first to 'born again' Jimmy Carter 
and later Ronald Reagan, whose movie  career projected him as the candidate of 
law and order, American  patriotism and traditional values. Gradually security 
was restored and in  1992 America turned its presidency over to one who 
reflected the Vietnam  resistance. It was time to move on. President Bill Clinton's 
misuse of the  Oval Office for sexual escapades, however, plus the constant 
and I think  excessive investigation of him by a politically motivated 
Republican  Congress reignited the fear that values were once again under assault,  
resulting in the narrow victory in 2000 by another voice of the past,  George W. 
Bush, the son of Reagan's vice president and successor, George  W. H. Bush. 
The Bush II presidency was then defined by the 9/11 attacks  that once again 
cast the people of this nation into a mode of fear. Fear  always drives people 
to seek the security of yesterday, a security they  feel that they have lost. 
The appeal of the present Bush administration is  first to family values, which 
is code language for anti-abortion measures  and government control of sexual 
activity. The corollary to this is the  drive to protect the "sanctity of 
marriage," which is the code language  for anti-homosexual measures. So life 
issues and sexual repression issues  dominate their social agenda. They seem not 
to realize that this flies in  the face of their conservative promise to "limit 
government" or to "get  the government off the back of the people." The 
politics of fear is quite  frequently the ticket to power. The rise of a 
controlling religious  mentality that seeks to force everyone by law to abide by the 
prevailing  traditional norms of behavior is a part of that.  
What usually happens when religion becomes politically  powerful and seeks to 
impose its values on the whole body politic is that,  drunk with a new sense 
of importance, it ultimately overreaches its  mandate and people begin to feel 
threatened by the imposition of a  narrowly defined religious power. The 
passion that surrounded the Terri  Schiavo case, the president's dramatic flight 
to Washington to sign the  emergency measure rushed through Congress at 
midnight to "save this  woman's life," Republican Majority leader Tom Delay's 
subsequent attack on  the Judiciary, the whole drama being orchestrated from Florida 
by Governor  Jeb Bush, and Republican Senate Leader Bill Frist's suggestion 
that by not  passing every judge nominated by the President, the political 
opposition  party was attacking religion, even hinting that Democratic opposition 
to  these potential judges was based on the fact that the nominees were  
"Evangelical Christians," has all the marks of a major over-stepping of  the 
boundaries of religious power. People respond quite negatively to any  attempt to 
coerce conformity. A Democrat named Franklin Delano Roosevelt,  at the height of 
his post depression popularity, tried to pack the Supreme  Court and was 
rebuffed by an aroused public. That is clearly happening  once again today even 
though the political shoe is on the other foot. The  practice of politics is 
always about power more than principle and this  nation is strong enough and wise 
enough never to let any group or any  person get too much power. So, relax and 
let history play itself out. It  will.  
 
____________________________________
 New Book  From Bishop Spong Available Now! 
_THE  SINS OF SCRIPTURE_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20) 

Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate  to Reveal the God of Love   "The  Sins of 
Scripture challenges Christians to look beyond the  myths of their faith into 
the heart of the matter."
-Bill  O'Reilly, anchor, Fox News Channel
_Order your copy  today!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)    
____________________________________
  
-- John Shelby  Spong
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