Perhaps because I happen to be a dual national (US and Israel), I find myself in a double pool of dismay: Rather than progressive, 21st century discourse and teaching inspiring me in the age of cellular transcendence, cyber access, and extended human longevity, one is drowning in a medieval, self-serving, and painfully chauvinistic pattern of self-righteousness and social fascism.
An eight year-old girl is spat upon by ultra-Orthodox despots in an Israeli village because she endangers male virtue (and gender apartheid) by wearing “immodest” clothing. Never mind that if she has an older brother or sister, one or the other would be serving in the Israeli military, protecting these very “black hats” and fundamentalists who are exempted from the national service because they are too busy studying Torah.
Jesus would intuit the pretense here; Benjamin Franklin would wonder what in the world happened to the United States.
Virtually every Republican candidate for president in this tawdry, insubstantial, sometimes distressingly pompous campaign of theirs is immersed with this bizarre Christian sanctimony that has nothing in common with what the founding parents of this nation inscribed as a touchstone of American values: freedom of religion—which, incidentally also infers freedom from religion.
Somewhere I read about the separation of church and state. Somewhere else I read to “love thy neighbor…for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Now I read that we need “a Jesus candidate.” Jesus would intuit the pretense here; Benjamin Franklin would wonder what in the world happened to the United States that, with great blood, overthrew the tyranny of kings and consecrated a Bill of Rights.
Republicans aren’t running so much as candidates as they are (with sickening duplicity) as Christians. Fundamentalist rabbis in Israel are hijacking the heroic story of Israel as a life-response to the Holocaust by aggressively making designations between who is and isn’t a Jew. They regard women as second-class humans. They are literally pushing women to the back of the bus even as some Republicans are shamelessly using racially-charged jargon to defile the very painful, valiant change—and legislation—that made America the civil rights paragon of the twentieth century.
Newt Gingrich, a moral louse, calling Obama “a food-stamp president?” The implication here, also made by other theologians such as Rick Santorum, is that African-Americans are co-dependents who are robbing all of us vulnerable whites of our access to goods and to a decent America. Besides this being a malignant skewing of truth and demography, the reality is that blacks rely less on food stamps than the combination of whites and Latinos who do. It’s all a very thin veil of racism, just as the rabbis who contribute nothing to Israel but their outlandish views on the humanity of women, Palestinians, questionable Russian-Jewish immigrants, make that democracy more than a little toxic.
Rick Perry (thankfully imploded into his own cowboy-boots intelligence) belonging to an exclusive club that had the N-word in its name? Ron Paul, who appears to have never met anyone but himself, actually questioning the 1964 Civil Rights Act as dubious because of the issue of “property rights?”
In that vein, my dear rabbis, women are not property. In fact, others have already pointed out during this current, hurtful period of rage and regression that the Talmud places the responsibility for inappropriate sexual ideas squarely on men. How can an 8 year-old girl threaten a 4,000 year tradition of freedom, inclusiveness, and tenderness? Israel is noted for the brilliance and moxie of its female scientists, teachers, sociologists, pilots, parliament leaders, and artists in all media. If a man can’t handle the physical appearance of a woman, let the man not, in his misogynist ailment, cover her up. Let him cover his own sexual conflicts.
In 2012, Republicans who would demonize non-Christians (including you, Mr. “Open Marriage”) and rabbis who would denigrate women are trying to send a lot of people to the back of the bus. Thank goodness, President Barack Obama, a family man who adores his wife and invites his rivals into the discussion, is still the driver.
Ben Kamin’s next book, ‘ROOM 306: The National Story of the Lorraine Motel,’ will be launched this April 4 at the National Civil Rights Museum – Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
Comments