How to Vote Like a Christian

Voting morally is an essential duty of every true Christian. If your church's congress or Pope or local Priest/Minister make suggestions it's easy, but if they don't provide sufficiently extensive guidance or if you want to figure out for yourself how to best carry out God's will, you may find yourself in a quandary.

For all the lip service that is lent to the Ten Commandments being the foundation of good law and for all the tablets and inscriptions of those commandments in American houses of law, you may be shocked to learn that only two of the commandments are written into law: thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not kill. Considering that America is an overwhelmingly Christian nation, it seems puzzling that we enforce only the two commandments that every nation on earth, Christian and heathen alike, enforce.

There are a few famous examples of Christian-run governments that attempted to enforce God's law to a more thorough extent, but unfortunately they were infamously harsh and/or authoritarian (Geneva circa the Reformation comes to mind). Let us dispense with past mistakes and begin anew.

Unfortunately, modern American law only partially encourages observance of God's commandment "thou shalt not kill". We should do everything in our power to make abortion illegal once again, but that's just the beginning of voting according to God's law.

Just as Jesus stayed an entire crowd's hands by saying "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her", so too should we depart from the institution of capital punishment, as the blood of those criminals is on all of our hands, as voters.

We should also vote against unnecessary warfare. It is one thing to protect ourselves from a genuine invasion and quite another to bomb vast countrysides on the other side of the world, killing tens of thousands of innocents, for some theoretical insulation from a repeat of 9/11, which killed a relatively paltry two thousand. This sort of violence is appalling and decidedly unChristian.

As taxpayers are currently footing the bill for the massive killing machine that is our military and this military facilitates an aggressive attitude toward international politics, we should also downsize our military to one reflective of an attitude of self-defense, not of aggressive enforcement of worldwide dominance. This will also promote a greater sense of humility across our nation. Our international actions this past decade have frequently been grounded in pride, selfish fear and an insufficient love of our neighbors. Downsizing our military budget by an order of magnitude would go a long way towards stifling those American sins.

Sodomy and all manner of sexual perversions should of course be prohibited. Until these things can be outlawed, nothing resembling acceptance or tolerance of such behavior should ever be passed into law. This behavior is never okay and we as Christians should make this holy truth clear with our votes.

Even more important for protecting our country's social fabric, though, is preventing divorce and sex before marriage-- the two biggest contributors to social fragmentation and destruction of the family unit. The legalization of "no fault" divorce across states in the early 1970's had an appalling affect on the social fabric of America. One of the most important steps to bringing that fabric back together is going to be reversing that legislation and forcing married couples to work things out.

The problem of sex before marriage is a more difficult snarl to untangle. Abstinence-only sex education has done little or nothing to stem the rising tide of babies born out of wedlock. There is a deeper root cause at work here: young people are waiting until very late in their lives to marry and have children intentionally, and they are succumbing to temptation in the meantime. This is a result of a shifting economy, but Mormons have demonstrated that marrying early and having children within wedlock is feasible. Mormons consequently have a much lower rate of out-of-wedlock births. We should start by prohibiting sex before marriage and then institute a program to encourage marrying early, perhaps just out of high school as was typical in the 1950's.

An important topic of the Lord's teachings that we also need to take into consideration at the voting booth is that of poverty and wealth. Jesus said "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." He also suggested to his apostles, "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven." Between these two quotes I think we have a clear God-given mandate for how to structure our government's tax and entitlement systems.

First of all, American government should take money from the rich until they are no longer rich, and in so doing save their souls. We should then take this wealth and distribute it to the poor and save America's soul. It is very simple and it is very much in keeping with the gospel. The fact that America, as the most God-fearing of first world countries, does the least redistribution of wealth in this most moral of directions quite frankly boggles my mind.

These are the first and foremost things we need to vote for to save our souls and the soul of our nation. There are many further things we could do, such as formally recognizing America as a Christian nation and enforcing all ten of the commandments, but those must wait until America is ready for our holy vision. Baby steps, my fellow Christians, baby steps.

For those of you who enjoyed this dose of common sense, I recommend checking out my friend Rob's Reasonable Person's Guide to the Bible.

Gay Marriage Part 2: After Reason

I have tried approaching this topic reasonably. I attempted to craft a logical, facts-based argument in favor of gay marriage. The impact was unfortunately negligible. My mistake was in treating gay marriage as an issue for which reason plays any role. Living in San Francisco has also changed my attitude towards the issue. I had spent a lot of energy trying to understand the conservative viewpoint, but it turned out I didn't adequately understand the liberal viewpoint. The following is an adapted version of a letter I wrote to my uncle. Pierre, I apologize for singling you out when you are no more guilty than anyone on your side, you were just the catalyst.

I know it's surprising and potentially upsetting to think that so many Catholics are ignoring the Pope, but excluding Hispanics from the statistics in the article wasn't actually that disingenuous. The second article I sent says, "For all the opposition by leaders in the Catholic Church, their flock isn’t following. 'Nearly six-in-ten white non-Hispanic Catholics (59%) favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry,' Pew reports, 'as do 57% of Hispanic Catholics.' This shouldn’t come as too surprising. Catholics have been leading the way on same-sex marriage for some time now."

I agree that the emphasis on white Catholics of the first article raises an eyebrow, but at a 2% difference it's hardly something to get up in arms about. Considering that both Hispanic Catholics and non-Hispanic Catholics are roughly 10% more in favor than the national average of 48% from the same report, it doesn't seem far-fetched to generalize that Catholics as a group are a major demographic leading the charge on gay marriage.

As to the question of whether or not these are "real" Catholics, the pollsters do their best, but it would be much more difficult/expensive to parse an additional variable for cross-control (ie. churchgoing rates of respondents). By the flip side of the coin, are you really so interested in disowning the vast majority of those who call themselves Catholic? "You're not a real Catholic unless you single-issue-vote for theocracy, have had sex the same number of times you've had children and flagellate yourself every morning before coffee."

The argument that legalizing gay marriage represents a slippery slope or opens a Pandora's box is absurd. California or New York would sooner pass Jim Crow laws than legalize first cousins marrying (both are cut from the same Southern cloth, in our minds). There is no other "rights" group looking for an expansion of marriage law with even a trace of the sincerity, fervor or political legitimacy of the gay rights movement.

Based on your own very technical definition of "deviant", I will disagree that gay marriage is "merely an attempt to make themselves non-deviant." By your definition, they will never be "non-deviant", but they can be treated like first-class citizens and granted rights that cost the rest of us nothing. Gays are looking for their (theoretically secular) government to acknowledge that they exist in the most sensible legal way available. Don't tell me extensive legal documents or civil unions are the same thing. They are clumsy workarounds to a glaring hole in contemporary law. The hole is one generated by a social reality that's at least 40 years old: gay people act remarkably like heterosexual people. They find someone they want to spend their lives with, they own houses together, they adopt children, etcetera. The elegant solution staring us in the face is legal marriage-- but that's not the argument to endorse it. The real argument to endorse it is that to willfully ignore and actively lobby against that elegant solution is insulting. You're telling people, "fuck you, this may be a secular government, but it's a democracy and you will play your charade of open, legally-recognized homosexuality over my dead body and every other REAL christian this country can muster."

Do you have any idea how ugly your side is? Do you have any idea how many people hate Middle America, the Pope, Jesus because of people like you? I have heard so many people in this city speak fervently about how ugly religion is and, coming from my background, I didn't understand at first. Living here for awhile you realize that nobody cares if a person gay. People don't play guessing games, they don't gawk, they don't ask, they just don't care. That is true non-judgement, not the silly mainline christian charade of "hate the sin, love the sinner". Do you have any idea how liberating, how utopian that feels, even to someone who isn't gay? It becomes very easy to understand why people here think of Middle America as a hell pit of judgement and scorn. I've seen it from both sides and I know your heart is in the right place, but I understand people here when they wrinkle their nose at the idea of living in Louisiana-- too much racism and religious zealots and judgement, they say-- and it's true! Isn't judgement for the afterlife? When did Jesus say that good people should tell other people how to live with their words and, when that becomes socially uncouth, with their votes? Y'know, I don't even care what Jesus said, because that wouldn't make it less ugly.

Fleeting Contact

Well, it finally happened. I saw her. My train was crossing the intersection of Church and Duboce and I saw her on the corner decide to wait for it to pass. For a second I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. She's dead, my mind said, she no longer exists.

But she did exist, standing on the corner, looking at my train. I thought, she's going to see me for sure, then she looked a different direction. I started waving a slow, plaintive wave, for what seemed like a long time, but was only a few seconds-- maybe a half-dozen waves. I stopped waving. She continued surveying the street. Her head stopped when it came to me, long enough that I was certain. I started waving again. She hesitated for a pregnant moment, then waved back. My train finished crossing the intersection and came to stop in front of my-- our-- old apartment, and then it was over. She crossed behind the train with the rest of the people on the corner, and I turned away from the window and sat back down in my seat.

I looked around the train to see if anyone noticed. I could feel myself breathing hard, feel my brain buzzing with exclamation points. I certainly felt like people should be looking at me, wondering what the hell was wrong with me. I tried to take deep breaths. Then I changed my music player to something cathartic. My phone buzzed with a received text and my heart leapt. It was from a friend about meeting later in the evening. Sigh.

When I saw her, I saw a shadow future pass before my eyes. Things that would not be. In those few seconds any fragile illusions that I was over the worst of this, that it would be as easy as I naively hoped a week and a half ago, drained like water from a suddenly cracked plastic bucket. It isn't over. It's not even halfway yet. In a way it was a relief. I will not feel like a sociopath or a bloodless traveler. My love is real and will be real in the future. I was never faking anything.

Things have gotten decidedly harder since Bri left on Sunday. My roommate is gone for a couple weeks and I still haven't cleaned up from Bri's visit. My apartment looks like I am. I am a mess. Music doesn't sparkle the way it did the first and second weeks, but I am at least as emotionally unbalanced. Or maybe my emotions are just more on-target. I miss Sarah and think about missing her on a regular basis now. Each time my mind grabs onto something specific about her, it's sad like sand oozing out between my fingers. I know I'm never going to remember it with that same clarity. If I ever remember it again, it will be an old memory. Alas, such is loss and such is the tragedy of time's passage.