It is time to give thanks for the “just us” moment, the time when politicians and other public figures let their hair down and say what they really feel to, you know, “between you and me"—and an often-mortified public.
Rep. Katherine Harris gave us the latest “just us” moment of frankness last week in an interview with the Florida Baptist Witness . In that interview, she is quoted as saying, in essence, that God “chooses our rulers” and that the Founding Fathers intended a theocracy in America rather than “a nation of secular laws”:
… 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 than we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended and that certainly isn’t what God intended.
She also 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. They can legislate sin.
We know that her comments were uttered in a “just us” moment because Harris essentially said so this past weekend. The Orlando Sentinel quotes her as saying that "my comments were specifically directed toward a Christian group” and that "my rallying cry has always been people of all faiths should be involved."
Harris' comments line up with the philosophy of groups such as Wallbuilders, the organization founded by former Texas Republican Party vice chairman David Barton to promote the notion, inelegantly expressed by Harris, that America was founded as a Christian nation. Harris is trying to resuscitate a sputtering Senate campaign aimed at defeating incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, and she clearly believes one way to do that is to set herself up a standard-bearer for such Christian Right extremists. (And extreme they are: The Pew Research Center said that while 60 percent of "white evangelicals" in a poll released Aug. 24 believe that the Bible, not "the will of the people," should be the primary guide for U.S. lawmaking, only 16 percent of "mainline" Protestants and 23 percent of Catholics agreed.) Based on the reaction, her interview with the Baptist publication hasn’t helped with the broader public.
Late Monday, this reaction came in from Kim Baldwin, director of public policy at the Interfaith Alliance :
The founders of our nation believed that all Americans should have the right to worship according to their own beliefs, or not to worship at all. So strong was their commitment to religious freedom that they enshrined it in the first sentence of the Bill of Rights. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." In order for society to benefit, religious belief and practice must be free and voluntary. And in matters of faith, government must not take sides and must serve all citizens regardless of their religious belief or non-belief. Because the United States is one nation of many faiths, no citizen’s rights or opportunities should depend on religious beliefs or practices. If there is not freedom from the imposition of religion, there is not freedom for the free practice of religion.
A column today on TomPaine.com looks at another “just us” moment, in which former United Nations ambassador and congressman Andrew Young complained in the Los Angeles Sentinel , an African-American newspaper, about the succession of Jews, Koreans and now Arab store owners in African-American neighborhoods who “have been overcharging us—selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables.” That statement, and his conclusion that Wal-Mart should put these stores out of business, cost him his job as a Wal-Mart front-man in urban communities. It also resulted in him releasing a statement in which he said, "I retract those comments."
“Just us” moments can happen in big crowds as well as intimate interviews. Just ask Sen. George Allen, R-Va., who earlier this month regaled a crowd of campaign supporters with a racial slur directed at S.R. Sidarth, an Indian-American man filming the event for Democratic challenger Jim Webb. Allen, basking in the support of like-minded southern Virginians, felt perfectly comfortable calling the darker-skinned Sidarth a type of monkey and saying to him, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia"—even though Sidarth was born in Virginia, unlike Allen, who was born in Whittier, Calif. It was only when the political condemnation was deafening did Allen pick up the phone to call Sidarth and apologize.
Usually, the apologies and retractions rarely do much to undo the damage done by the original comment, and that is as it should be. We all have our just-us moments, where we tell raw truths about what’s really going on inside our minds and hearts that are then carefully refined and filtered for the rest of the world. And now that we have gotten a new look at Katherine Harris’ politics without its make-up, we are reminded how important it is to see these moments in all of their ugliness.
--Isaiah J. Poole |
Monday, August 28, 2006 12:47 PM
