The Waiting Game

So tonight is Election Eve. There are so many things flying around the internets, and everyone has a video they want you to see, to prove some sort of point about one POTUS candidate or the other. Each camp has their good, and their not-so-good points. I know how I feel, and I know how I voted. But here's something I don't understand:

Somehow, the separation of Church and State has suddenly become not separate. I watched (albeit over someone's shoulder) a video of a preacher in a church welcoming a Cambridge-graduate Theologian (who also holds a degree from Harvard) as a guest speaker. And the preacher says to his audience that they need to tune out the rhetoric and the mainstream media, and that they need to VOTE WITH THEIR BIBLES.

Now, you can call me a leftist Commie pinko, or a radical Marxist Socialist Terrorist (the latter is what my uncle calls President Obama), but I thought that politics was supposed to be a separate institution from religion, and that people WEREN'T supposed to vote (or make policy) with their Bible.

There are so many things about American politics that drive me crazy, but using religion as a basis for why (or why not) policy should (or should not) be put into place, or turned into law, takes the cake. The number of people who think that American domestic political issues should be discussed and decisions about those issues made on the basis of how a religious text is SUBJECTIVELY interpreted are the SAME people who get all fired up about the dangers of America being overrun by The Infidel/The Arab/The Terrorist/The FOREIGNER.

I am closely related to people who actually think that the current POTUS harbours a secret agenda to try to make Islam the established religion in America. In reality, there is, and never WILL be, an established official religion in America. Because the founding fathers guaranteed that one of the main criteria for America to succeed as a free nation was that all its citizens had to enjoy the freedom to practice whatever religion they chose. It was the religious persecution that drove the first immigrants to seek America's shores back in the 17th century.

So now there are people who want to establish rules and regulations about who can practice what religion, about who can do what to their bodies, and when, about what can be taught in schools, and what can't. And these rules and regulations stem from a subjective interpretation of a religious text.

And these same Americans can't see their similarity to the tiny percentage of The Other (who've given Muslims the world over a bad name) who have also made decisions affecting others that are based on subjective interpretations of a religious text. These Americans don't notice their own reactionary methods and statements. And they don't see that they are in danger of becoming the same sort of society that those immigrants who sought freedom from persecution chose to leave all those hundreds of years ago.

While there will never be a world that is completely free of a fear of The Other, there have been moments in time where The Other has been seen as different, but not Different; as something perhaps to be investigated and discovered, not vilified and persecuted.

So I voted. And I believe in my heart that I voted for the candidate who chooses to help the American people move forward within the global community, and within their own country. I voted for the candidate whose campaign speeches don't ring with promises to exclude, restrict, deny, forbid. I voted for the candidate who seems to represent policy that includes, engages, offers, and allows.

Good luck, Mr. President. I'm with you.