God Save Us--From Ourselves

Janet Anne Napolitano is our first woman Secretary of Homeland Security; she is also the first woman to be re-elected Governor of Arizona. Her resume displays a career replete with scholarships, honors and victorious election campaigns. She was an attorney for Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings in the Senate.
This is obviously a very bright lady with a long record of public service. She can also be labeled a “liberal Democrat”. It did not terribly surprise me that she recently issued a warning that labels veterans and conservative Christians who oppose abortion as terrorist threats.
It’s been almost fifty years since I heard my first politically involved liberal democratic friends (and some of them were good friends) tell me how most of the evils of the world have been caused by religion—specifically the Christian religion.
They would go on and on about the Crusades, the persecution of Jews, the Scopes Trial and the cross bearing Ku Klux Klan. Some became quite angry that such a primitive, blood-thirsty, and atavistic set of beliefs could go on existing in the enlightened Twentieth Century.
We could agree on Civil Rights, the need for poverty programs, the foolishness of the Vietnam War—but there was no point in even trying to raise a defense for historic Christianity. Their ears were totally closed. The case against religion was beyond argument.
I quickly learned not to try. (I could make an old point about how dealing with an irrational bias is almost impossible. If a person believes all blacks are muggers, for instance, he is unlikely to be dissuaded by mere facts. If a man decides all females are conniving b---s, no amount of appeals even to his own contrary experiences will change his mind. But, again, what would it gain me? Obviously I would be talking apples and oranges.)
One could point out to Secretary Napolitano that the veterans she so disparages (a common liberal democratic point of view in my experience) were also feared during Vietnam. I heard from more than one otherwise liberal source that we were training potential black militants in the use of weapons and explosives by sending them to Vietnam. We could expect them to use this knowledge against White America upon their return.
I’m still waiting for the first explosion.
One could also point out to her that Christianity, for all of its slips and sometimes bloody missteps, was also the initiating force behind the abolition of human slavery, women’s rights and useful social institutions like hospitals, the Red Cross, and organized charity.
It is not a coincidence that America has long been known as a Christian nation—and the most charitable of nations. I’ve suggested to more than one feminist that she be in no rush to push Christianity out of our political spectrum because with it will go all regard for women’s rights and safety. (Check female status in the non-Christian world.)
But there’s no real point in saying these things. (Merely because they are true.) When irrational prejudice takes deep root, it is nearly impossible to dislodge it.
I, for instance—out of one or two personal experiences, tend to detest Parisian women. (The mere fact that I’ve known and liked one or two others makes no difference.) Tell me I’m about to meet someone who is a Parisian female, and my hackles are instantly up.
One can only suspect that, from her political background, Janet Napolitano is cut from the same political cloth my old friends and colleagues were. (She, like Hillary Clinton, lists herself as a Methodist—long advocates of the “social gospel” as opposed to conservative, orthodox Christianity.)
It is only to be expected that, coming from her political background, she will view military personnel and committed Christians with deep suspicion. It comes with her territory.
It is disturbing that someone who is in a position to make legal definitions of what constitutes a danger to this republic, who can define what threats must be defended against and opposed, is so willing to publicly label veterans and Christians as civic dangers.
There is more than a hint of danger in this. While Secretary Napolitano may very well be a person of good will and decency, there could well be others in places of power who do not share her sense of legal and moral restraint.
It’s dangerous to start labeling whole groups of people as a threat to public safety. We’ve felt that way about black Americans during Jim Crow, Japanese-Americans in WWII, German Americans in WWI, dissenters in nearly all wars, Native Americans long after the last tomahawk was buried and who knows what else.
As Napolitano talks—or writes threat reports—I keep hearing my dear old friends excoriating the faith that helped found this nation. I can only say, Here we go again.