Of Xs, Religions, and Attacks
Jun 27
In this response to my ruminations on Mitt Romney and criticisms of his faith, KTK says this:
Attacks on Romney for being Mormon are out of line and should be condemned.
Why, exactly, is this, anyway?
If attacking someone for “being an X” (where “X” is “member of some certain religion”) is understood simply to mean saying that they hold certain beliefs (characteristic of X) and those beliefs should be condemned, why would it possibly not be legitimate to attack them in that way? What else could we judge a person on - especially in the political arena - but their beliefs and how they act on them? We certainly have no hesitation in making such attacks for all beliefs other than religious ones - but are somehow pulled up short as soon as those beliefs are called “religious”.
This is wrong. First, and perhaps I wasn’t clear enough in my original post, but I never meant to imply that beliefs someone acts upon, even religious beliefs, can ever be off limits. Indeed, right before the quote KTK highlights I said this:
Similarly, Romney’s placing his faith at the center of his campaign opens him up to questions about what, exactly, does that mean. When a political candidates says, essentially, that his faith guides his decisions, then people are entitled to know what his faith instucts its members to do. And those instructions are just as open to discussion, debate, attack, and rejection as any other set of policy positions or guiding principles. Again, if Romney did not want the tenets of his faith to be campaign fodder then he should be careful to not give the impression that his faith will guide his decisions.
I think its clear that attacking someone on their expressed or actual actions based on a given set of beliefs is perfectly fone. But that is not the situation we are discussing here.
Part of the problem is that “being an X” is never understood as “saying that they hold certain beliefs (characteristic of X) and those beliefs should be condemned”. When someone is attacked for “being an X” what the person doing the attacking is invariably doing is saying that since a person is a member of X then they will blindly and mindlessly follow a set of beliefs. Usually those beliefs are presented in the most stark, black and white, an unsubtle way possible. John Kennedy was attacked for being Catholics because every Protestant knew that Catholics took their orders directly from the Pope. That is an extreme case, but it is only a difference of kind. When you attack someone for being a member of a religion, and just for being a member of a religion, then you are saying, in essence, that the person is not a person but a mindless automaton, incapable of overriding the programing of his religion in any form or fashion. That is attacking someone for what she is, not for what she does.
John Kennedy did not take his orders form the Pope. Ted Kennedy does not push anti-abortion or anti-stem cell legislation. John Kerry would not have appointed anti-choices judges to the bench. In KTK’s formulation, it seems to me, it is perfectly fine to attack them for being Catholic, to disqualify them because the current Church leadership chooses to represent only the conservative side of Catholicism at the present. People are complex and contradictory and it is best to judge them as such.
#1 by Dan M. at June 27th, 2007
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Note that KTK’s quoting of you loses the emphasis on the word ‘being’. I think that’s the critical mistake here.
KTK is saying that one can be criticized for having the features of or trying to have the features they claim by dint of membership in a particular group. You’re saying that they can’t be criticized for the features others ascribe to that group unless they show those features.
The point, which you make in your original comments, is that it’s about who is trying to use the group membership. I’m not sure how KTK missed that, but he seems to have.
#2 by Ted at June 27th, 2007
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But of course the more mono-thematic a group, the more reasonable it is to judge an individual based solely on membership, regardless of personal actions (or lack thereof). This is because there is a certain element of support implicit in group membership, but as the reasons for group membership become diverse, assumptions concerning an individual’s support for specific group ideologies become less valid.
For example, it would be more valid to draw conclusions about my stance on integration based on membership in the KKK than my stance on abortion based on my membership in the Catholic church.
#3 by KTK at June 29th, 2007
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I didn’t really mean my post to be a refutation of Kevin’s point. I was mostly in agreement with him, and I’m in agreement with what he says above.
I was taking the line I quoted as a point of departure to address the question from a slightly different point of view. I still think there is such a difference (between what Kevin was saying and what I was trying to say), but I may not have made it very clear, and it’s obvious now that by quoting just that one line and then challenging it, it seemed as if I was disagreeing with Kevin. Let me try to make my point more effectively, this time.
What I was responding to was not Kevin’s point that what you say about your religion, or what you mean when you say it influences you, should be subject to discussion. That we both agree on. However, there is a tendency for people to think that religion, in some way, is out of bounds for discussion otherwise - what I think Kevin meant by refering to merely “being Mormon” (emphasis re-supplied), as opposed to openly citing Mormon teachings as justification for policy decisions. My point was to question to what extent that kind of “respect for religion” is necessary.
I noted, and it’s important to emphasize, that pure prejudice - disliking or discriminating against someone because they’re a member of whatever group - is reprehensible and very dangerous. But there seems to me to be an unexplored middle ground between not being irrationally prejudiced against people by reason of group membership (which we all agree is not acceptable) and actively questioning religious beliefs that are publicly cited as justification for behavior (which we all agree is acceptable). That middle ground, I think, is the matter of rationally questioning or criticizing beliefs or behavior that are publicly declared but do not rise to the level of public policymaking. I mean criticizing the kinds of things people constantly broadcast about themselves even if they’re not engaged in a policy debate (not snooping through people’s private lives, that is, but taking notice of the things about themselves that they themselves advertise).
Obviously we should respond if Romney claims he’s entitled to make policy on the basis of his personal religious beliefs. But apparently we’re not supposed to say anything about the fact that he merely has those beliefs. I don’t know why not.
If he believed in a flat earth for non-religious reasons, he would rightly be regarded as a crank. And I would think we’d be entitled to take that into account in deciding whether or not to vote for him. It doesn’t strictly bear directly on most questions of policy, but it’s not unreasonable to imagine that anyone that crazy in one respect is in danger of harboring nutty beliefs in others; at the very least, all other things being equal, it’s a bad idea to have cranks in positions of power. But when 3 major Republican presidential candidates openly asserted that they didn’t “believe in” evolution on religious grounds, we’re somehow supposed to accept that as “a matter of personal faith” and thus off-limits to criticism. That bogus privilege covers a multitude of intellectual sins: across the board, the GOP and the religious right have defined question after question of fact and logic as “matters of faith” - which contraceptive method works best, how old the Grand Canyon is, even whether to go to war - and treated them as immune to rational analysis. Yet the identical assertions, made without cover of “faith”, would rightly be laughed off the table as loony - and, more to our point, the people who made them would be regarded as mentally suspect.
My point was merely that that shouldn’t be so. Not merely policy decisions, but the intellectual framework from which policy decisions are made, are fair game for discussion, analysis, and criticism. The things influential people say and believe that are false, irrational, or just plan nutty are open to criticism, no matter what they are or why they say them.
This is what I meant by saying, in my first post, that “I want the things religious people say and expect others to believe to be subject to test, in the same way any other statement by any rational person is so.” We shouldn’t have to wait until Romney actually does something crazy as president to question his mindset; we’re entitled to note that he believes and acts on crazy things already to determine whether we want him to be president. And that, in turn, is what I meant when I said “I want [the candidates] all to answer the question ‘How will your religion influence your policy decisions in the future?’, and, if their answers are anything but ‘it’s totally irrelevant’, I want a big trapdoor to open under them and dump them in a pit for the duration of the campaign.” It’s what we’d do to anyone else who asserted crazy justifications for their actions; we owe religious believers no less respect.
#4 by oyun at April 12th, 2008
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thanks…