By Phillip Bailey
There’s a running joke among young Democratic operatives around the country this election season and it goes something like this: Why doesn’t Mark Foley use bookmarks? Give up? Because he’d rather bend over pages.
Whether you laugh or cringe, poll numbers indicate that the Foley scandal is impacting the decision of voters. Invigorated secular progressives recall Republican piousness during the Lewinsky scandal and plan to thump the GOP’s duplicity. Meanwhile, social conservatives, who make places like Buffalo, N.Y., and St. Cloud, Minn., Republican strongholds, are more likely to abstain in disgust, which is why many congressional races have Democrats in the lead or gaining.
That’s good for the Democrats, but aren’t we interested to see if liberals can win a single debate or take an electoral lead without Republicans using racial slurs or enabling sexual predators? I assure you that there’s another October surprise before the election, so Nancy Pelosi better not pin her hopes for Speaker of the House on Foley’s indiscretions.
But the big loser is once again the American public. This was supposed to be an election where the most important questions confronting our country, from legalizing torture to the looming energy crisis to nuclear war, were going to be discussed. After six years of timidity I was hoping for an aggressive full court press by the progressive agenda. Instead of a political debate of Socratic questioning the Democrats yield while the American macabre served up another high-profiled booty call where orgasms always trump wargasms.
Attention on Foley’s instant messages and the subsequent cover-up is not unwarranted. Our unyielding gaze, however, has already allowed one important story to fall into the media’s Bermuda triangle, genially called the “news dump.”As noted by Courier-Journal columnist Betty Baye, “A special assistant to President Bush resigned after congressional reports documented that she arranged hundreds of contacts between [corrupt lobbyist Jack] Abramoff and the White House.” Something Bush & Co. frequently denied.
Our obsession with Foley may be a result of the narrow moral values debate we have in the first place. In “God’s Politics,” theologian, Jim Wallis, said that evangelical conservatives have done an enormous disserve to public faith by misrepresenting Christianity with their selective morality.
“The religious and political right gets the public meaning of religion mostly wrong,” Wallis stated, “[because they prefer] to focus only on sexual and cultural issues.”
Weightier matters like the stewardship of the environment, economic justice, human health and peaceful diplomatic solutions take a backseat. Wallis pulls no punches for the secular left either, but his analysis helps us understand why no one – especially the moral hypocrites on the right – has presented a prophetic public faith since 1968 when the greatest practicing theologian, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed.
True spiritual deeds based on a moral compass are out. We now have a religion of buzzwords used to build wedges in a weekly repository of obnoxious gossip-mongers, smug moral hypocrites and pulpit hustlers. For my generation it is getting much easier; with a click of a button we can create digital ministries on Facebook.com to group and recruit soldiers in the army of God. By the way, ever notice how some Christian fundamentalists draw their faith with militaristic metaphors? Never are they a “nurse in the hospital of God.” And I thought he was the Prince of Peace.
Today the easiest fib to tell in American politics is the sanctimonious one of religious values based on sex and culture. No wonder the easiest issue to stir our outrage is based on the same lie.
Phillip Bailey is a senior majoring in political science. E-mail him at opinion@louisvillecardinal.com.
