Down With the Two-Party System

. . . kind of.

As it stands now, there are two major political parties that are supposed to somehow represent the infinitely more complex political views of hundreds of millions of Americans.  It's a political duopoly.  Our two political parties, meanwhile, are failing us spectacularly.

Not only are the two parties failing us, but the two-party system itself, regardless of which parties are in control, is failing us.  It is a system which actively suppresses diverse ideas and candidates and thinking-outside-the-box, which results is less choice and less democratic representation for Americans.

The 2000 presidential election is an apt illustration of this problem.  More people voted for Al Gore than George W. Bush, but Bush became president of the United States.  So you have a situation where the president of the United States did not garner a majority vote of Americans.  This might be attributed to two major factors.  First, the electoral college and, second, the presence of Ralph Nader.

Liberal States' Rights

My visceral opposition to strong states' rights comes from a variety of sources.  First, I don't like the way my state generally does things.  Utah is a drag.  This is an intellectually shallow argument against states' rights, but its real for many people.

Second, I think the constitutional arguments behind it are pretty weak, or have become weaker in a changing world that the Founding Fathers could not possibly have foreseen.  I went into detail about this here.

Third, I think there are certain basic privileges and protections that the federal government should ensure that many states are hostile to, such as health care, which we'll discuss more below.  I support the federal government setting minimum standards for health care, the financial sector, etc. that are binding on states and put all Americans on a more equal footing.  As long as we are the United States of America, what's bad for one of us is bad for all of us.

In Which I Whine About Our Political Parties

Pres. Obama is certainly a better president that Pres. W. Bush was, and is certainly better than Sen. McCain would have been, not to mention the mediocre crop of hopefuls lining up to challenge him next year.  He's done some good things such as at least making an effort to end our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not starting any new wars (. . . yet, but we're keeping our eyes on you, Libya), making an effort to reform the health care and financial systems, and, importantly, changing the tone of discourse in the White House.  But it hasn't really been that great, overall.  Where he has tried to make some progress in areas of war and regulation reform, they have been meager and more or less disappointing.  I went over some of the failures before here.

Now we learn that Pres. Obama will not be shutting down Guantanamo Bay any time soon, like he promised, will reinstate military tribunals and not use our world-class criminal justice system, and will continue indefinite detentions without hearings.  He also fired the State Dept. spokesperson for criticizing the brutal detention of Bradley Manning, the Wikileaks leaker.  His record on civil liberties is no better than Bush's, which make me sick.

Elder Oaks and Preserving Religious Freedom

There is considerable discussion out there about Elder Oak's talk given at Chapman University about religious freedom.  It is the sort of message that leaves me torn and restless.  As a deeply religious person I agree completely with the general sentiment expressed in his conclusion:

We must never see the day when the public square is not open to religious ideas and religious persons. The religious community must unite to be sure we are not coerced or deterred into silence by the kinds of intimidation or threatening rhetoric that are being experienced. Whether or not such actions are anti-religious, they are surely anti-democratic and should be condemned by all who are interested in democratic government. There should be room for all good-faith views in the public square, be they secular, religious, or a mixture of the two. When expressed sincerely and without sanctimoniousness, the religious voice adds much to the text and tenor of public debate.

No one should ever feel embarrassed or intimidated for expressing strong religious beliefs in the public square, and I agree that religions have much good to offer public policy on a more abstract level.  But at the same time, I disagree with Elder Oaks that religious expression should be given a special, elevated status in such discussions:

Democracy in Egypt and the Middle East

What you are hearing from Washington insiders regarding the uprising, or revolution, in Egypt is that Pres. Obama is in a very tough spot.  Republicans are surprisingly supportive of this view and are standing behind the president as he tries to figure out what to do.  It's tricky because we've been supporting, through billions of dollars in aid, Mubarak for decades, this despite the fact that he is an undemocratic autocrat who excludes his people from legitimate public debate and involvement.  But the US is okay with that because he has been friendly with Israel, he has been moderate in keeping fundamentalism at bay in Egypt, and the country has been stable under his rule.

This is the classic foreign policy realism point of view.  Realism is not concerned with right or wrong, moral or immoral, and the like.  Realism is concerned with who has power and how does that effect me?  The paramount concern for a foreign policy realist is one's own security and self-interest.  From the realist's point of view, Mubarak has been perfectly acceptable.  The idea of a revolution in Egypt, with the possibility of chaos or fundamentalism taking hold as a counter-weight to the possibility of real democracy taking hold, is a risk probably not worth taking.  So the establishment is treading very carefully, not really sure what to do about it.  Of course a stable democracy is the very best thing for America's self-interest, but the cost/benefit analysis is tricky.  This is why the Obama administration is making wishy-washy statements and being blamed for being one step behind the situation, and why Republicans are supportive.

And it's all wrong.

Senate Tea Party Caucus: "We Hate Transparency and Efficiency"

The Senate used to have a process where one senator could place an anonymous secret "hold" on any nomination or bill to prevent it from coming to a vote.  It represented all that was wrong with the Senate.  It was undemocratic, anti-transparent, and cowardly.  The Senate voted to end secret holds by a 92-4 vote.  Who were the four opposed?  The Senate Tea Party Caucus, of course, with Utah's own baby-faced tea-party senator, Mike Lee, included.

Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Jim DeMint (all founding members of the TPC), and John Ensign voted against ending secret holds.  They voted against democratic procedures, against transparency in our legislative process, and for cowardliness.

Update: Expanding the House of Representatives Just Got Cooler

My post a few weeks ago about the need for our House of Representatives to be expanded just got some support from people smarter than me with slightly more conspicuous platforms.

A couple of PhDs, Jacqueline Stevens from Northwestern and Dalton Conley from NYU, wrote an op-ed for the NY Times touting the need for a dramatic expansion of the House of Representatives and the attendant benefits it would create.  Ms. Stevens also appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation to discuss the issue.  Thanks for picking up where I left off, professors.

Now is the time to jump on the expansion bandwagon if you want to seem cool in a couple of years when this gets big.  You'll want to hear yourself saying, "I was back reading the Mormon Left about expansion when you were still in diapers."

Constitutional Over-Correction: Extreme States' Rights

Utah's very own baby-faced tea-party senator, and self-styled Constitutional scholar, Mike Lee, recently held forth that, of all things, child labor laws are unconstitutional.  I guess I'm more sad than anything.  Sad because we have completely stopped thinking through issues and ideas carefully.  Rhetoric rules.

The best way I can describe what is going on is with a car analogy, which I understand is worn and cliche but I am nothing if not worn and cliche.  So, you are driving along on a road trip and you are eating a Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich and you look down for a second to rearrange the wrapping for your next bite and when you look up you are drifting into oncoming traffic.  The natural reaction is to jerk the wheel back.  But this is how rollovers happen, by over-correction.  The proper response is to course-correct more smoothly.

You Are the Government: Wikileaks and Transparency

So Julian Assange of Wikileaks recently released about 250,000 secret documents from the State Department.  The very best thing you could possibly read about Wikileaks is Glenn Greenwald.  Here is a smattering, the tip o' the iceberg, of new information that we learned about our government's illegal and immoral activity from these documents that Greenwald  put together:

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me");

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;

(7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

(9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

Baseball and Politics: Expansion

I desperately want a major league baseball team in Salt Lake.  I could see myself going to a few dozen games every season.  As a lifelong Red Sox fan I would have no problem switching allegiances to a new, local team (especially after the Sox have won a couple World Series recently).  The only way I see this happening is through expansion.

There are currently 30 major league teams.  There are 16 teams in the National League and 14 in the American League.  The reason they are unbalanced is because in baseball every team plays just about every day, and teams play in (typically) three game sets, so you need an even number of teams in each league to avoid scheduling problems.  This means that the NL Central has six teams while the AL West only has four.  It would be ideal to add a couple of western teams to even out the leagues and enfranchise some disenfranchised parts of the country (I think Portland would be perfect for a second team).

Utah's Republican Hegemony

Utah again elected a Republican as governor and a Republican as United States Senator.  Both Gov. Herbert and Sen.-elect Lee won by wide 2-1 margins against moderate-to-conservative Democrats.  These are perhaps the least surprising election results since racist Democrats owned the South from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Era.  In Utah, Republicans win and they win big, particularly for governor and United States Senate, which are the big, important statewide elections.

It got me wondering when the last time was that Utahns elected a Democrat to statewide office.  It turns out that Utah has not had a Democrat in statewide office since Scott Matheson (father of current Rep. Matheson) left the governor's office in January of 1985.  That's about 26 years.  Utah has not had a Democrat in the United State Senate since Frank Moss was defeated by Sen. Hatch and left office in January of 1977.  Sen. Hatch, ironically, made a big deal that Sen. Moss' 16 years in office were too many and that he had lost touch with Utahns.  Sen. Hatch has now been a senator for about 34 years.

I then began to wonder how this Republican hegemony stacked up against other states that are perceived to be dominated by one political party.  The results were not good for Utah.  No other state has gone as long as Utah voting for a single party in the major statewide elections of governor and senator.  The results follow.

The Economy, Mitigated by the Tea Party

. . . unfortunately.

This was certainly a drubbing for Democrats, no doubt about it.  After making six years of gains they have lost the House in resounding fashion, lost a bunch of governorships, and lost a handful of Senate seats.  I have no problem with fluidity in political power, but when you take a look at the underlying factors in the Republican landslide last night, the picture isn't so neat and clear as it might seem.

Take a look at the polling that asks Americans which issues are most important to them.  The economy is always the most important by a wide margin.  In the most recent CNN poll 52% of respondents said it was the most important issue while only eight percent thought issues such as the deficit, health care, our lame wars, etc., respectively were the most important.  In a recent Pew poll 39% thought the economy was the most pressing issue, 25% said health care was, and 17% said the deficit was.  In a recent Bloomberg poll 49% listed the economy as problem number one, compared to 27% for the deficit and ten percent for health care.  In a recent CBS poll it was 57% for the economy, seven percent for health care, three percent for things like immigration and the deficit.  Exit polls from last night show the same thing.

I Hate Election Season

It's been a little slow around here and I can blame life being busy and tumultuous and, ironically, election season.  A political blog should be hoppin' during election season but I find that elections make me disillusioned and sad for America.  While we don't practice the most honorable politics in non-election seasons, during elections the level of political discourse on all sides plummets and candidates compete in a race to the bottom.  Perhaps the worst aspect of democracy is the elections.

The candidates believe, correctly, that Americans care more about wedge issues and digestible soundbites than substantive discussions of the issues.  They know by now that Americans like to be reaffirmed in what they believe as opposed to being challenged by new and novel ideas.  They know that Americans are tribalistic and like to think in terms of "us v. them" as opposed to finding ways to come together for the common good.  They are more interested in not making a gaffe than in saying or doing something truly memorable and inspiring and taking chances, because any little gaffe in this era of 24-hour cable news and the internet will be magnified beyond all reasonable limits of logic and decency.

Restrained and Intelligent Foreign Policy

In keeping with a recent tradition of writing an entire post just to announce I'm adding another link to the sidebar on a blog that very few people actually read (ahh! self-deprecation is nice!), I'm announcing that I'm adding a new link to the sidebar and I strongly suggest you click on this one.  The link is to a blog on the website Foreign Policy by Stephen M. Walt.  If you're interests range outside of domestic politics at all, and they really should, then Walt's blog is a must read, in my opinion.

In response to the odious Bill Kristol's recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which uses fear-mongering to lobby for continuing the current insane level of funding for our bloated military-industrial complex, Walt gives several reasons why cutting "defense" spending is necessary but unlikely.  He concludes with this:

Which brings me to my main point. Although it is mind-boggling to realize that five percent of the world's population (the United States) now spends more on defense than the other 95 percent put together, this situation is hard to avoid when you see threats emerging virtually everywhere and when you think all of them are best met by an ambitious and highly interventionst foreign policy. If Americans want to be able to go anywhere and do anything, then they are going to have keep spending lots of money, even if all that activity merely reinforces anti-American extremism and makes more people want to come after us. (And for more on that latter point, read this book).

If you want to cut defense spending significantly, in short, you have to make some non-trivial adjustments in U.S. grand strategy. As some of you know, I think the United States would be both more prosperous and safer if we had a more restrained grand strategy and a more intelligent foreign policy. Until that happens, however, reducing defense spending itself is going to be an uphill fight, and our defense expenditures will be closer to the views of Kristol et al than to mine. Unfortunately.

Why I Can Kind of Sort of Support the Tea Party

I don't like the Tea Party, which should come as no surprise.  I don't like the fear-mongering and implicit racism that it invites in some (not all), I don't like the complete breakdown of civility, and I just don't like the politics of taking caring for the poor and elderly out of the government's hands.  I think the government has a valuable role to play in helping the underprivileged and underrepresented and in kick starting the economy when it tanks.  But they are doing pretty well this primary season (here is a list of their major victories).  Despite all of that, I find myself rooting for them, in some small way, for two reasons.

First, in the ulterior motive category, they give Democrats a better shot at holding on to seats that the Democrats otherwise would have certainly lost.  As a caveat let me just say that Democrats, as a party, are no great shakes.  But they are closer to what I espouse in politics than Republicans, so that's where my tentative loyalty lies.  So when I see races that should be Republican blowouts actually close and winnable for Democrats, I'm glad the Tea Party is doing well.  Some examples of this are the Nevada senatorial race, the Kentucky senatorial race, the Delaware senatorial race, the Colorado gubernatorial race, and a slew of house races around the country.  The primary voters are electing ultra-conservative candidates that moderate voters want no part of, and it's hurting their party.  If the Republicans fail to win back the House and Senate, you can point to the Tea Party as the reason why.

Second, *deep breath* I actually think they are good for democracy.  Most or all of those Tea Party primary wins came against the party-backed, system-approved incumbent or insider.  These are the type of candidates that expect to win because they are supported by the institution.  Reelection rates in America are somewhere north of 90%.  Politicians get comfy and complacent and power-hungry.  As a result we get a political class whose main goal is to continue to get reelected, as opposed to doing the work of the People.

So when a movement comes along which starts booting some of them out and putting the fear of the People in their hearts, I'm kind of on board.  I wish it was a movement of moderates or something more benign, and I hope they win as few general election contests as possible, but I see their intrinsic value nonetheless.  So, rock on, anti-establishmentists, vote out the stupids, but remember that I have a very different idea of what is stupid than you.

What Would the Founding Fathers Have Thought About Ebay?

So let's pretend that you discovered a new continent with seemingly limitless natural resources, fertile soil, and a varied climate.  It began to be populated by people from every nation, religion, and walk of life and was thus tolerant and dynamic.  Essentially, the potential for growth and progress was boundless.  And let's pretend that those people turned to you and your colleagues to establish a government that would endure and upon which they could rely for generations to come.  What would you do?

Remember that this Constitution could endure for hundreds of years and see changes in the world that you cannot possibly imagine. Would you write a short document that gave a basic framework and allowed for a variety of interpretations to fit the needs of future generations?  Would you write a document that that had some broad language but a strict interpretation to be followed by all future generations?  Would you create essentially a large volume of specific statutes to be followed for all time?  Would you be confident that your wisdom should be followed explicitly by the progeny of your generation hundreds of years down the line?  Or would you want them to be able to adapt to a changing world while holding on to a few key principles of freedom that you hold dear?

These are, in essence, the issues that America's Founding Fathers faced while creating our new nation and producing a Constitution.  For a little context, here's a real rough sketch of America in 1790, just a couple of years after the Constitutional Convention.  America had about four million inhabitants, including about 700,000 slaves.  New York City was the largest city with about 33,000 people, Philadelphia was next with about 28,000, which means that the nation was overwhelmingly rural.  Most people were self-sufficient to the extreme, meaning they produced their own food and made their own clothes and built their own houses and bred their own horses.

The Health Of Our Democracy

The word democracy derives from the Greek word meaning "the power to the people." Because we treasure it so dearly we are constantly vigilant of threats to it. So with all the talk from conservatives about Pres. Obama precipitating the fall of democracy, I wanted to share my impressions on the current threats to democracy we are facing. I don't think democracy is in any real danger in the short term, but these are the issues I see as worth keeping an eye on, in no particular order:

Campaign finance laws

In the recently decided case Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, the Supreme Court struck down a law that limited the amount of direct campaigning that can be done by corporations and groups. The ruling allows special interests, lobbyists, corporations, labor unions, and the like to spend potentially unlimited amounts of money on political campaigning for or against individual candidates.

This means several things. For one, corporations are now able to buy candidates by promising them immense amounts of money in return for political favors. For another, candidates who speak out against corporations or special interests will be overwhelmed by the corporate money spent to have them ousted.

Because of the exponentially larger amount of money available through corporations, candidates will no longer see the necessity of soliciting funds from the average citizens, nor will they need to persuade an army of volunteers to help them through an election, which are fundamentally democratic ways of getting elected. The average citizen is now expendable. In essence, the Obama campaign strategy relying on millions of Americans donating and volunteering is a thing of the past, replaced by candidates relying on just a few corporations.

The supposed impetus of this decision is to protect political free speech. But the Constitution only protects the free speech of the people, and a corporation is not a person. A special interest is not a person. A labor union is not a person. If democracy is the power to the people, this decision, which takes away the power of the people and gives it to corporations, is the antithesis of democracy.

Lack of term limits

I've made my point about term limits known here. Without term limits in Congress we get an entrenched political elite with virtually no ties to the American people and no sense of urgency to solve the problems of everyday Americans. These politicians' first priority is to remain an elected official with all the power and fame that goes along with it. They are always in reelection mode and, indeed, over 90% of incumbents win reelection. With term limits we would get fresh ideas, fresh leaders, and more emphasis on the American people.

Widening gap between rich and poor

I went into more depth here about the widening gap between the rich and poor in America. Not since the pre-Depression era has the gap been so gaping. The top ten percent of income earners own a majority of the wealth in the United States, meaning of course that the 90% of the rest of us own less than half of the wealth. And it is only getting worse.

Wealth and power being accumulated by the elite very few is the death knell of a healthy democracy. We live in a political system where, increasingly, money, and money alone, talks. A family that has to worry constantly about putting food on the table, losing their home, the lack of affordable health insurance, and the like, will have less free time and mental and emotional will to get involved in the political process. They are also more likely to become jaded and disinterested in a society that is set up for them to fail. This is the new reality for the majority of American families and it is bad for democracy.

Filibuster

I remember back in 2005 when the Republicans were debating whether or not to employ the "nuclear option" and end filibusters on judicial nominees, and potentially ending the practice altogether, thinking that I wish they would go ahead and just do it. Where before it was used sparingly, it is now accepted that any bill in the Senate needs a super-majority of 60 votes to pass, where the Constitution only requires a bare majority. The filibuster is so plainly undemocratic, and potentially unconstitutional, that it should be ended. Here is a chart that demonstrates why now is the time to end the practice (from wikipedia):



Since the Democrats have taken over power in the Senate the use of the filibuster by Republicans has skyrocketed, and before that its use was steadily increasing. The axiom of "majority rule," which is the entire point of "the power to the people" has been replaced by "minority rule." Those that received fewer votes now have more power than those that received more votes.

Destruction of public natural resources
There is nothing more democratic than our natural resources. Everyone has free access to air. Everyone has access to our public lands. Everyone needs access to these things to reconnect with the earth and each other on a spiritual level. God created this world for our use and enjoyment, "for the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare."

But what happens when a certain few corporations are able to freely pollute our air and water, develop our last vestiges of wilderness, and profit from our communal lands? Is it democracy when a single logging company spoils old growth forest that belonged to the public at large? Is it democracy when a single oil refinery makes the air we breath harmful to our health? Our natural resources should be preserved for the people, for all to enjoy, and not managed for the profits of a few corporations. I don't think the destruction of natural resources is a direct threat our democracy, but I do think it is a apt barometer for the health of it.

I'm sure there are other legitimate threats to democracy that I have not named here, this is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but I think these are among the most important.

Health Care Reform Passes in House, America Dies

America has survived the Revolutionary War, traitors, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the first ever peaceful exchange of political power between opposing political parties, the War of 1812, slavery, the first death of a sitting president, the Trail of Tears, the Missouri Compromise, Dred Scott, the Civil War, the suspension of habeas corpus, the assassination of our greatest president, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, the disputed election of 1876, the corruption of the Gilded Age, the assassinations of a couple more presidents, the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Espionage and Sedition Acts, Eugene Debbs, the Great Depression, the New Deal, J. Edgar Hoover, Pearl Harbor, World War II, the Smith Act, Japanese Internment camps, FDR court packing, desegregation, McCarthyism, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of JFK, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Great Society, the Vietnam War, Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Cold War, two Iraq Wars, impeachment of the president, 9/11, and an administration that tortured and started unprovoked wars and illegally wiretapped and spied on American citizens. Just to name a few.

We have been attacked and mauled from without and from within. We have suppressed and brutalized minorities. We have allowed our most basic civil liberties to be trampled during almost every war we've ever fought. We have been so divided we've started an internal war.

Through it all, however, America has remained the greatest nation on Earth and triumphed again and again. It is tempting to call it destiny, looking back, but it is also because of the strength and resiliency of the American people. It is because of the genius of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers. It is because, deep down, Americans have a sense of justness and fairness and liberty that no other nation has ever achieved.

But it's all over, folks. We may have endured those difficult times, but we've encountered something greater than them all: The 111th House of Representatives has passed health care reform. This is the end of America. Liberty itself is now dead. The Constitution has been broken. Democracy is failing.

Nothing in our 233-year history could have prepared us for this. The rest of the world may have watched the Civil War unfold and predicted the end of the Great Experiment, but if they could have seen health care reform they would have viewed that war as a mere pittance in comparison. We may be a nation that is strong and resilient and jealous of our liberties and freedoms, but when one house of Congress passes a bill reforming a broken health care system and allowing all Americans essentially to opt in to Medicare before the age of 65, well, that is too much for even the most freedom-loving people.

So goodnight, fair America. You were a beacon of justice and liberty for so long. We will always remember you with fondness. But every great nation must pass away eventually. Because of health care reform.

Democracy is Action

Reward Good Behavior

It's a shame that our current political system relies as much as it does on money. Thankfully, though, there are ways now to make your money talk much more than it could before sites like Act Blue (or Red) existed. This is one of those times when a bit of talking money could amount to a shout; as Nate Silver demonstrates, Insurance Company money can play a large role in influencing Senators from smaller states who may not have a large, independent donor base. Showing them (by contributing to the good guys) that there is money out there for people who behave well is one of the strongest signals we can send in this environment. In fact, I think the days of wholly-owned Senators may be drawing to a close due to these sorts of democratic ways to give money. We're not there yet, but the "people" already bought a President (he raised $342 million from donors who gave under $1000 total to the campaign).

The Role of Religion in Democracy

There are more atheists and non-practicing religious-types in the Democratic Party than in the Republican party. I attribute this mainly to the issues of homosexuality and abortion. That is my guess because I don't see anything of particular religious or spiritual appeal to typically conservative ideas such as less government regulation over the free market, states' rights (which is really only nominally an issue anymore, anyway), less welfare, more proactive military, less environmental protection, and a preference for management over labor.

I've said many times, and I will continue to beat that drum, there is a place for good religious people in both parties, or in neither party. But this whole idea of religion getting mixed up in politics concerns me. It reminds me of a scripture from the New Testament, Mark 12:14-17:

And when they were come, they say unto him, Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth: Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not?

Shall we give, or shall we not give? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye me? bring me a penny, that I may see it.

And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Caesar’s.

And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And they marvelled at him.

Does this scripture imply that there should be a clear delineation between religion and politics? I think a reasonable interpretation of this passage is that there should. That the things of God are too important and sacred to mingle with politics and, therefore, should be held apart. The requirements for ruling a nation, state, or city are not aligned with the requirements for running a religion. The requirements for being a good citizen are not aligned with requirements for being a good member of one's faith. Civic duty and religious duty are not the same. That does not mean that good citizens and the religious do not share common attributes, they do, it means that at the most fundamental level there are serious differences that cannot be transplanted into the other.

While democracy does not have one universal definition nor a universal application, there are usually two shared characteristics. First, all citizens have equal access to power, typically by vote. The idea is, according to Aristotle, "equality according to number, not worth." Second, all citizens enjoy recognized rights and liberties. Religion is an organized worship of deity through a set of beliefs and practices.

Democracy and religion have different roots and different goals. Religion is typically hierarchical where members seek guidance and knowledge from a person in authority, such as a prophet, pope, or imam. Democracy is of the people and has typically been born in revolution from oppressive authority. Those with democratic authority are chosen by the people, while those with religious authority are chosen by God. In democracy the rules and laws are enacted by the people, in religion they come from God. Religions typically require its adherents to follow the civic law and then follow an additional, higher law.

So what is the role of religion in democracy? Is it to impose our belief system and our holding to a higher law on others as a matter of civic law? Is it to disqualify those seeking public office based on religion, or lack thereof? Polls show that Americans want a deeply religious person for president. They show that Americans are not ready for a Mormon president. They show that Americans would rather have a homosexual president than an atheist. There is only one member of Congress, that is 545 members, who is openly atheistic. If a person is willing to uphold and defend the Constitution, and represent our civic interests as our representative, why is it that we require the person to also adhere to the higher standards of our religions?

Last month I posted a long quote from Brigham Young about science. One of the key ideas was that science should play a central role in our government. One of the reasons for this is that government should never make arbitrary decisions. Arbitrary decisions are more likely to oppress in order to satisfy a prejudice. An example is the Black Codes which oppressed blacks for nearly one hundred years. Those laws were enacted arbitrarily, without any science, sociology, or studies to back them up.

One of the basic tenets of religion is faith. We cannot prove that God exists, and we cannot prove that God expects us to live according to certain higher standards than our civil laws. There is no science or study that can show we are right. The only proof is the quality of our lives. So when religion attempts to dictate to society, I think it makes bad government. The standards with which we live a religion cannot be the same standards with which we run a democracy. The decisions made by a religion, based on faith, would seem too arbitrary to a person who does not belong to that religion or to no religion at all. That would open the door for laws against religion that were similarly based on arbitrary standards. If we instead only made laws based on objective facts we would assure equality and justice.

The influence of the religious qua religious should be through example and missionary work, not legislation and lobbying. If we have to resort to legislating our ideals and beliefs it probably means we are not being as effective as we should through the means that the Savior taught us to spread the Gospel.

No one is compelled to live by our higher standards. It is always a choice to make, which we as the religious can make more appealing by our quality of life. If we want true influence politically and culturally we will start really living up to our high standards. Treat other kindly (especially those with whom we disagree), forgive trespasses quickly, be fair in honest in our employment, accept each person has a child of God.

One final thing I think is imperative for the religious to do in order to be good citizens in a democracy is to be completely open with our beliefs and our history. No one expects us to be perfect, or to have an unblemished past, but they do expect us to be honest about it, and I think that is the least we can do. We should be completely comfortable discussing sensitive issues such as the role of women and minorities in our church's present and past, polygamy, and any other fact about our church. If we can be open and honest about ourselves, while not violating that which is sacred, it will be easier for us to have positive influences without feeling it necessary to legislate our beliefs.

Of course we cannot compartmentalize our religious beliefs. We cannot and should not leave them at home when we go to vote or run for public office. What we can do is make sure that we are not using the weight of our institution, as opposed to the weight of our individual commitment to our faith, to influence public policy. Only in very rare circumstances, such as laws that bear directly on our Constitutionally guaranteed right to practice our religion, should we do otherwise.