The Big Day Has Come

Blue Skies Falling

EVENT: Gemma

So at long last, waiting for my hair to dry before I go vote, I'm going to blog on Blue Skies Falling.

To all those who don't know me, I'm Connor's friend from college, passionate lefty who's at odds to decide why she isn't going to Wisconsin with people to combat voter disenfranchisement today. I'm also a theater teacher who works for After School Matters--that means I'm teaching acting and playwriting to inner-city high-school students at a magnet on the West Side of Chicago. What I want to talk about today is a conversation I had with Tiera, one of my ninth-grade students.

Tiera is deeply intelligent and deeply religious, and the first high-school student who has brought up politics with me since I started teaching. When I asked her whom she'd vote for if she could vote, she said she was conflicted, but probably Bush for religious reasons. A few days later, when we had leisure time, I asked her for more details on this. She said that she agreed with Bush's position on abortion, because it was a human life, and with his position on gay marriage, because marriage was a sacrament. Did those beliefs have a place in government? I asked her. She responded that although she knew that in theory the separation of church and state was important, in practice it was impossible, and in most basic terms she would prefer to vote for the man less hypocritical about the effect his Christianity had on his policies.

If I, a New Yorker by birth, may make an unpleasant generalization about voters in Middle America, I consider Tiera more intelligent than the vast majority of single-issue voters who will be casting ballots for Bush today. And what Tiera explained was not precisely single-issue voting. It was, and is, a larger philosophical question, one that will not be answered by this election but that will come to a head within the next twenty years: is the separation of church and state actually a practical policy in this nation?

Let's get historical for a bit. This nation was founded by groups of people who fled England to avoid religious persecution, but by the standards of contemporary America they were relatively religiously uniform, and not only that, they proceeded to practice religious persecution almost immediately (Salem Witch Trials, belittling and eventual destruction of Indians as "heathens," bla bla bla etcetera). Even in this rapidly diversifying nation, only white male Christians have ever held the Presidency. Looking at this through the eyes of Tiera, a working-class, black female Christian student whose values clearly reflect the values of her community, lets me understand that a little more clearly. There are probably a great deal of minority voters who vote based on the moral system formed by their Christianity.

Is there anything wrong with that? I'm not sure. The question that leads to is, can you ethically cast a purely pragmatic vote? Are your pragmatics ever separate from your morals? The conversation was not long enough for me to ask Tiera about her views on Iraq as compared to abortion rights, the parallel most commonly drawn, but I could easily see her answering that soldiers in Iraq are dying to protect values--values as much Christian as American--and that they have made a choice to serve these values, whereas the aborted have no choice in the matter and therefore she'd prefer Bush's errors. If you threw that at me out of nowhere I'd see it as bullshit, but imagining it from the mouth and perspective of somebody I respect changes it. Not that I don't still consider it bullshit, but we the liberal populace have a tendency to deprecate choices that are made based on religion. (Of course, I'm posting that on the blog of a liberal Catholic, but bear with me). And I don't think we can; I don't think it's fair. I think Tiera's right on one level--we cannot stop people from voting based on their religious beliefs, and as urban black populations and Latin American immigrant populations, the majority of both of which populations have Christian churches as the center of communities, become even stronger voting blocs that will only increase. Question Two: can we keep the separation of church and state in DC itself?

I don't know. I need to think about this more. And go and *vote*. Right now. Yay, my first punch-card election!

Is rain going to discourage people from voting?