Recently in Politics Category

New York's City Council voted to add two Muslim holidays to the city's public school calendar, citing the annual observance of Christian and Jewish holidays. Mayor Bloomberg objects, saying the city isn't obligated to accommodate all faiths: "If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won't be any school."

My heart tells me that we should include the two requested Muslim holidays in the school calendar. My head tells me that Mayor Bloomberg's slippery slope argument is weak, at best. But the fact that most respondents to this issue do nothing more than bang the drum for their own cause, should make us all pause and ask what's really going on here.

Not surprisingly, Muslims favor the new school holidays, conservative Christians and secularists oppose them (and you gotta love that alliance of convenience!), religious liberals favor them because "everybody should always be included", and those who follow non-Abrahamic traditions remind us that whatever decision is made, it's not all about the "big 3".

How typical and how unlikely to get a solution which feels like more than knuckling under to religion in general or to one group in particular.

Instead of rushing to advocate for the "right answer", I suggest we use this moment to ask new questions about the relationship between genuinely accommodating the religious needs of an entire society and the obligations which each group must assume for the society of which they are a part, in order for that accommodation to really work.
The case of the New York City school system provides a great opportunity to do just that, but it requires looking back to how the first day of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur came to be school holidays.

With Al Franken taking Norm Coleman's seat in the Senate, the 111th Congress is down to a single Republican, Virginia's Eric Cantor, among its 44 Jewish members. I wonder if this is something about which to worry, not because I am a Republican (I am a member of no political party), but because being so lopsided is rarely a healthy thing in the long run.

Why is it that when Jews vote, we vote democratic by a margin of 3 to 1, but when we get elected the margin shifts to 43 to 1? What does that say about who chooses to run and even more significantly about how welcome Jews are as elected officials in one party versus the other?

Writing in the Washington Post, Former UN Ambassador John R. Bolton suggests that an Israeli attack aimed at the eradication of Iran's emergent nuclear capacity is a reasonable proposition. And just yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden told George Stephanopoulos that such a strike was within Israel's sovereign power even if it was not entirely in line with US policy. What is going on here?

First, the idea that American political leaders and opinion makers on both sides of the aisle are comfortable with even suggesting this kind of proxy warfare is morally reprehensible. If bombing Iran is such a great idea, then we should do it ourselves. And if we know that it would be misguided for us to do, then we ought not to invite others to do it for us.

Newly released tapes from the Nixon Library certainly make these fair questions, and not for the first time. Particularly disturbing, especially for those who have limited familiarity with the New Testament, was their conversation about those who are part of the "synagogue of Satan". But perhaps even more importantly, since Graham is an old man and Nixon is dead, it invites us to ask what it means to call anybody an anti-Semite, and who is best suited to answer that question.

Without asking those questions, this story is nothing more than an excuse for a little Jewish rage-mongering, a little Nixon-bashing, and an excuse to stir up anti-Christian sentiment. While those are all popular pursuits, they are really no healthier than the ugly conversations which Reverend Graham had with President Nixon.

Certainly, Jewish leaders should not be telling Christians what the New Testament "really means", and using their interpretation to prove that Graham was a Jew-hater. It's just more complicated than that.

Politicians invoke God and the Bible both because it works, and in cases like that of Governor Sanford who compared himself to King David, because it nourishes their outsized egos -- situating their personal dramas within a cosmically significant narrative. It works, because whether the politicians themselves are truly religious or not, we Americans are true believers.

We may like church and synagogue less and less, as recent polling suggests, but our faith in God and love of both biblical language and stories endures. And why not? They really are some of the greatest stories ever told, regardless of what we may think about their status as divinely revealed literature.

Ultimately, the use of such language tells us more about ourselves than it does about the misbehaving politicos. The passage of time is the only way to tell if they are sincere or simply pandering because we never fully know what's going on inside of another person. In fact, how often do we really know what's going on inside ourselves?