Why I like Ben Stein

Ben Stein wrote this article almost a year ago, but it's just as relevant today:

Lately, there has been much gnashing of teeth in the media and on liberal talk radio about Protestant preachers urging their megaflocks to get involved in the fight against abortion on demand. There has also been a good amount of muttering about Republicans using churches to promote the vote--up or down--on a few of President Bush's nominees to the federal bench. And of course, there is ever more screaming about what secret plans the new Pope might have for controlling American Catholics in their views on abortion and homosexuality.

All of this, it is darkly hinted, is a violation of the Constitutional bans on the Establishment of a religion, a new and sinister development in political life, and a threat to the Republic.

What foolishness. Who was was leading the marchers heading towards the Pettus Bridge in ( or near ) Selma, Alabama forty years ago during the heyday of the Civil Rights movement? Ministers and nuns in clerical garb. Who was there in Birmingham? Again, men and women of the cloth. What was the greatest political/moral figure of the twentieth century in America? A Protestant minister, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Who was leading us from the pulpit, sounding out fury at the seemingly endless Vietnam war? The Reverend William Sloan Coffin, a minister of the Gospel. Who was at all of the anti-war marches? Ministers and priests and rabbis. No one was complaining about that, for some reason.

Who thundered against slavery and urged on the Civil War? Henry Ward Beecher and other men of faith in the north.

This is what has always been going on in political life in America. The political is the moral. And the moral is the political.

Men and women of faith have always been involved in political/moral issues as long as there has been politics and as long as there has been religion. (Think of Moses urging the politically explosive issue of freeing the children of Israel from bondage, or of Jesus telling followers it was fine to pay taxes to Caesar.)

The only new thing is that now it's conservatives marching for life and preaching for life, not ministers marching for civil rights or disarmament. But surely men and women of the cloth are not just allowed but commanded to assert their moral beliefs on issues of supreme importance. Men and women who wear the cloth do not check their first amendment rights and their moral duties when they take their vows. They never have, and they never will. And we are far better for it.