Probably because we are supposed to have separation of church and state and have government based on secular constitutional law, not on any particular religion (or any particular religiously derived belief).Kbg wrote: ↑Thu Jul 28, 2022 10:43 pm Appreciate the posts that are going. Let me take a quote and swap out some words.
When secular individuals and organizations attempt to blend their beliefs with political machinery, it seems that it ends up looking mostly like politics and like they are forcing their beliefs on others.
Putting the negative impact on religious organizations who get "dirty in politics aside" for a moment, I think if you substituted pretty much any other interest group name into the place where Christian or church was, prima facie it would be considered an outrageous statement...but yet it's completely cool to stick religion in there. Why?
Also, pretty much everyone in the US who is for legalized abortion--and/or for that matter, virtually anyone who is against forced school prayer, or against taxpayer-funded purely religious displays (vs historically-oriented ones) of, say, the Ten Commandments--aren't in favor of FORCING everyone to have an abortion, or to be atheist, or not be allowed to pray on their own in school as their conscience dictates, or to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize atheism, etc. Plenty of hard core evangelicals (and some Catholics as well) are in favor of using government force to coerce people to do the reverse. If religion wants to avoid being singled out then perhaps certain religious people should quit trying to force laws on others based on their interpretation of Christianty (or any other religion for that matter).
Same things with many of the Muslims over in Europe (from what I can see we don't really have enough of them here to have a critical mass to try something like that in the US); they complain about "discrimination against Islam" or "anti-Muslim hate" or "Islamophobia" or "hate speech" or whine about how Muslims are being oppressed.....not because of any real actual oppression of Muslims or people who believe everything in the Quran is true, but because some (non-Muslim) people have the temerity to dare criticize Islam/Mohammed/Islamic beliefs/etc! Just because one is not allowed force one's religion on others (or force actions/laws based on religion, and/or force them not to criticize one's religion) doesn't make one oppressed....this should go without saying! Having your faith be criticized is NOT "anti-religious discrimination" and not having laws centered around one's own religious beliefs does not mean one is being oppressed/persecuted/discriminated against.
Assuming you still had political parties and still had primaries then nothing much would really change. In all but the bluest states GOP voters would still tend to prefer candidates who were against legalized abortion and Dem voters in all but the reddest states would tend to prefer candidates who were in favor of legalized abortion (virtually the same goes for either party for issues like marriage, sexuality, guns, etc). The "different than my party on this one issue" guy/gal wouldn't likely make it past the primary.I've often wondered what the Democratic Party would be like (and the R party for that matter) if their platforms were "party members will vote their personal conscience and the party will take no political position on matters of religion, sexuality, marriage and reproduction." I think it would completely scramble our politics and probably make general elections competitive again.