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August 24, 2002
Stupid Conservative Tricks
There's nothing that makes me want to gag more than conservative white men in power who complain people are bigoted against their kind. That's what Florida governor Jeb Bush is doing, talking specifically about Jerry Regier, a man Bush picked to run Florida's Department of Children & Families -- you know, the one that keeps losing track of children until they end up dead on the side of the road, at which point it's a race to see who can find their little bodies first: Concerned truckers steaming north on the 95, or the alligators.
Regier is a fundamentalist Christian. He also signed his name to a 1989 article which condoned corporal punishment to the point of causing actual physical damage to the child. He's since denied writing the article; he says he was just the co-chairman of the committee that oversaw the article, and had no control over the content, so you can see how useful it was for him to be co-chairman of that particular committee. However, it's largely immaterial, since he did admittedly write an article a year earlier for a conservative Christian publication in which he affirmed whacking on kids, based on Biblical justification, and plumped for the idea men's dominance over their wives and the desirability of keeping the womenfolk at home. So, basically, the guy Bush has running his child welfare agency is on the record giving a thumbs up to beating children and keeping women in the thrall of men.
Naturally, there's been something of an uproar over Regier's appointment. Yesterday, Bush, who already has enough problems, defended Reiger by crying bigotry, saying that there's a "soft bigotry that is emerging against people of faith.'' Of Regier himself, Bush said, "It really doesn't matter if Jerry has a deep and abiding faith and it certainly doesn't disqualify him for public service. I think there's bigotry here and it troubles me.''
Well. There is indeed bigotry going on here. But it's not that people are bigoted against fundamentalist Christians; they're bigoted against people who advocate child beatings and spousal subjugation running a government department that's supposed to prevent child beatings and spousal subjugation. Reiger's "deep and abiding faith" is entirely immaterial. If Regier were a fundamentalist Christian who hadn't put his name on an article that suggested it was okey-dokey to discipline children to the point of causing internal bleeding, people wouldn't care who or what he worshiped (actually, that's not at all true -- if he worshiped, say, Chango, the Yoriba spirit that's so popular with the Santeria folks, people would be in an uproar even if he never once signed off on switching a child until it welted. Funny thing, that).
However, he did do that, and now people are justifiably concerned. Again, it's not about faith; it's about Regier's own personal views. Regier muddies the water by claiming his opinions are based on scripture, so it's mildly ironic that Regier said yesterday that "for somebody to use their religious beliefs as a cover for abusing children is wrong." I'm glad he said it; if I were a Floridian, however, I'd want him to specifically spell out where he believed the line between righteous discipline and abuse might actually be.
In any event, Bush does faith a disservice by suggesting that people are bigoted against it. The vast majority of Americans have faith; suggest to them they they're bigoted against it, they'll probably tell you to go to Hell, a suggestion that would refute your assertion on a number of levels. It's a cheap and cynical misdirection to mask the real issue, which is that people are worried that based on his own expressed opinions, Regier is spectacularly the wrong person to run the department he's supposed to run.
Strangely, even as Bush was running down those he thought were bigoted against faith, he did a not-so-subtle discounting of the very sort of faith he was trying to prop up. When a reporter followed up on Regier quoting the scripture that read "Smite him with the rod," in the context of child discipline (this being the article Regier actually wrote), Bush dismissed the query. "Without getting into biblical references, do you think that saying `an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth' actually means that someone ought to poke your eye out?'' Bush said.
Well, actually, if you're like many fundamentalist Christians, the answer to that is yes -- many fundamentalist Christians take the Word at its word, which is why they spend so much time and energy trying to convince the rest of us that God whipped up the entire Universe in six days, evolution is a crock, and that we're all the relatives of two humans who lived in a nice garden until it was discovered that they just couldn't follow directions at all. To suggest to these folks that the Bible doesn't really mean what it says is probably a little bit offensive, or, at least, it should be.
In any event, it's well worth it to know if Regier believes that he's got the God-given right to smite a child with a rod -- not because he might believe he's got the God-given right to do a thing, but because he might believe he actually can beat a child with a large stick. The first of these is his own business, but the second of these is everyone else's.
Posted by john at August 24, 2002 09:29 PM
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