God-O-Meter
It was in the late 1940s when, as a pre-teen, I first heard the word “bigotry.” Washington State had restrictive liquor laws. No Sunday sales. You could not carry a drink in a bar. If you wanted to change tables you had to call for a barmaid (hey, it was 60 years ago) to take your beer to your new location. Few places had liquor by the drink. I can remember my folks going to the old Dick Parker’s dance hall in north Seattle where they would set a bottle of liquor under the table, order set-ups from the house and enjoy an evening of dancing to Duke Ellington’s band.
Well, an initiative was placed on the ballot to liberalize the laws and create a “Class H” license whereby liquor by the drink would be readily available. Although I was a constant captive to the church’s message that this was the work of Satan I was struck by the theme of the pro-initiative forces who called the church groups bigots, which they defined as “I don’t like it so you can’t have it!” The initiative passed and some still contend that Satan prevailed. They have a hard time separating “secular” and “Satan.”
Yesterday we had Huckabee echoing the illustrious Ellen Craswell in his statement to the effect that the Bible trumps the Constitution. The evangelicals captured the Republican party in Washington a few years back and Craswell was nominated to run against Gary Locke–his good fortune. She repeatedly proclaimed that she would use the Bible as her guide if there were a conflict with the Constitution. She was trounced. Huckabee’s religious belief that the wife should be subservient to the husband should make him a good target down the line.
One of my favorite defining court rulings was by the California Supreme Court when it ruled that a school board, which had banned a book from its district libraries because “it offended Christian values,” had acted unconstitutionally. It noted that books could be deemed inappropriate but not on the basis of religious considerations.
All of this is an introduction to the God-O-Meter Earlier today on MSNBC I viewed an interview about it. Go to the site and start wondering who the bigots are in this country.
H. L. Mencken noted: Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.”
