Disappointment

In my daily browsing of news, I came across this story, which describes how both Obama and McCain are being interviewed by a pastor, Rick Warren. There is nothing wrong with both individuals being interviewed by a particular group of people in order to try to inform their members on the views of both candidates so that they may make a decision as to who they will vote for. In fact, I applaud them for actually interviewing both candidates. My disappointment then resides with the candidates. Both candidates in varying degree are catering to fundamentalist Christians in this country. While a good portion of people in the US consider themselves to be Christians, the number of fundamentalist Christians is not the majority, but they tend to be the ones who scream the loudest and thus get the most attention. I do not have a problem with Christians. I don't share their views, but I believe they have as much right as I do to believe in what they choose. The problem is that fundamentalists do not respect my right to believe something contrary to their beliefs. Not only do they not respect my right, they expect for legislation to be made that serves no real purpose other than to write their beliefs into law (i.e. gay marriage). Our mainstream candidates, rather than stand up and look at the situation and look at the Constitution and take religion out of the equation, tend to find a way to either stand firm with the fundamentalists and/or find some way to make it sound like they sympathize with the fundamentalist nut jobs that want to write prejudice into law in this country (again). They don't just want to write into law; they want to write it into the Constitution, which in my eyes is beyond just law. I want to see the candidate that says "hey, it doesn't matter what my personal view on gay marriage is because there are gay people who deserve to have the same rights as everyone else in this country and the Constitution guarantees them the same rights as straight people." But no one is ever going to say that because they'll upset the homophobes and the fundamentalists who are a loud minority.

I am using the issue of gay marriage as an example here, but that is not the only issue on which candidates do this sort of posturing. The sad thing is that there are much bigger issues out there that no one really wants to address that need to be addressed immediately, but instead we keep letting people like this control what we put out there and discuss and what we take action on. Instead of worrying about excluding gays from a ceremony that every other person in the country has access too, we should be concerned about poverty. We should be concerned about our country's dependence on fossil fuel. We should be concerned about the rising costs of goods and falling salaries, as well as the disappearing middle class. We should be concerned about everyone in the country having access to affordable and GOOD health care (I emphasize good because everyone has access to the ER and while ERs are not bad, they are not intended to be a primary care facility, thus their being called EMERGENCY room). But why don't we instead keep pandering to the wants of a small group of people concerned with recruiting others into their cult until this country is just like any other country in the world that has state run religion, where the law will tell us what we have to believe in and how we have to practice it. I pose this question those who think religion should play such a large role in the government: How does this make us any different than a country like China who outlaws religion? State sanctioned Christianity or state sanctioned atheism, it's all the same. No choice. You are told what to believe.