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Here I sit in my old rocking chair watching the ACLU in its self-assigned struggle to separate church from state. Tricked out in regulation hard hat and pickax, the ACLU is still doggedly whacking away to separate yet another etched-in-granite Ten Commandments from yet another wall of yet another small town colonnaded court house. I shake my head sadly at such unnecessary flailing. The struggle is over, my dear ACLU, and your pickaxes had nothing to do with it. Church and state are now joyously joined together and the twain shall not be put asunder, at penalty of some new law or executive order. Obliviously, the ACLU fights on, like Hiroo Onoda fighting WWII in the jungles of the Philippines for 20 years after Japan capitulated.
While the ACLU was preoccupied with hacking at the tables of stone in the court's courtyard or occupied inside the courtroom with empowering and championing Evolution as the law of the land, everybody else was deliberately or witlessly arranging the marriage. More like a movement than a process, it was exquisitely complex and sweetly if unintentionally deceptive, carried along by invigorating breezes of change in religion organized or free-floating, theurgy and theosophy, philosophy and politics, underlain by an evolution in the persona of the citizenry, the academy, the cloister. To loud applause and acclaim art, film, and literature danced and fandangoed; Boston purred with sensitivity; Hollywood flowed with special effects blood; and Oh! the PowerPoint, the streaming screens and teleprompters, spas, seminars and seminaries, forums and festivals; pews and pulpits and lecterns; pop culture and haute culture, textbooks and blogs, rap, rock, hip-hop, and Christian concerts; Oscar awards and small talk. Just chatter and aimless noise but worthy of awards and self-congratulation. Then came a chorus of meaningful um-ummmm-ummmmms led by the the robed-up Supreme Court and the change-you-can-believe-in Oval Office. Off stage, these gusts of change were generated by a battery of powerful low-pressure high-volume fans -- charismatic Postmodernism, deconstructionism, executive order, late night talk shows, whimsy, meditation, and karma. Don’t feel bad, dear ACLU, that you missed out on all this. Nobody was wise, not at first anyway, to the fact that the whole production would end in a big fat Church-State wedding. But it did, as if orchestrated, ordained.
Yes, the historic marriage did happen, and was fittingly modish as man to man and woman to woman, Church and State having flirted shamelessly and openly and secretly so lusted for each other. They had become hard to tell apart. They are not just living together, like hippies. They’re legally married.
The event was solemnized In the National Cathedral, solid concrete with flying buttresses and stained glass windows. Officiating were beaming pastors who had the two lay their hands on a Bible and priests transubstantiating their gay bodies, vested by authority of the government. Secularized religion was maid of honor and agnostic secularism best man and flower boy. Ecumenical Protestants and Catholics, the father and mother of the bride and bride or were they groom and groom, were ushered by black-tied swat teams to the front pews.
At the reception festivities there were lots of dancing and loud music and raised and emptied glasses and thrown rice and hog hanks. The wedding cake, for which the contract competition no baker was loath to participate, was of spiraling lime-frosted layers and looked for all the world like the tower of Babel adorned with roses and gardenias and sweet peas. Honored guests included Karl Marx, Chuck Darwin, Dawkins and Hawking, a bus-load of botoxed Congresswomen doubling as high-tax advocates, and a couple of disguised Russian Colusionists. Of course as welcome as illegal immigrants were the usual party crashers like pot pushers and protesters with social justice signs, and moveOn.org.
But all was not bonhomie. Sulking outside like the nonprodigal son when the prodigal came home was the Civil Union, offended and affronted that its union was not the one being celebrated. When it learned that it was the big fat Church-State wedding being feted, the ACLU flew into a huff worse than Creationism had evoked. Flinging its hard hat on the ground, the Union Civil reminded the celebrants that such an unnatural union is against nature and not even constitutional. It's not the American Way. But then a couple of celebrants who had retained a tad of sobriety went outside and reached out to the ACLUsers, agreeing that the C and S union was not the founding-fathers' American Way, but so what, all that's so yesterday. Fast runs around the uptight right end, fake news, and cute fibs such as Good ole Fred Astaire flipped off in every movie he ever made, or that POTUS seems prone to, and maybe a bit of Collusion with the Vatican, that's become the new and cool American way. Constitution? It's gone even without the formality of an archivable recension. The government, so profligate with executive orders, never bothered.
At this, ACLuLu perked, grinned, and shook its pickax in approval, never having really cared much for the Constitution or the American Way anyway. Resettling upon its head its hard hat newly adorned with daisies and glitter the Union joined the party, and pitching the ax into a spittoon, it runs into the vast reception room and hugs the others while grabbing a double portion of the fatted calf, exclaiming, “Ah! So that’s why those tables of stone came off the wall so easy – they were Styrofoam attached by Velcro!”
Made in America with pride, not in heaven, the marriage may not be a happy one, but that’s expected, that's the New Age American way. If any man objects, let him keep his trap shut forever on pain of the full weight of the law. Now the ACLibU shoots up and leads another round of toasts and dancing to Christian and Woodstock rock, dancing the night away, creating such a seismic rumble that the mountain is moved and the Sermon on it.
The Big Fat Church-State Wedding
Self-evidently a parable
Thursday, November 26, 2015
