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“Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians,” Danforth said.
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CAIRO,
March 31, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – The current US administration has
been playing into the hands of conservative Christians, turning the
Republican Party into the political arm of the religious right,
according to one of the party’s most senior and long-serving
members.
Former
US ambassador to the United Nations and a three-term senator from
Missouri, John Danforth, further accused US President George W. Bush
of falling hostage to a religious group, “departing from Republican
principles (that) can rightfully be interpreted as yielding to the
pressure of religious power blocs”, according to an opinion article
he wrote in the New York Times Wednesday, March 30.
Danforth,
whose credentials make him a well-established senior Republican, said
high-profile Republican efforts to prolong the life of Terri Schiavo,
including departures from Republican principles can rightfully be
interpreted as yielding to the pressure of religious power blocs.
Schiavo
is a severely brain-damaged woman who spent a fortnight without food
or water in hospice following the removal of her feeding tube.
“Christian
activists, eager to take credit for recent electoral successes, would
not be likely to concede that Republican adoption of their political
agenda is merely the natural convergence of conservative religious and
political values,” he wrote.
“When
government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it
raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the
absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist
identification with a religious movement.
“While
religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the
work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as
one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a
uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For
politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to
oppose the cause of another.”
The
case of the brain-damaged Florida patient has sparked a political
controversy in the United States, over the role of government as far
as individual rights are concerned.
Cutting
short his holiday in Texas, Bush rushed back to Washington Sunday,
March 20, to follow the case and signed into law an emergency bill
passed by Congress early Monday, allowing Schiavo's parents to take
the case to a federal court in a bid to keep her alive.
Schiavo
has been kept alive since a 1990 heart failure damaged her brain.
Doctors have said in a long series of court battles over the case that
Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state, unable to speak or help
herself.
Michael
Schiavo says his wife told him prior to her accident that she would
never desire to be kept alive artificially.
But
her parents say their daughter could improve with proper treatment and
have questioned Michael Schiavo's fitness to serve as his wife’s
guardian.
Earlier
Thursday, March 31, the US Supreme Court rejected another petition by
the parents of the brain-damaged patient, who had asked that the
woman's feeding tube be reinserted, Agence France Presse (AFP) said.
Sectarian
Agenda
Danforth
further cited other examples of the domination of religious rights’
agenda over the Republican Party’s policies, such as advocacy of a
constitutional amendment to ban the same-sex marriage and opposition
to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in
Petri dishes.
“I
am and have always been pro-life. But the only explanation for
legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in the womb is
the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law,” Danforth
said.
“The
problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It
is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda
that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.
“Take
stem cell research. Criminalizing the work of scientists doing such
research would give strong support to one religious doctrine, and it
would punish people who believe it is their religious duty to use
science to heal the sick.”
Bidding
to win the knife-edge presidential race with Democrat candidate John
Kerry, Bush played the religion card, working
hard to show to the American people, many of whom have firm
religious convictions, his religious commitment.
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