Capri Maddox, chief of the city’s Civil Rights Department, rightly said last year that the work of pluralism is never finished. Yet the most powerful voices in our country say they’re fed up with pluralism. They say that the problem with free and fair elections is that democracy is going make us a pluralistic country, insisting on a social safety net instead of the fashionable values of dog eat dog, winner take all, and survival of the fittest.
I believe in the separation of church and state. The Constitution says Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion. Government can’t interfere with anyone’s religious expression. But the Constitution was written to protect the people from the government, not the government from the people. It doesn’t prevent us from speaking up for values which are important to the people of God.
The challenge for people of faith comes when the government, for instance, adopts a policy of cruelty for cruelty’s sake against immigrant workers, or against trans and non-binary people. Then people of faith need to stand up for the law of love. The law of the universe. It was set down long before the Constitution. It’s at the heart of every religion and decent philosophy. It’s the law under which 150 million Americans and millions of Angelenos were raised. The law that says that we are to behave toward others as we would have them behave toward us: The golden rule.
It used to be on a chart in every classroom. We hear it from Torah, Confucius, and Christ, from Sikhism and Sufism. We can’t keep a happy household for two weeks without it. We’d get into a fight with our spouse or friend every time we picked a restaurant or a movie. Without the golden rule, we couldn’t have driven here safely this morning.
Of course it applies to you and me. It’s long past time for people of faith to get together, across our differences and distinctions, moving beyond tolerance and inclusion and monthly breakfasts toward a determined unity of purpose in action, insisting at last that the law of the universe also applies to Trump, Putin, and Xi.
The golden rule is neither conservative nor liberal, Democratic nor Republican. But it places practical constraints on all leaders. It says we can’t hurt people on purpose to advance our interests. It says that if we wield the power of the state, we have to respect the dignity of every human being. It says that our government can’t make a religion out of hate.
It says that providing for the unhoused may be complex, as Mayor Bass and her colleagues know. But not one of our unhoused neighbors is a zombie. It says that we can secure our borders without racist roundups and pornographic displays of cruelty for the TV cameras. It says we can defend our nation without launching immoral wars.
It says that we can help the public learn more about the complexity of the lives of our trans and non-binary siblings without torturing middle and high school athletes and making children feel ashamed to go to the bathroom.
Some people in politics may fear that they can’t win without hate – that cruelty for cruelty’s sake, turning our neighbors into scapegoats for political purposes, is how you win.
For many years, after his resignation, I worked for former President Nixon. I’m the former director of the Nixon library, where Vice President Vance made an appearance just yesterday. In 1968, there was a guy named Kevin Phillips working for Mr. Nixon, who was running for president the second time. Phillips had identified what he called an emerging conservative majority. He left the GOP eventually, but that’s another story.
In 1968, Phillips said that the secret of politics was figuring out who hates who. Who’s resenting someone. Who thinks someone else is getting more than they deserve. In fairness, it didn’t begin in 1968. Cultivating resentments has always been part of politics. But today we’re experiencing the perfect distillation of a politics that’s giving up on hope and making all of its hay out of hate.
People of faith bear some accountability. Some of us have let ourselves be driven from the public square by those who say the separation of church and state means that we shouldn’t even talk about these things with our people. The voice of humane religious faith, receding from the political realm, has left the path wide open for the state’s church of hate.
We’ve had leaders before, and by grace we will have them again, who promise to do the best they can for the largest number of our people. If we worked at it, we could have a politics rooted in love instead of hate. A politics that insists on the common denominator of the golden rule. Faith leaders could get started by organizing themselves, establishing a PAC, raising some money, and punishing the haters at the polls district by district, sending them home to learn some manners.
[A portion of my remarks at today’s ceremony and “golden rule” forum in Mayor Karen Bass’s press room at city hall. Organized by Joumana Silyan-Saba, the city’s director of civic engagement and human rights, the panel featured Los Angeles Council of Religious Leaders president RabbiSarah Hronsky, civic leader Jacquelyn Dupont-walker of Ward AME Church, and Salam Al-Marayati, founder and president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.]
