The people of the United States face threats to their safety, health, and economic well being that are not being addressed by Congress. Congress has a favorability rating in the single digits, yet we continue to re-elect the vast majority of its members every two years. The reason is that most Americans seem afraid to face the greatest threat: that the Democratic experiment may fail because of rabid partisanship, for which we are ultimately responsible. The dangers our government is failing to address pose a threat to the rest of the world given the economic and military dominance of the United States over other nations.

If we want a government of, by, and for the People, we must achieve consensus on where we want our leaders to take us. That requires forging a consensus on what kind of America we want to leave our children. This is the crux of the dilemma in which we find ourselves. If we cannot agree on what we want our elected officials to do, then they will continue to do as they please. That is generally to keep themselves in office by catering to the interests of the special interests that pay for their obscenely expensive election campaigns.

Glenn Beck supporters gather for his "Restoring Honor" rally on the National Mall on August 28, 2010. Photo courtesy of FlickrCC/theqspeaks.

As one who has been vilified by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, I had to tune in Saturday and listen to his speech in Washington, D.C. (almost as one who cannot help but to look at a car accident as they drive by on the freeway). During his “revival,” Beck gave his usual banter regarding the beauties of Capitalism and runaway consumerism, the dangers of anything with the word “social” in it, and how we should fear the coming financial apocalypse by “battening down the hatches” and “get everything you can while the getting’s good.”

However, it was not his usual verbosity that gave me pause — that caused me to be in “shock and awe,” if you will. It was his statement on civil rights:

We are the people of the civil rights movement. We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights. Equal justice. Not special justice, not social justice, but equal justice.

Equal justice? Standing up for Civil Rights? How can Glenn Beck — a man who makes millions of dollars as a purveyor of fear and, in a McCarthy-esque fashion, labeling those who disagree with his point-of-view (including us progressives) as “Marxists” and “Nazis” — even begin to talk about equality or justice while there still exists the poor, the homeless, the falsely accused, and the disenfranchised within our own backyard (much less the world)?

Judge Vaughn Walker (photo by Mike Linksvayer)

 Since Judge Vaughn Walker overturned Proposition 8 on the grounds that it was unconstitutional, much has been made of Walker’s sexual orientation and what Proposition 8 supporters see as his inevitable bias as a gay man. Never mind Walker’s conservative credentials, or the arguably weak case made by Proposition 8’s defense team. It’s a matter of simple pro-homosexual bias and therefore a morally wrong outcome.

Some progressive bloggers have retorted that the bias claim is ridiculous, and that a religiously conservative heterosexual judge would have been just as biased. Most of us progressives would likely agree, but by moving so quickly to this retort we are missing an opportunity for public discussion of a key way that social inequality of all sorts works: by pegging members of “special interest groups” as inevitably biased, while “individuals” who don’t belong to such groups get to view reality as though they were inevitably impartial. Those in power get the “view from nowhere in particular;” those who are disadvantaged are immediately particularized and “socially located.” Like dehumanization and devaluation more generally, this is a moral issue and spiritual progressives should take it up.

Donkey (photo by Antoine Moreau)

You’ve got to admire the creativity of the Jerusalem municipal official who tried to have a “donkey pride” run alongside Jerusalem’s gay pride parade this past week. He clearly loves the animals so much that he would honor them by inviting them to join Jerusalem’s much-beloved gay community in celebration. Oops, cancel that. He was attempting to put together a parallel donkey parade in order to illustrate the “bestial nature” of gays. And I thought it was a donkey-rights thing! (I guess if donkeys get rights, everyone will want them.)

Seriously, though, this homophobic action speaks volumes about at least one aspect of the nature of homophobia: the practice of reducing LGBT people to our bodies and denying us our souls. Calling someone a beast, after all, really says that all they have is brute physicality. No sensitivity. No yearnings. No pain. No God.

Reducing LGBT people to our bodies is morally wrong for many reasons, reasons that involve both justice and the spirit. I’ll stick with three such reasons in this post.

Habitat for Humanity 2007 (Joe Mabel)

Interdependence is one of our greatest (albeit least well-respected) truths. It is at the center of our society’s ability to keep going, at the core of human and planetary well-being, and at the heart of many of the most profound spiritual truths. In fact, any spirituality that will have a meaningful impact in the world must explicitly address the interdependence of people, nations, and the ecosystem as a whole. We do well this Independence Day to reframe independence as interdependence, to tilt the narrative toward a healthier way of seeing ourselves and our planet, and to give thanks for the many good things in our lives and our country.

Interdependence, however, also has a less positive side: social inequalities of all sorts similarly rely on interdependence to continue their soul-killing and world-killing work. The military-industrial complex of the last sixty years, and the Supreme Court’s recent collusion with corporations on political spending in candidate elections, represent only two examples of large-scale organizations working interdependently to reward the rich and punish the poor. Two other kinds of interdependence in the service of inequality are interlocking types of inequality and interlocking levels of inequality. (Patricia Hill Collins is only one of many social theorists to have written elegantly about both issues.) This kind of interdependence, too, must be considered from a spiritual perspective in order to maximize our ability to challenge inequality of all sorts.

In anticipation of the coming passage of a “Health Care Reform” bill, we are already hearing a great deal about “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Liberal Senators like Tom Harkin are hawking the idea that we’ll get the public option, or the expansion of Medicare, “next time.” Make no mistake about it. Such homilies are as empty as Obama’s reference to “Fat cats.” The bill marks a turning point in the history of American social reform, and it is a negative one.

Of course the bill will accomplish good, and this needs to be recognized. It will extend coverage and it will prevent some insurance company abuses. However, the true meaning of the bill lies not in the steps it takes toward universal coverage and toward reform, but rather in the meaning it assigns to those steps, namely cost control. Rather than a future in which liberals expand coverage further, the bill marks the deepening of the divide between the “two Americas,” and a decisive step toward abandoning long-standing ideals of equality.

Universal health care was the central demand of progressives because issues of life and death are great equalizers. Accordingly, people of good will can tolerate living in a society in which some people have bigger houses or bigger cars than others, but not in which some people have better health care. Health care is the one thing we should never compromise about, because it is morally intolerable to allow two Americas in this sphere.