It was a national columnist who finally goaded me into action. After reading his column, like dominos falling, I rose from the table, took a deep breath, let it out as slowly as I could — stalling the inevitable moment — then said, out loud to my border collie, “OK. Here we go again.”
The year 2005 was a hard one for me in a pained-head- and-heart way; the year hurt my stomach too, as I spent too much of it in a torrent of anger and argument. Lest you forget, it was a time when some radio talk show hosts, some powerful evangelical personality ministers, and some politicians were pushing a rhetoric of what I called the God-Haves and the God- Have-Nots.
It went something like this: “You disagree with me, thus you don’t believe in God. You are a bad person.” This rhetoric was hefted and heaved about to win political arguments and to try to divide the nation into a God-Fearing Camp and a God-Forsaken camp.
It was an odd, disquieting, awkward time; we kept hearing that if we did not believe certain things, go to certain churches and vote certain ways, we were God-Have- Nots.
Eventually people of goodwill found their voices and said that people of all religious, and nonreligious, persuasions could lead lives of goodness and light. They reminded us that no political party, state, country, religion, gender, race or any other group gets to claim God as its own.
That being said, the columnist who got me talking to my border collie was Cal Thomas. Writing about health care reform, he said: “The secular left claims we are evolutionary accidents who managed to crawl out of the slime. . . . If that is your belief, then you probably think health care should be rationed. The opposing view sees human beings as unique creations. Those who believe that God made us and also makes the rules about our existence and our behavior will have a completely different understanding of life’s value and our approach to affirming it until natural death. It is between these two distinctly different worldview goalposts that the battle is taking place.”
I will share one more of his lines: “We are now witnessing some of the consequences of attempting to ban people with a God perspective from the public square.” (For the complete column, go to calthomas )
Now, instead of delving into the black-and-white, God- Have and God-Have-Not argument he tries to set up, I’d like to sidestep.
I am a woman of God. I believe in evolution. I believe in a life of the spirit. I believe that no one religion has it right, and that all of them have some of it wrong. I believe that gentleness and kindness, though sometimes very hard, are always more powerful than bullying and arrogance. I believe that sarcasm, exaggeration and disdain are weak rhetorical devices for serious discourse, though they work well for late-night TV comedians. I believe most people are good, and that good people can disagree vehemently.
I speak as a great-granddaughter, a granddaughter, a daughter, a mother: I believe we need health care reform and that we’re all in this together, as one country. I believe the I-Have-Mine-Go- Find-Your-Own way of thinking will eventually destroy us. I believe we have to care for one an other civilly and decently.
I believe that presenting an argument, as Thomas did, that people who support the reform of health care think of their grandmothers as “burdens” to be “snuffed out” is not only a lie, but is mean — and, frankly, is bad, weak writing.
Sidestep people who write columns or give speeches that manipulatively try to state the answers to the hard questions of our time by simplistically denigrating those who disagree with them. Or worse, who equate disagreeing with them with disagreeing with God.
The questions of our lives can’t all be answered with “Yes. Always.” or “No. Never.” It is our duty as decent human beings to see our way through the fog and find good answers. What I see may not be the same as what you see. Nevertheless, our first job is to crawl out of the slime and resist the urge to win an argument by crawling back into it.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza- Chavez at grace-notes@ . Read more of her essays at .
