WHERE THERE’S SEX, THERE’S HOPE

I’m well aware it’s not over, but, to my immense relief, Roy S. Moore has been removed as Alabama’s chief justice. The coverage only a day ago seemed to suggest Moore would survive an ethics committee considering his insistence on keeping a huge granite statue of the Ten Commandments in his courthouse -- even though several higher courts told him not to.

It seems insane there’s even a question. How can a judge do his job if he defies court orders, which proves he has no respect for the law?

Yet, Moore is apparently not only respected by the majority of Alabama residents, but exalted.

The patterns discernible just by reading a couple days’ worth of New York Times coverage are disturbing, to say the least, if only a little inconsistent. Earlier this week, Nicholas D. Kristof again cited a Pew study that found Americans now “are three times as likely to believe in the virgin birth of Jesus as in evolution” and far more likely than in 1987 to expect an actual, biblical, Judgment Day.

Certainly this reinforces my discomfort over religions that force beliefs on others. But it also reinforces my discomfort with religion in general, because its strictures are at once so rigid and so difficult to pin down, with our historical religious writings so open to interpretation, but so many of our modern worshippers so opposed to admitting it. How can one follow the word of God when it keeps getting reinterpreted? It forces the admission, ultimately, that people choose the interpretation they like best -- and, suddenly, the serenity and certainty inherent in religion evaporates.

At the courthouse Wednesday were women in black veils, “to mourn the death of America,” and when the decision went against Moore, atheists were cursed as “destroying our country.”

“Many of Mr. Moore’s supporters were outraged that an unelected panel had removed an elected justice,” the Times says, quoting Patrick Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition as saying, “They’re undoing a democratic process here. It smacks of third-world countries. It smacks of dictatorship.”

Does this make any sense? Especially since, in the words of the Times, Moore’s reasoning for creating and keeping the giant, 5,000-pound statue was “to honor the biblical underpinnings of America’s laws”?

And especially since it’s in keeping with a constitutional amendment to prevent the burning of the American flag, and the outrage over the notion of cutting “under God” from the pledge of allegiance, even though it’s only been in since 1954. This is like the constant bleating over the “liberal media”: If the media’s so liberal, how can there be so much complaining about it? If everyone’s waiting for Judgment Day, how dead and destroyed can their America be?

I take it back. I’m not just discomforted. I’m terrified by the intense, almost desperate need Americans have for image and symbol over substance and reason.

If there’s a bright side, it oddly enough comes from another Times story on religion, one that should be, by all rights, as disturbing as the others. Thursday’s paper carried a story on Roman Catholic bishops’ decisions on how to tackle the staggering indifference shown by Catholics to the church’s stand on contraception (their decision: liken it to abortion) and the increasing acceptance of homosexuality (although they considered calling it “gravely sinful,” they went with “immoral”).

Despite the scary aspects of that, and the much scarier stuff I’m not bothering to quote, what stood out from the story was the church’s admission that “Catholics used contraceptives as much as anyone else and that only 4 percent of married Catholic couples of childbearing age practiced natural family planning.”

So there’s hope.