Sacred Cowed

The town I live in has a tourist trap on the water known as “The Nautical Mile.” Among its bars, restaurants, souvenir shops and mini golf course, there’s a large gambling boat that cruises out to international waters so players can stuff their faces at the buffet table and lose their shirts at the craps table.

I was walking past it on a recent Sunday morning when I caught the unmistakable aroma of bacon and eggs wafting from its interior. Much like Proust’s madeleines, this sensory stimulus transported me back to the Sunday mornings of my youth, when 7am mass was followed by a trip to the bakery for a dozen Kaiser rolls and then home, where my Protestant-raised mother would be frying up heaping helpings of pork fat and cholesterol for us to feast on.

It’s the only really good memory I have of my Catholic-centric childhood. Not only was Sunday mass compulsory, I endured twelve years of parochial school education. Some people believe private schools are superior to public schools and I think, for the most part, they’re right. God knows the nuns ruled with an iron crucifix, keeping perfect order in classes that ranged in size from 40 to 50 kids. The lay teachers were no slackers, either, but along with the three R’s came the fourth, religion. Honestly, how many times can you discuss the Sermon on the Mount or the Beatitudes before you go mad? By the time I hit high school, I wanted to raise my hand and say, “I get it. I got it. I’m gone.” One day I did go, skipping out on mass at the age of 14, and never looked back.

In the intervening years, I’ve taken a very hard line about keeping The Church and The State at opposite ends of the dancehall. This being America, you think that would be understood, but with the rise, once again, of the Far Right and their never-ending nattering about “Christian values,” it seems that God and Uncle Sam are tangoing ever closer to a very unholy union.

One hallowed word that keeps popping up in two hotly contested political debates is “sacred.”

The opponents of gay marriage refer to the union between a man and woman as “sacred” and prohibited to couples of the same sex. The last time I looked, city hall was not a cathedral, synagogue or mosque. If a marriage ceremony is performed in one of these pious places it is, in fact, sacred. But a marriage license issued by the state is nothing more nor less than a legal contract. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t need lawyers to dissolve it. Since there’s no danger of hierophants from the three major religions condoning, no less performing, gay marriages anytime soon, the “anti” camp needs to come up with another word to make their case unless, of course, they want to equate a fishing license with a papal edict.

The other controversy that depends almightily on the word “sacred” is the building of a mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero. The opponents of this Islamic house of worship refer to the site of the former World Trade Center as “sacred ground” and make the argument that erecting a mosque so close to where thousands of innocents were slaughtered by a pack of Muslim mad dogs would desecrate their memory.

I think we’re all missing the bigger picture. If Ground Zero is “sacred” (and I believe it is), then why did we condone the building of a corporate skyscraper on top of what is – essentially, horribly – a crematorium? What’s next, a W Hotel on the grounds of Auschwitz? A KFC next to the graves at Arlington?

Condemning a group of moderate Muslims for wanting to build a mosque while a Monument to Mammon slowly takes shape over the remains of the sacrificed is like pointing out the speck in your brother’s eye while ignoring the steel I-beam in your own.

It makes a mosque seem not just sacred, but downright small potatoes.