Strange Bedfellows: Religion and Politics

Many question why the United States military still maintains a presence in Afghanistan; after all Osama bin Laden and many of his most influential henchmen have been eliminated. One of the reasons why the United States attacked the religious students known as the Taliban was to prevent the latter's indiscriminate beating and killing of women for any and all alleged instances of misbehavior. The Afghan Taliban utilized the UN built soccer stadium in Kabul to execute any woman accused of being unfaithful, disobeying her mother-in-law, or showing her ankles in public, or for any other trivialality a male could have dreamt up. Yet, here we are in the United States of America allowing men who believe in another form of God, or what I prefer to call the Creative Force, to enforce their brand of Christianity upon women, and any other person not of their particular religious bent. Those that deny a good and pious man such as Romney a chance to attain the land's highest office because he is a practicing Mormon do so out of fear and not on the basis of inability or disqualification as set forth in the Constitution. These men want to deny women control over their own destinies by denying them medical coverages and practices they believe runs counter to their religious thought. Yet, not every person believes in the same version of the same deity at any particular moment in time. The main tenets of Christ, as I learned them,  are to love thy neighbor as thy self, and judge not that thou be not judged. Yet, the hypocrisy of the political right denies equality to women and the tenets of Christ. This mixture of American politics; especially within the Republican Party, and the forced nature of conservative Christianity makes it difficult, if not impossible, to square with our mission in the Central Asian nation of Afghanistan. There, the hypocrites are Islamic, here, they are Christian.  No human being can or ever will know the mind of the Creative Force. There is no "chosen people," there is no "party of God," and there is no returning "savior." We are the driving force of our fate upon this small speck of dust we have chosen to call Earth, and it is up to each one of us to see to it that those that drive religion are not allowed to do so because it is politically expedient or to drive politics based upon religious fervor.