HOW SHE SEES IT Dems should study election in Virginia

By SUSANNA RODELL
CHARLESTON (W.VA.) GAZETTE
If last week's election for governor of Virginia is an indication of things to come, we could be in for an interesting time in American politics.
Timothy Kaine's victory is already being analyzed and crowed over, and it will take some time for all its lessons to be digested. But the part that interested me the most was Kaine's frank, open and natural approach to his religious faith.
Here was a Democratic politician willing to discuss his beliefs as a legitimate indicator of what kind of person he is -- and willing to draw a clear distinction between his personal creed and his function as an elected official.
I've been waiting for some Democrats to do this -- to be willing to engage in this conversation, and to deny the religious right a monopoly on the discussion.
Kaine accomplished two things in this campaign that other Democrats would do well to study. First of all, he talked easily about his faith, a nice contrast with John Kerry, who seemed to spend most of his presidential campaign either avoiding the subject or talking about it with deep discomfort.
Second, he presented a picture of someone to whom religious faith was a central part of life, but for whom the most important thing was not proscriptions and exclusions but tolerance and compassion.
As a Christian liberal, I admit I've had my fill of hateful people who call themselves Christian and who fill my e-mail inbox with language whose inspiration seems anything but divine. The religious right has had it all their way in recent years, equating publicly avowed faith with a range of intolerant judgments, scouring Scripture to find the parts that fit their prejudices and pronouncing anyone who objects bound for eternal damnation.
Kaine has shown that it's possible to have a conversation about these issues that challenges the right's skewed, two-dimensional diagram of the political landscape, with righteous conservatives on one side and godless liberals on the other.
'Faith in God'
In his victory speech, Kaine said, "We proved that faith in God is a value for all and that we can all share regardless of our partisan labels."
Actually, I don't entirely buy this. I agree that faith should go beyond party loyalty. But I still squirm a bit at the idea of that faith as a "value for all," knowing that some people in this country have no religious faith and have an constitutional right not to have one. They should not be made to feel excluded from political discourse -- or from political office.
But I do feel it's way past time for religious liberals to stop being shy about their convictions. They (we) need to start being much more assertive in answering the right, who seem intoxicated with their own righteousness to the point where they really believe there's only one possible approach to a whole range of social issues.
Personally, there are parts of Scripture I'd like to see making their way back into public discourse, the parts about compassion, about loving our brothers as ourselves, about feeding Jesus' sheep, about not harming the children, about the difficulty of getting into the Kingdom of Heaven with a lot of riches in tow, about loving your enemies and not making a lot of noise when you pray so as to look all religious and important in public.
I'd like to see people worrying less about what Paul said about homosexuality (he also said women should cover their heads in church) and looking harder at some of the truly amazing things he said about the law and the new covenant, or about spiritual gifts and the uselessness of any of them without compassion.
I'd like to see some real challenges to the caricature of faith that allows people to shamelessly state in public that God hates queers, or that all liberals are going to hell.
If more politicians did this, we could start to have a really interesting conversation in this country. It's only one aspect of American politics, but I think this struggle is an important one, and I'm looking forward to seeing it played out in the coming years.
X Susanna Rodell is editorial-page editor of The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Service.