AMISH AND POLITICS

An open letter to the Old Order Amish bishops and ministers:
The news coverage of the attraction of your people to President Bush and the GOP's solicitation of their vote begs further discourse.
Your congregants entering the voting booth with their pacifist beliefs and a military-service exemption to vote for a candidate who is a unrepentant champion of an unprecedented, ill-begotten, preemptive invasion of a sovereign nation will pose quite a spectacle.
Your position of leaving it up to the individual whether to vote may not cut it for your neighbors who are appalled at Bush's hawkish policies and desperately want him out of office.
Not to mention they face the prospect of having their sons and daughters conscripted to fight in this quagmire of a war while your children don't have to serve.
With the country evenly divided politically, the outcome in Pennsylvania could decide who our next president will be. If Bush would win by a margin equal to the number of Amish who voted, they would, in a sense, be responsible for reelecting him.
The ill will and resentment such a scenario could produce would be a social disaster that would haunt us for generations.
I petition your sense of fairness, your desire to live in the world but not be of the world. I ask you to please take a clear, concise position on this issue and bring the full authority of your entrusted positions as religious leaders to it.




First off, I'm a registered Democrat, and to say I'm capable of being rabidly partisan is an understatement. That said, I have a few comments on the news coverage of the GOP's trolling for votes in the Amish community. As a former Amishman, I will note that democracy, open debate and dissent are not utilized in any aspect of Amish life.
Based on the quotes of Amish sources in the newspaper, I further observe that any participation of the Amish in this election year is not out of a desire to contribute to democracy, but a cheap exercise in jumping on the religion bandwagon.
To the Amish who are considering voting this year: Based on your overall aversion for the democratic process, and your stated religious reasons for supporting our current president, I will draw the conclusion that, when you cast a vote, you are advocating the creation of a theocracy. And, by doing so, you will be making a mockery of what your forefathers gave their lives for.
If that wasn't enough, what of the concept of a pacifist group supporting a self-proclaimed war president? Your servile affection for your candidate whom you won't challenge in any way (for your own vain reasons) makes you a bunch of hypocrites, because none of you or your children are being killed, or even the slightest bit inconvenienced, by this current administration's flawed attempts to make the world safer.
The local GOP is to be commended for trying to increase voter participation, but it wasn't so long ago that Congressman Joe Pitts was in a snit about UPN's "Amish in the City," proclaiming it an assault on my people's sanctity of life. If Pitts and local campaign officials weren't so anxious to make political hay, or really knew their constituents, they would understand that, when the Amish align themselves with the government, they are violating one of their core principles in a far more detrimental way than a couple of marginalized teenagers on a reality show ever will.




According to the Scribbler (9/26 New Era), President Bush pressed the flesh with the Amish twice in two years.
Amishman Jake Stoltzfus is quoted as being amazed at the trust placed in the Amish because they did not have to pass through security and the personal recognition he received from Mr Bush.
Considering that anyone from the general public who isn't Republican is routinely excluded and even sometimes, with no provocation, evicted from having an audience with the president, this sounds quite cozy.
I have no interest in the president's motivation for participating in this dalliance, but what about the Amish? Would they still be agog if their sons and daughters were fighting and dying in Iraq?
Would they still be infatuated with Mr. Bush's carefully cultivated image as "a good Christian man" if their moral integrity depended on owning the treatment and prosecution of terrorist suspects as something done in their name the way the rest of us are?




After watching Bill Moyers' PBS special, "Selling the War," it is obvious the Bush administration played the American people like a drum.
The sad part is how vulnerable the media and the American people were to their manipulations. That brings me to my own people, the Amish. If anybody could have been immune to the propaganda it should have been them. The Amish faith is heavily influenced by the scriptural admonition to be separate and apart from the world and yet prior to the 2004 election this pacifist community was quoted as having "Bush fever."
Allowing our government to take us to war without an imminent threat that is more than hype and propaganda is a black mark against us all. I suggest my Amish peers search their hearts a little harder the next time, before giving their salt-of-the-earth credibility to a warmonger.