Rhetoric Race and Religion
Recreational marijuana became became legal in the State of Colorado on the first day of 2014 for those 21 and older. Other states, like Washington, are preparing to do the same.
Is this just a further sign of the “moral decay” of American society, or can we say the legalization of marijuana can have a place in a Christian theology that values, instead ofdenigrates, the body?
We might think primarily of the individual body and marijuana use, but first let us consider the social body and what will happen to our social body by legalizing marijuana.
Our social body is currently deformed, almost beyond recognition as a developed democracy, by the huge numbers of Americans in jail, many of them there for non-violent drug offenses.
The so-called “war on drugs” begun in the Nixon administration has been a Trillion Dollar Failure. All it has done is explode the prison population to the point where in the United States the number of Americans incarcerated dwarfs that of other nations. Our national failure on drug policy is also racist. “Black men were more than six times as likely as white men to be incarcerated in federal and state prisons, and local jails in 2010,” according to thePew Research Center.
The effects of this on our social body of families separated, and non-violent individuals exposed to the horrific conditions of our overcrowded prisons, cannot be exaggerated.
Read the rest here
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In