SHARPTON PREACHES.

"I am tired," he went on, "of seeing ministers who will preach homophobia by day, and then after they're preaching, when the lights are off they go cruising for trade...We know you're not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you. We would have heard from you when people were starving in California--when they deregulated the economy and crashed Wall Street you had nothing to say. When Madoff made off with the money, you had nothing to say. When Bush took us to war chasing weapons of mass destruction that weren't there you had nothing to say.But all of a sudden, when Proposition 8 came out, you had so much to say.[...]There is something immoral and sick about using all of that power to not end brutality and poverty, but to break into people's bedrooms and claim that God sent you. It amazes me when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being [relegated] into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners."

Immoral and sick. That's correctly put. Which is not say it can't be understood. Religion, like much else in America, is a market good. This isn't a controversial statement: It's conventional wisdom to say that American religion is more vibrant than its European counterpart because Europe has ossified state churches and America has a humming spiritual marketplace.But people are less comfortable digging through the implications of a market-driven religion. They're not hidden, however. Preachers obsess over homosexuality for the same reason that newscasters talk about polls rather than policies: It gets ratings. It arouses passions. It ensures relevance. It's not about religion, or justice. You can't read the Bible and honestly decide its primary political imperative is to block gay marriage. But that was, of course, the first time Warren ever entered domestic politics. This stuff is not about the judgment of the divine but the demands of the market. And that's okay, I guess, it's just a bit weird we make it tax exempt to sell a market good so long as you make God part of your sales pitch.