I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand’

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Maybe it’s because this is a national election year. Such years historically appear to have been times when a lot of American political-social-cultural mishegas hatches out.

Whatever the reason, the last few months have brought us a number of spectacles on several cultural battlefields: What is marriage? What is appropriate cultural expression of religious teaching? What is love?

Any one of these could be a topic for a book. Here, I just want to explore briefly my gut reactions to some of these issues with the help of a few quotations.

• “I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.”

This is one of the funniest and wisest lines created by the great cartoonist Charles Schultz (“Peanuts”). I couldn’t help thinking of it when reading some of the stuff Mel Gibson said about his controversial movie “The Passion of The Christ.”

Newsweek magazine in its cover story about the film quotes Gibson responding to anti-Semitism charges with: “I don’t want to lynch any Jews … I love them. I pray for them.” I have heard other patronizing “I love the Jewish people” statements from Christians, particularly Evangelicals, and they creep me out only a little less than anti-Semitic statements.

It is easy to love “mankind” as an abstract idea; it is not easy to love the messy reality and diversity of actual people. There’s a reason that the Torah (Leviticus 19:18) commands “Love your neighbor as yourself” (a command Jesus picked up on; Matthew 19:19 and elsewhere) — not “all humanity” but your neighbor, the individual human being standing, sitting or living next to you.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be loved or hated as part of an abstract or statistical group I happen to fit — Jews, journalists, single men. I want to be judged lovable or hate-able for what I am as an individual, and I want to be respected as a human being for my particularity, which includes the fact that I do not and never will believe in Christianity.

• “A Puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.” British author and devout Catholic G. K. Chesterton was something of an anti-Semite, but he also was a brilliant phrasemaker and observer of human oddities; and this statement of his rings for me today.

I know it’s an old song — and one usually sung by liberals — that our American culture is strange for producing people and institutions that find portrayals of violence far more acceptable and less controversial than portrayals or even discussions of sexuality. But give me a break.

Yes, families and others watching the Super Bowl should not have been unwillingly exposed to socially unacceptable partial nudity or an aggressively erotic display that many felt was glorifying violence against women. Still, the glimpse of one of singer Janet Jackson’s breasts at the Super Bowl produced an overreaction; and op-ed pages were filled with geshreis for weeks, government bodies are holding hearings and one would think civilization is teetering on the brink.

Some gay and lesbian people want to obtain the social-economic-legal benefits — and undertake the social-legal-moral obligations — of marriage. Yet religious people, Jewish and not, see in this desire and the movement to realize it a catastrophe in the offering, a threat to the very foundation of civilization.

Yet to make a movie most of which graphically shows a man being tortured to death is considered a praiseworthy, righteous act; and church groups are buying out whole theaters to see it.

Moreover, Gibson and others appear to dismiss cavalierly our community’s justified concern that this film could foster hatred of and maybe even promote violence against Jews. In fact, Gibson and some other Christians seem to be indignant that some Jews and Christians even raise the issue.

Besides, is it a quest for spiritual expression or a quest for huge monetary profit that is driving the making and the hawking of Gibson’s film? Anybody wondering whether that ambiguity corrupts even a little the supposed religious message expressed here?

And when are American religious leaders going to become as indignant about the abuses of economic practices that harm the environment, exploit and cheat workers here and abroad, and generally do more real harm to real people than I think any number of married homosexuals ever will?

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin in his quotation anthology “Uncommon Sense” hands on an observation by Arsene Houssaye: “Tell me whom you love and I will tell you what you are.” Maybe learning what inspires someone to righteous indignation can be just as revealing.