“I’M SORRY, I’M A BUDDHIST, I DON’T DO POLITICS”

In his blog, Dharma Dialog, Akasa Skye, notes that American Buddhists, unlike their counterparts in mainline religions like Christianity or Islam, rarely get involved in political issues like same-sex marriage or abortion. He argues in this rather long, but interesting post, that American Buddhists tend "to maintain a largely individualistic, self-help appearance in the U.S."  Skye quotes Harvey Cox, the Harvard Divinity School professor, to explain: :

 "The problem is…that in a culture like ours, already steeped in the philosophy of ‘You do your own thing and I’ll do mine’, the lofty Buddhist idea of nonattachment can hardly escape distortion. Westerners will not be able to practice the oriental posture of nonattachment until they move not just beyond attachments but also beyond an ‘I’ which does ‘my thing’. Real nonattachment will become possible only when self slips away, too. But this is something most Westerners either cannot or will not concede."