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DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 8/23/2003 10:20 AM (GMT -6)

Time to Look Dangerous

quote:
Bob Jenkins:

www.crosswalk.com/news/weblogs/mohler/?adate=8/21/2003#1215807

The Media Elite and the Evangelicals: Time to Look Dangerous

Why do evangelical Christians face such hostility in the news media? There are exceptions, of course, but the major national news media present a picture of evangelical faith that is distorted at best and often dishonest as well.

The two groups inhabit very different worlds. The media elite is often educated in the major centers of American higher education, where a naturalistic and secular worldview is just taken for granted. Historic Christianity is seen as a relic of the past -- a repressive system of belief that produced beautiful cathedrals, but called upon its adherents to accept revealed truths and to live by a repressive morality. Been there, done that, moved on to the modern age.

Evangelical Christians [and traditionalist Roman Catholics] are seen as throwbacks. Our convictions are routinely dismissed as anti-intellectual and our moral concerns are assailed as hostile to human liberation. Many of the most influential journalists want us to disappear, or at least go back into the backwoods from which we must have emerged.

Their friends in the educational elite, Hollywood, and the political left are in full agreement. Their colleagues reinforce the worldview, and the major journalism schools are training grounds for hostility toward conservative Christians.

Nicholas Kristof rang the alarm in The New York Times last week [see Web Log entries for the past two days], but he is hardly alone. Conservative Christians are seen as the great threat to social progress, abortion rights, homosexual marriage, and full human liberation. We should get out of the political arena, the elite warn, because we have no right imposing our morality on the rest of the country. Leaving, of course, the media elite free to impose their morality [or amorality, as may be the case].

Kristof's column is just unusually frank. These candid admissions appear in unguarded moments. Reporter Michael Weisskopf of The Washington Post once dismissed conservative Christians as "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command." When called on the carpet, Weisskopf said that he should have written that "most" evangelicals are poor, uneducated, and easy to command. Ah, now that's better.

Veteran CBS journalist Bernard Goldberg claims that the media elite see conservative Christians as "especially juicy targets." He explains: "In a lot of newsrooms, they're seen as odd and viewed with suspicion because their lives are shaped by faith and devotion to God and an adherence to rigid principles -- opposition to abortion, for one -- that seem archaic and closed-minded to a lot of journalists who, survey after survey suggests, are not especially religious themselves."[see book announcement]

CNN founder Ted Turner once called Christianity a religion "for losers." Turner's remark was criticized, but more because it was impolite than untrue. It's no accident that moguls like Ted Turner hire those who share their worldview. Why would CNN hire "losers?"

Journalism professor Marvin Olasky explains: "Lack of understanding, along with outright anti-Christian prejudice, leads to journalistic amazement or horror at the supposed self-deception of those who do see a spiritual realm."

The media elite and their colleagues in liberal culture are absolutely certain that secularism is the shape of the future. They pity those poor and backward Christians who are destined to be mowed down by secularism and washed out of history.

"Normal" people are not deeply committed Christians, explains Eric Alterman. Alterman is a liberal journalist whose book, What Liberal Media? [see book announcement] is a rejoinder to Goldberg's Bias. Journalists are far more comfortable with the secular-minded, he explains. Their worldview is taken as normal: "Indeed it is so normal, it does not occur to anyone to point it out." At least we know where we stand. And what about the journalists? Alterman reveals that most reporters are "clueless" about what conservative Christians really believe. They just know enought to know that we are not "normal."

David Brooks, who describes himself as a "recovering secularist," accuses his fellow journalists of being "secular fundamentalists" who "remain smugly ignorant of the enormous shifts occurring all around them." [see his article, "'Kicking the Secularist Habit"] September 11 should have been a wake-up call, he argues: "Secularism is not the future; it is yesterday's incorrect vision of the future. This sends us recovering secularists to the bookstore or the library in a desperate attempt to find out what is going on in the world."

They should go to church instead. Of course, for this to be helpful, the church must actually preach the Gospel and teach the Bible. Secular journalists could go into all too many churches and see very little that would offend or challenge.

Authentic Christianity must be presented without fear or compromise, and without "dumbing down" the faith so that its intellectual content and theological core disappear.

The secular establishment considers Christians odd, outdated, and embarrassingly vocal. Secularists just want us to go away. Authentic Christianity represents a threat -- the only threat that matters -- to the secular momentum of the postmodern age. We should be tired of the secular condescension that sees us as odd and eccentric. It's about time we look dangerous.

http://www.crosswalk.com/news/weblo...21/2003#1215807

The Media Elite and the Evangelicals: Time to Look Dangerous

Why do evangelical Christians face such hostility in the news media? There are exceptions, of course, but the major national news media present a picture of evangelical faith that is distorted at best and often dishonest as well.

The two groups inhabit very different worlds. The media elite is often educated in the major centers of American higher education, where a naturalistic and secular worldview is just taken for granted. Historic Christianity is seen as a relic of the past -- a repressive system of belief that produced beautiful cathedrals, but called upon its adherents to accept revealed truths and to live by a repressive morality. Been there, done that, moved on to the modern age.

Evangelical Christians [and traditionalist Roman Catholics] are seen as throwbacks. Our convictions are routinely dismissed as anti-intellectual and our moral concerns are assailed as hostile to human liberation. Many of the most influential journalists want us to disappear, or at least go back into the backwoods from which we must have emerged.

Their friends in the educational elite, Hollywood, and the political left are in full agreement. Their colleagues reinforce the worldview, and the major journalism schools are training grounds for hostility toward conservative Christians.

Nicholas Kristof rang the alarm in The New York Times last week [see Web Log entries for the past two days], but he is hardly alone. Conservative Christians are seen as the great threat to social progress, abortion rights, homosexual marriage, and full human liberation. We should get out of the political arena, the elite warn, because we have no right imposing our morality on the rest of the country. Leaving, of course, the media elite free to impose their morality [or amorality, as may be the case].

Kristof's column is just unusually frank. These candid admissions appear in unguarded moments. Reporter Michael Weisskopf of The Washington Post once dismissed conservative Christians as "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command." When called on the carpet, Weisskopf said that he should have written that "most" evangelicals are poor, uneducated, and easy to command. Ah, now that's better.

Veteran CBS journalist Bernard Goldberg claims that the media elite see conservative Christians as "especially juicy targets." He explains: "In a lot of newsrooms, they're seen as odd and viewed with suspicion because their lives are shaped by faith and devotion to God and an adherence to rigid principles -- opposition to abortion, for one -- that seem archaic and closed-minded to a lot of journalists who, survey after survey suggests, are not especially religious themselves."[see book announcement]

CNN founder Ted Turner once called Christianity a religion "for losers." Turner's remark was criticized, but more because it was impolite than untrue. It's no accident that moguls like Ted Turner hire those who share their worldview. Why would CNN hire "losers?"

Journalism professor Marvin Olasky explains: "Lack of understanding, along with outright anti-Christian prejudice, leads to journalistic amazement or horror at the supposed self-deception of those who do see a spiritual realm."

The media elite and their colleagues in liberal culture are absolutely certain that secularism is the shape of the future. They pity those poor and backward Christians who are destined to be mowed down by secularism and washed out of history.

"Normal" people are not deeply committed Christians, explains Eric Alterman. Alterman is a liberal journalist whose book, What Liberal Media? [see book announcement] is a rejoinder to Goldberg's Bias. Journalists are far more comfortable with the secular-minded, he explains. Their worldview is taken as normal: "Indeed it is so normal, it does not occur to anyone to point it out." At least we know where we stand. And what about the journalists? Alterman reveals that most reporters are "clueless" about what conservative Christians really believe. They just know enought to know that we are not "normal."

David Brooks, who describes himself as a "recovering secularist," accuses his fellow journalists of being "secular fundamentalists" who "remain smugly ignorant of the enormous shifts occurring all around them." [see his article, "'Kicking the Secularist Habit"] September 11 should have been a wake-up call, he argues: "Secularism is not the future; it is yesterday's incorrect vision of the future. This sends us recovering secularists to the bookstore or the library in a desperate attempt to find out what is going on in the world."

They should go to church instead. Of course, for this to be helpful, the church must actually preach the Gospel and teach the Bible. Secular journalists could go into all too many churches and see very little that would offend or challenge.

Authentic Christianity must be presented without fear or compromise, and without "dumbing down" the faith so that its intellectual content and theological core disappear.

The secular establishment considers Christians odd, outdated, and embarrassingly vocal. Secularists just want us to go away. Authentic Christianity represents a threat -- the only threat that matters -- to the secular momentum of the postmodern age. We should be tired of the secular condescension that sees us as odd and eccentric. It's about time we look dangerous.

DLW:My assessment of the situation overall is that as a country we got a large number of serious problems ahead that we're going to have to deal with and the way the "cultural wars" have been dominating our national politics has been getting in the way of us dealing with them. As such, we need a "detente" that acknowledges the role faith plays in how people deal with the world and encourages all to deliberate and participate in how we collectively come at solutions to our nation's problems and provide better world-leadership...

dlw

Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes."

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 9/1/2003 7:43 AM (GMT -6)

I think this article illustrates why trying to promote a compromise on abortion and gay-rights issues will make the upcoming election more competitive. The Republicans are counting on these polarizing issues to make us reliable voters for their side.

However, there are points of difference between social/religious conservatives and economic conservatives and for the cultural wars to loom so large in our politics is not helping our democracy.
dlw

Political Parties Shift Emphasis to Core Voters

September 1, 2003
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

CHICHESTER, N.H., Aug. 30 - In a fundamental reassessment
of presidential political strategy, White House and
Democratic Party officials say that turning out core
Republican and Democratic voters will be more critical to
next year's election than winning independent voters, long
a prime target in national campaigns.

On this Labor Day weekend, 15 months before the general
election, party strategists are already building what are
almost certain to be the most expensive and ambitious
turn-out-the-vote operations in history, in a reflection of
this calculation. In the 2002 Congressional elections, the
Republican Party did not begin assembling its turnout
operation until four months before Election Day.

The activity reflects a new view of a political landscape
changed because of what each party sees as an increasingly
polarized and evenly divided electorate. Americans who move
between parties - known as swing voters - are being
overshadowed by a growing and very motivated base of
Republican and Democratic loyalists.

"There's a realization, having looked at the past few
elections, that the party that motivates their base - that
makes their base emotional and turn out - has a much higher
likelihood of success on Election Day," Matthew Dowd, a
senior adviser to Mr. Bush's re-election campaign, said in
an interview.

Stanley Greenberg, the Democratic pollster who advised Bill
Clinton when he won by appealing to swing voters 11 years
ago, said: "Things have changed over the decade since 1992.
The partisans are much more polarized. And turnout has
actually gone up because the partisans have turned out in
much greater numbers and in greater unity."

"I don't see a decline in independents," Mr. Greenberg
added. "But what has happened is the partisans have
dominated because their turnout is higher and they vote
with greater and greater unity."

This shift signals that the 2004 election will have a much
greater reliance on identifying supporters and getting them
to the polls. That would tip the balance away from the
emphasis on developing nuanced messages aimed at swing
voters, who make up 10 percent to 20 percent of the
electorate, pollsters said.

The change has the potential, several strategists said, of
encouraging the presidential candidates to make the kind of
unvarnished partisan appeals that they once tried to avoid
out of concern of pushing away independent-minded voters.
"If both sides are concerned about motivating their base,
the agenda difference between the two is much more
dramatic," Mr. Dowd said. "I actually think it could make
for a much more interesting election."

Mark Gersh, the Washington director for the National
Committee for an Effective Congress, which conducts
demographic research for Democrats, said, "I think it does
tend to produce more ideological candidates."

The new attention to turnout also reflects the emerging
influence of the Internet, which, through e-mail directed
at registered Democrats and Republicans, could supplant the
door knock and the evening telephone call as the easiest
and most effective way of reaching sure-fire supporters.

This changing environment is one force that has made the
presidential campaign of Howard Dean, who has assembled an
extraordinarily motivated base of supporters, so
unpredictable, and it is why some Democrats are not as
quick as Republicans to discount Dr. Dean's chances of
defeating Mr. Bush, should he become his party's nominee.

Voter turnout campaigns are typically more influential in
primaries, because fewer people vote, making the outcome
easier to affect. At the very least, several Democrats
said, Dr. Dean's ability to use new techniques to identify
and turn out a base of supporters makes him a formidable
figure in early primary states.

But Dr. Dean, in remarks at a pig roast here in central New
Hampshire this afternoon, noted that a shift of just a few
percentage points in states like New Hampshire would have
delivered the White House to Al Gore in 2000. And he urged
supporters who showed up at his events to register their
e-mail addresses with his campaign, so they can be
contacted as Election Day approaches. Dr. Dean's aides are
creating a database that merges e-mail addresses with voter
registration rolls and the history of voting behavior.

This is the latest chapter of a shift that became
particularly vivid after the 2000 presidential election,
which White House officials believe Mr. Bush nearly lost
because the Democrats mounted the kind of highly effective
voter turnout effort that had long been identified with the
party. Thus, in the 2002 midterm elections, Republicans put
in place a plan known as the 72-Hour Task Force to identify
Republican voters and get them to the polls. The
Republicans beat the Democrats at their own game, winning
control of the Senate while widening their margin in the
House.

David B. Magleby, the dean of social sciences at Brigham
Young University, who conducted a study of spending in the
2002 Congressional election, reported evidence of a sharp
change in emphasis away from television advertisements and
toward get-out-the-vote efforts. He is planning a study of
the 2004 race and said he expected each party to
significantly increase the resources devoted to getting out
the vote.

Republicans are almost certain to enjoy an advantage in
their operations because of a huge fund-raising advantage.
Officials from each party declined to say how much they
were planning to spend on setting up turnout operations,
but the parties have already begun registering voters,
setting up computer programs and training party officials
in ways to identify and turn out supporters.

"We're starting a lot earlier," said Blaise Hazelwood, the
political director of the Republican National Committee.

Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic national chairman, summoned
20 executive directors of state parties to Washington in
June to get training in setting up get-out-the-vote
operations. "In order to win the election, you have got to
get your base out," Mr. McAuliffe said. "But you've got to
get your swing voters out, too."

This is not a case of one strategy entirely supplanting
another. The successful campaign strategy combines turning
out staunch supporters and competing for swing voters. But
the balance is changing, and each side is struggling to
keep pace.

"In the last few years, if politics has taught us anything,
it's that you have to do both," said Ken Mehlman, the
president's campaign manager.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each strategy.

Getting out the vote tends to be expensive and cumbersome,
draining money that might otherwise go to television
advertising.

But turning out sure-fire supporters is very attractive to
campaigns because it is simpler and less risky than trying
to win the battle for swing voters. That requires making a
nuanced appeal that, if not done agilely, can alienate base
voters and encourage the emergence of a third-party
candidacy or a primary challenge - as happened with Patrick
J. Buchanan in 1992, when President Bush's father ran for
re-election.

"At least with a base strategy, you know that the people
who come out are going to vote for you," Laurie Moskowitz,
a Democratic strategist, said.

Mr. Greenberg said: "I'm for both, but I'll tell you, all
the temptation in both parties is to continue to compete
for greater and greater support in their base. Because it's
working. That's where you are able to produce voters. It's
a lot easier to do than to go out and convince swing voters
to think differently about the party."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/01/p...0dfdc7592ece08d

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 9/4/2003 4:47 PM (GMT -6)

Evidence that the Cultural Wars have been poisoning the US's democracy.

Have you considered how critical abortion politics has played in so many elections? Religious/Social Conservatives have been selling their votes for cheap to the mainly economic conservative Republican party. As a consequence, economic conservatives have more sway over the federal gov't than otherwise would tend to be the case, as is evidenced in the massive tax-cut that was passed mostly for the rich and the move to remove the estate tax. It also is evidenced in that successful democratic candidates, such as Bill Clinton, succeed by emulating Republicans as much as feasible.

Also consider what a low percentage of the US population actually votes, this has fallen quite considerably over the past thirty years since the abortion-debate began. Moreover, in a recent NYTIMES article, it was announced that the Repubs and Dems' strategy for this upcoming election will be mainly to get out the party faithful. The moderate voters that actually vote apparently aren't large enough in numbers to make that big of a difference.

Also, consider the level of acrimony in the gov't currently. That is impeding our democracy since compromise is more difficult when the two sides don't get along at all. The recent power outage in the east coast is yet more evidence that the political system as a whole isn't working.

I think that for the sake of hoping to be able to share the Gospel more with those from the "left" it is imperative that a detente be organized in the cultural wars...

dlw

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 9/6/2003 6:21 AM (GMT -6)

Culture war?[This was posted over at TheoWeb by a non-Christian. The article is a mainstream person's concern that religious fundamentalism in the US will turn violent.]

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.h...outlook/2078995

Clergy must be the peacemakers in `culture war'
By ED MENKEN

TODAY, we see and hear the rising tide of rants and outrage bellowed by those who insist that the United States is a Christian nation and must be acknowledged as such, by allowing Chief Justice Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument to stand in a government building in Alabama and a King James version of the Bible to be displayed outside a government building in Houston.

The simple fact is, the Founders never intended that this should be anything but a secular nation, making that abundantly clear in the First Amendment. The Establishment Clause isn't complicated or confusing; it is absolute in its simplicity. And the U.S. Supreme Court has continuously upheld the principle that government cannot and must not endorse a particular religion, even if that religion represents the majority of the citizenry. It's called "protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority," and the Founders were extremely deliberate about it.

But we have a growing chorus of radical Christian fundamentalists who believe otherwise ... who preach that Christians are under attack, that their beliefs are being assaulted by "Christ-haters," and that "atheists and devil-worshipers want to remove every vestige of religion from the public square." Apart from the massive absurdity of these inflammatory claims, the purveyors of these lies are major beneficiaries of their deceit as they plead for more and more money from misled followers to "defend Christianity." They tell their audiences that this country was "founded on Christian beliefs," but never mention the fact that although the Declaration of Independence contains several references to God (or "Nature's God," "their Creator" or "the Supreme Judge of the World"), nowhere does the name Jesus ever appear. And nowhere in that Declaration of Independence, where the reasons for severance from England are clearly defined, is there any mention whatsoever of a religious motive, or a desire to establish a Christian nation or a theocracy.

Moreover, nowhere in the Constitution -- which is the supreme document that governs the country -- is there any reference to God. In fact, not only does the Constitution clearly state, in the requirement for attaining office, that the candidate must either swear or affirm, there is no requirement that a Bible be present or used. Most significantly, the Constitution specifically says, " ... no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." And the fact that the phrase, "In God We Trust," is on our money, or that every session of the Supreme Court opens with the call, "God save this Honorable Court," are notable in that nowhere, again, is the name of Jesus invoked. But the radical Christian fundamentalists would have us believe that the God mentioned is Jesus, and that it's time to acknowledge that, no matter what the federal courts or the Constitution say.

What we are faced with now is a tragedy and a danger of immense proportions, where a cadre of power- and money-hungry televangelists -- most of them already multimillionaires who use their pulpits for despicable personal gain -- along with a larger number of other theo-propagandists who want a piece of the power-and-profit action -- are hell-bent on inciting what they refer to as a "culture war." And, rather than review the facts, rather than read history books and the Constitution, rather than exercise the same rational thinking that's applied when crossing the street, the "faithful" are listening to the demagogues and getting angrier and more militant ... much to the pleasure of their venomous leaders.

Anyone who believes that this "culture war" will be settled by the courts, or that it's just a passing protest that will benignly fade away, is sadly -- and dangerously -- mistaken. As long as those much more numerous clergy who understand and support the separation of church and state remain silent ... as long as responsible religious leaders of all faiths in this country remain out of sight ... as long as the demagogues continue to go unchallenged ... this nation grows ever closer to more violence in the name of Jesus. The rising tide of intolerance, the overheated rhetoric of self-anointed "defenders of Christ," the calls for greater militancy on the part of hate-filled fundamentalists whose lies and distortions are being swallowed whole by naive believers ... all signal a prelude to catastrophe. And the fact that these self-described "Christian Warriors" believe, not without reason, that the current president of the United States is supportive of their aims, adds all the fuel to the raging fire that's necessary for the destruction of this beloved democracy.

Unless there is a massive public outcry from mainstream religious leaders, and soon, such misguided fervor will add a great many more names to the list of people who have been killed in recent years in the name of Jesus. The fact that a recent poll told us that 77 percent of the American people believe that Moore's monument should have remained is another signal that should be heeded. For among that huge number there are surely those whose misguided frustration is rapidly approaching a boiling point. The roster of Bible-quoting murderers, which includes John Salvi, Michael Griffin, Paul Hill, James Kopp and Eric Rudolph, awaits only the erupting vehemence of the willing before it grows. The writing, so to speak, is on the wall.

DLWcommentary:Yes the constitution doesn't use the word God, but the constitution is subject to alternative interpretations than the one given above.

Those ten-commandments that "fundamentalists" want in court-rooms do command one not to kill. Which doesn't mean that there aren't some deranged types who might rationalize the use of violence, but it is unlikely that many will choose to do so.

I think that key to a detente will be for us to provisionally accept a definition of separation of Church and State as meaning their autonomy, not their segregation. It also will entail religious "conservatives" will need to pick their battle better and realize that the Christian faith that undergirded our country through so much of its history was fallible and its persistence and effective witness to others doesn't require capturing large portions of the US gov't and it doesn't hang on whether or not abortions are legal in the US or homosexuals have civil unions w. benefits/marriages.

dlw

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 9/7/2003 10:38 AM (GMT -6)

How to Reignite the Culture Wars

September 7, 2003
By JEFFREY ROSEN

One morning in the middle of July, in front of the federal
courthouse in Charlotte, N.C., the Rev. Flip Benham
summoned about 50 of his followers to hold the Supreme
Court of the United States in contempt of the Court of
Jesus Christ. Benham, the head of the militant
anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, is not an admirer of
the Supreme Court, and after its decision in June in
Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down every sodomy law in
America, he was especially displeased.

On the steps of the courthouse, Benham's followers arranged
six coffins, each inscribed with the name of a Supreme
Court decision that represented a defeat for social
conservatives in the moral and political clashes known as
the culture wars. The coffins began with the decisions in
the 1960's that outlawed school prayer, moved on from Roe
v. Wade in 1973 to the decision in 1980

that banned the posting of the Ten Commandments in public
schools and ended with Lawrence in 2003.

As one of his supporters sounded an earsplitting blast on a
shofar, Benham sentenced the decisions to be burned. Small
children in anti-abortion T-shirts tore up copies of the
decisions and placed the fragments in a large metal urn. As
Benham set them on fire, officers from the Charlotte Police
Department swooped down, opened their fire extinguishers
and put out the tiny flames. ''That's not going to work in
hell, I tell you!'' Benham shouted. The police officers,
backed up by federal marshals, descended from the plaza,
handcuffed Benham and led him into the courthouse to be
arraigned for unlawful burning.

It was not surprising to see Benham and his followers
exercised by the court's decision in Lawrence, nor was it
surprising to see them embrace their defeat as an
opportunity to rally the faithful. Dramatic resistance to
the court, after all, is their reason for being. But in the
months since Lawrence, what has been startling is how many
social conservative leaders with larger constituencies have
also come to view Lawrence as an unexpected and welcome
political opportunity. It was four years ago, after the
Senate refused to convict President Clinton of high crimes
and misdemeanors, that Paul M. Weyrich, one of the leading
conservative strategists in America, sent a letter to his
supporters conceding defeat in the culture wars and
advising them to ''tune out'' of the modern world. With
Lawrence, however, social conservatives are suddenly
talking as if they've been given a chance to tune back in.
As the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, the editor of the
religious journal First Things, told me, ''People really
think that on this one they have a winner.''

The Supreme Court in Lawrence did far more than strike down
an extreme and discriminatory Texas law that forbade sodomy
by homosexuals but not heterosexuals. Justice Anthony
Kennedy's opinion for the court also overruled Bowers v.
Hardwick, a 1986 opinion holding that moral disapproval was
a legitimate reason for states to regulate intimate
behavior. By ruling out moral disapproval as a permissible
basis for legislation, Kennedy, in the eyes of liberal
activists and social conservatives alike, made it more
likely that lower courts will come to recognize a
constitutional right to gay marriage. If this happens --
the Massachusetts Supreme Court may have already ruled on
the question of gay marriage by the time this article
appears -- conservative activists hope and expect that many
Americans will finally be roused to take political action.

''I think the Supreme Court decision will serve to awaken
the sleeping giant of the majority of conservative
Americans who believe in the traditional institution of
marriage to get involved in the culture wars again to
preserve traditional marriage and culture in this
country,'' Mathew D. Staver, the head of the conservative
Liberty Counsel, told me.

This optimism has some historical support. During the past
decade, on those occasions when a lower court has
recognized a broad right of gay marriage, the decision has
provoked a political backlash. When the Supreme Court of
Hawaii implied in 1993 that gays and lesbians had a
constitutional right to marry in that state, 34 states
passed laws declaring that they wouldn't recognize same-sex
marriage, and Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act,
which announced that those laws were constitutional. The
voters of Hawaii promptly amended their state Constitution
to prohibit same-sex marriages. In Alaska in 1998, voters
adopted a similar amendment by a similarly overwhelming
margin months after a lower court declared a right to
same-sex marriage.

Conservatives also point to recent polls as an indication
that even in a country that has grown more accepting of
gays and lesbians, a significant number of people were not
prepared for the breadth of Kennedy's opinion. After the
Supreme Court decision, the number of Americans who said
sexual relations between homosexuals should be legal fell
from 60 percent in May to 48 percent in July, the lowest
number since 1996. Polls taken after Lawrence also revealed
a sudden drop in the number of Americans who said they
would support civil unions for gays and lesbians, from 49
percent in May to 37 percent in August. Weyrich told me
that as a result of these shifts, he has been having second
thoughts about the need for conservatives to concede defeat
in the culture wars. ''I have never seen people so
energized and activated, even more so than at the time of
Roe v. Wade,'' he said.

The outcome of the next phase of the culture wars is far
from certain. But if social conservative leaders are able
to convert the ambivalence of the country as a whole about
gay marriage into active resistance, then Lawrence could
have the paradoxical effect of setting back the cause of
gay and lesbian equality at a moment when greater
acceptance of gay life had seemed inevitable. This would be
an unfortunate paradox, but hardly an unprecedented one.

Liberals who came of age in the postwar era like to think
of the Supreme Court as a heroic check on the tyranny of
the majority, and Lawrence has been heralded in this vein.
But it's not clear that this picture of the court's role in
the culture wars is historically accurate. In the decades
after World War II, it was political agitation -- in
particular, the efforts of the civil rights and women
rights movements -- rather than the Supreme Court that was
primarily responsible for the expansion of equality in
America and the steady growth of a libertarian national
consensus. On those occasions when the Supreme Court ruled
in favor of expanding rights, it was typically reflecting a
change in public opinion, not marching as an advance guard.
For most of Earl Warren's tenure as chief justice, the
court's decisions were remarkably popular with a majority
of Americans. The court's decision in 1963 to ban the
Lord's Prayer and the reading of Bible verses in school was
supported by mainstream Protestants as well as Catholics.
In the late 1960's, the court's decisions liberalizing
pornography also provoked no significant backlash. As the
pill, the sexual revolution and the women's movement were
transforming American sexual mores, the court's opinions
inspired resistance only among small groups of social
conservatives, mostly evangelicals in the South.

The greatest threat to social conservatives came, as it
always has, not from a crusading court but from the
relentless American pressures to assimilate. With the
expansion of women's equality -- along with an increase in
higher education and mobility -- conservatives as well as
liberals began to embrace what the sociologist Alan Wolfe
has called an ethos of ''moral freedom,'' based on the
laissez-faire belief that individuals should decide for
themselves what it means to lead a good life. Even within
more conservative, God-fearing communities, younger
generations increasingly abandoned traditional attitudes,
to the point at which their outlook on the importance of
personal autonomy no longer differed from those of their
secular counterparts. ''There is the distinct
possibility,'' the sociologist James Davison Hunter wrote
at the end of his authoritative book, ''Culture Wars,'' in
1991, ''that orthodox communities may become so assimilated
to a progressive political . . . culture that they will not
be capable of offering any effective opposition to the
worldview that currently plagues them.''

But the court has not always trod carefully in the culture
wars. Most notably in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, it ruled with
far less restraint. In the cases involving school prayer,
obscenity and sex discrimination, the court not only acted
in line with a growing national consensus but it also based
its decisions on clearly established constitutional law.
The school prayer and obscenity decisions were rooted in
the First Amendment's protections for free speech and
religious freedom; even when social conservatives disagreed
about the outcomes of particular cases, they could embrace
the principles that supported them.

In Roe v. Wade, however, the court did something very
different. It struck down abortion laws in 46 states, and
it did so in a freewheeling way that even some scholars and
justices who were in favor of abortion rights found
constitutionally questionable. In his majority opinion,
Justice Harry Blackmun said the Constitution protected the
right to choose first trimester abortions, but he failed to
specify where in the text or history of the Constitution
this right was located.

Moreover, by striking down so many laws rather than just
the draconian Texas law before it (which banned abortion in
nearly all circumstances), the court largely
short-circuited a national debate about abortion. Popular
opinion about abortion in the early 70's was becoming more
and more liberal. According to abortion rights advocates
who are critics of Roe, like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
the state legislatures would have continued to repeal the
most extreme laws like the one in Texas. By cutting off
that debate, the court in Roe had the effect of giving
abortion rights advocates a false and complacent sense of
victory; anti-abortion groups, by contrast, were energized
-- they suddenly felt like martyrs instead of mere losers.
A series of conservative interest groups, from the
Concerned Women for America to the Moral Majority, arose in
response to Roe in the 1970's and 80's, and they were
initially effective. While states had been liberalizing
their abortion laws before 1973, they increasingly limited
access to abortion after Roe came down. These newly formed
interest groups also set out to oppose pornography, gay
rights and the E.R.A., to resurrect school prayer and,
above all, to appoint Supreme Court justices who would
reverse Roe.

Although Roe was reaffirmed in 1992, the decision has
continued to distort and polarize our judicial politics
long after there was any threat of its being overturned.
The conservative judicial movement that arose in response
to Roe led to the appointment of two justices -- Antonin
Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- who continue to refuse to
accept the legitimacy of Roe even after their colleagues
have repeatedly reaffirmed it. Thirty years after it was
decided, furthermore, Roe continues to define the terms of
our nomination battles for the federal courts. In the
Reagan and both Bush administrations, lower court and
Supreme Court nominees were selected largely because of
their perceived opposition to Roe, which was used as a
litmus test of judicial virtue. The result is a polarizing
gap between the moderate views of the country as a whole on
abortion and the radical opposition it continues to inspire
among conservative legal elites.

Might Roe serve as a cautionary tale for supporters of
Lawrence? If any single Supreme Court decision can
reinvigorate the culture wars today, conservatives say, the
court has just handed it to them on a silver platter.

''It isn't so much the facts of the case; it's the
reasoning of Kennedy's majority opinion that was really
very offensive to a lot of people,'' Phyllis Schlafly, the
president of the conservative Eagle Forum, told me. In
Lawrence, the defendants were prosecuted for having
consensual sex with each other under a Texas law that
forbade sodomy by homosexuals but not by heterosexuals.
Texas is one of only four states in America that banned
sodomy only when committed by gays and lesbians, and the
court could have struck down these four laws as a violation
of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection, as
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recommended. This would have
left states free to ban sodomy, as long as they did so in
an evenhanded way, treating heterosexuals and homosexuals
alike. Libertarian conservatives insist that they would not
have objected had the court simply struck down these four
discriminatory state laws. Even among evangelical and
social conservatives, there is a general sense that the
effort to stigmatize consensual sexual behavior as immoral
has been lost among the younger generation. ''I don't think
sodomy laws could be resurrected, because even most
Christians believe that what is done in the privacy of
one's home is not the government's business,'' Weyrich
says. ''I've had a couple of my own kids say that to me.''

But instead, Kennedy's opinion for the court struck down
all 13 state laws in America that ban sodomy whether
committed by straight or gay people, and it did so in a
particularly expansive way, citing the right to privacy and
liberty ''in its spatial and more transcendent
dimensions.'' Although as a political matter many Americans
may agree with Kennedy's concept of liberty, its roots in
the Constitution are not self-evident: the Fourth Amendment
explicitly protects the privacy of the home against
unreasonable searches, but no provision of the Bill of
Rights clearly protects such a sweeping vision of personal
autonomy. Taken to its logical conclusion, Kennedy's
argument would seem to invalidate all moral restrictions on
intimate associations that, it could be said, cause no harm
to others -- restrictions on polygamy, for example.

The implications of Kennedy's far-ranging opinion have
already begun to trigger a backlash. At a rare press
conference at the end of July, President Bush went out of
his way to endorse a federal definition of marriage as
limited to a man and a woman, and he is facing increasing
pressure from social conservatives to endorse a federal
marriage amendment to the Constitution, which has been
supported by the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist.
Whether the marriage amendment is actually proposed and
ratified -- a notoriously difficult political feat --
conservatives predict it will frame the debate about gay
rights in a way that can only help them and hurt liberals.
If the amendment makes it through Congress, the thinking
goes, it will provoke a mini-culture war in each of the 50
state legislatures that will force Democrats to choose
between alienating their liberal base, which favors gay
marriage, or alienating the moderate majority, which, at
least for now, appears to oppose it. Even if the amendment
fizzles in Congress, social conservatives are counting on
other lower-court decisions to energize their supporters by
extending Lawrence to strike down restrictions on gay and
lesbian behavior in public, like the exclusion of gays and
lesbians from the military. ''Anything that is the
outgrowth of that decision is going to have the effect of
keeping the momentum going,'' Weyrich says.

The outcome of these battles is hard to predict. At the
moment, Americans seem to feel differently about gay
marriage than about consensual sexual behavior in private.
Last June, a Gallup poll indicating that a majority
disapproved of laws banning sodomy also found that 55
percent of Americans said they believed that gay marriages
''should not be recognized as valid.'' Although two-thirds
of Americans now say they believe that same-sex marriage
will be legal within the next hundred years, they don't
appear ready for courts to enact this social revolution by
judicial fiat.

Of course, attitudes evolve. Unlike the debate about
abortion, in which those who believe that life begins at
conception may never be persuaded to lay down their arms,
there is no obvious victim in a gay marriage. If and when
gay marriages become a reality, opposition to them will
presumably decline over time. If the ratings for ''Queer
Eye for the Straight Guy'' are a harbinger of anything,
perhaps it will decline more quickly than conservatives
hope.

But the constitutional case for a right to gay marriage is
more hotly contested than, for example, the court's opinion
in 1967 recognizing a right to interracial marriage, which
was based on a solid equal-protection argument that came to
be accepted by the majority of the country. Seventy-two
percent of Americans opposed interracial marriage one year
after the decision, but few could deny the court's
conclusion that laws banning interracial marriage were
based on the discriminatory belief that blacks weren't fit
to marry whites. By contrast, many people who oppose gay
marriage but support civil unions for gays and lesbians say
they don't believe that gays and lesbians deserve less
respect than heterosexuals but that there are differences
between gay and straight unions that merit a semantic
distinction. The history of the court's interventions in
the culture wars suggests that judges should thwart the
will of the majority only when the principled
constitutional arguments for doing it are so overwhelmingly
clear and convincing that they are easily intelligible to
those who disagree. Both sides should have learned by now
that relying on courts for victories that you are unable to
win in the legislatures is not a recipe for enduring
success.

Regardless of the fate of the gay-marriage debate, Lawrence
has already turned up the heat on judicial nominations.
''This will make it all the more important that the
president fulfill his promise to appoint justices like
Scalia and Thomas,'' Schlafly says. ''We're tired of being
betrayed by Republican presidents.'' Interest groups on
both sides are now spoiling for a battle to the death over
the next Supreme Court vacancy, which will inspire
political passions vastly out of proportion to the actual
judicial stakes.

The turn away from politics and toward the courts is almost
always a sign of weakness rather than strength. But for
both sides in the culture wars, the allure of the courts
has proved too powerful to resist. Meanwhile, the fractious
political sideshows that Lawrence has set in motion may
lead not to greater equality and acceptance for gays and
lesbians but to greater recriminations, suspicion and
strife.

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted Today 11:42 AM (GMT -6)

I just sent the below letter to Prism and it seems they are going to include it in their next edition...

I hope and pray that a miracle happens and that Christian and non-Christian leadership emerges so as to organize a detente in the cultural wars with the hope of reducing the level acrimony in our nat'l gov't the cultural wars has caused. If more Christians could conceptually separate their beliefs about right personal conduct and the political strategies pursued wrt establishing right laws for our gov'ts and try to love our political enemies in this regard then it will be possible for them to act with more political autonomy on a wider range of political issues. The autonomy of Church and State is important since how we collectively use our political capital is an important collective form of witness to the world. The perception/identification of much of the world of "evangelical" christianity with president George W. Bush and all the policies associated with his administration may have set up barriers to the spread of the Gospel. The task of trying to capture the gov't completely on any given issue requires far too much compromise and implicit support of several other issues.

We need to be more judicious in seeking moderate reforms on a wide range of issues, in the spirit of the former Christian/Social Gospelist, John R. Commons, who influenced legislation that included civil-service reform, factory legislation, workmen's compensation, unemployment insurance, interest-rate control, rural credit schemes, inheritance taxation, property-assessment laws, immigration policy and industrial relations and whose students influenced Rooselvelt's New Deal programme of economic measures to lift the US out of the Great Depression.

One issue that may be worthy of more attention would be to express political solidarity with US muslims in the upcoming election so as to ensure they will have a greater voice in the US middle-east operations. This will then signal to muslims world-wide the message that democracy can work for them and that the separation of mosque and state implies the need for their autonomy, not their segregation.

dlw

Tigress
Registered Member

Date Joined Feb 2003
Total Posts : 1252

Posted 11/10/2003 11:34 AM (GMT -6)

DLW,
Do you realize you're the only one responding to your post? Tongue

Tigress

"Name a shrub after me. Preferably one that's prickly and difficult to eradicate."

-Captain Jack Aubrey
"Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World"

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 11/10/2003 11:40 AM (GMT -6)

It was not over my head...

But the subject ain't going away and so articles on its importance still pop up...

dlw

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 11/11/2003 2:36 PM (GMT -6)

Here is a posting on why Dean cannot win, namely because of his inability to step across the cultural divide...

dlw

Okay: Dean Cannot Win
I'm a big admirer of Governor Dean, and his campaign. His ability to fundraise from small donors is revolutionary, and will be the key to the next successful Democratic campaign for President. His knack for combining passionate rhetoric with moderate policies is almost Reaganesque in its appeal. And the excitement he's sparked in dormant sectors of the electorate is enough to make a small-d and big-D Democrat misty with joy.

But after the last couple of days, I'm ready to say that Howard Dean cannot win the Presidency.

By now, everyone's familiar with Dean's comments about southern rednecks, whom he shorthanded as "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks." It was a dumb thing to think and a dumber thing to say. If there's one thing that real, live Southerners can't stand, it's some frickin' yankee stereotyping them as racist rednecks. The message Dean sent was simple: "I have no clue what the South is, or who lives there."

A dumb thing to say, but not an unrecoverable mistake. No, he saved the latter one for today: "We have got to stop having our elections in the South based on race, guns, God and gays - and start having them based on jobs and health insurance and a foreign policy that's consistent with American values."

Good lord. Does Dr. Dean think that he's going to convince southerners -- or any other Americans, for that matter -- not to base their votes on race, guns, God, and gays? Does he think he can do that by berating them about it? Or maybe by saying that they don't matter? Sheesh. Of course they matter! In fact, they make up a critical mass of Dean's image that makes him attractive to his own supporters.

It was always clear that Dean would have a tough time crossing the cultural divide in a general election. But now he has proven, conclusively, that he has absolutely no ability to understand, or interest in understanding the concerns of Southern (and a large portion of Western) voters.

If he's the nominee, I'll work my ass off for him. But I think he's just made it an impossible task.

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 11/14/2003 7:31 PM (GMT -6)

This is a blatantly anti-Dean piece that argues that if he were nominated that the cultural wars would get worse, not better, and the prospects of the Dem party in the upcoming election would not be so great.

His point is that if another candidate sought to encourage a detente in the cultural wars, this would likely fly well with the moderates for whom it likely seems that the elections/gov't is being hijacked by the diehards on both sides.

What the author fails to go into is how exactly one would stop the war, without falling out of grace with the Dem party? That is the billion-dollar question. It would seem that compromise positions on abortion and homosexual-rights would be in order. But this would probably require that pro-life activists accept the political futility of reversing, not repealing mind you, Roe-V-Wade and pro-choice activists accepting that the political question is not a woman's right over her body but when should the human fetus have a legal-status other than as part of her body, with rights analogous to those currently given new-born infants.

As for homosexuality, gay-rights activists may need to curtail plans to have homosexual marriages made the law of the land, since this has taken on the meaning of giving social approbation to homosexuality as an equally-valid form of sexuality as heterosexuality. The gov't shouldn't be where such things get debated/conflicted over. The religious right, on the other hand, needs to come to terms with the constitutional nature of much homosexuality, stemming from before birth likely as a result of the hormonal balance formed in the fetuses brain. On this account, some benefits/rights for homosexual civil unions that are currently given to heterosexual married couples or cohabitators would be in order, so long as the benefits are geared at long-standing relationships.

And while we're at it, let's dispense with this pledge of the allegiance nonsense. The pledge is meant to be a statement of political solidarity not monotheism solidarity. The words under God can easily be removed from the pledge without the US having to expunge all traces of its religious heritage from gov't. How religious-types steward their political capital is likely to have a much greater impact on their long-run sway over people than whether or not the words "under God" are recited in the pledge of allegiance.

Anyways, us finding civil ways to settle our political disagreements is critical to the health of our democracy. Settling these disputes will require that the political laws in contention are kept in perspective and neither side sets out a particular legal-goal as an absolute must for itself.

dlw

Swords Into Plowshares
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: November 15, 2003

I've been waiting for one of the trailing Democratic presidential candidates to give the following speech. Since none have, I'm offering it to them, free of charge:

My fellow Democrats, it's good to be back in New Hampshire today. But I'd like to throw away my stump speech and talk honestly about the state of this campaign.

I am losing. Howard Dean is crushing me. He has money. He has a movement. And he's had one other big advantage: no opposition.

From the moment his campaign took off, the rest of us contenders tried to mimic his success. We ratcheted up our attacks on the Bush administration. We became more combative. We attacked the war in Iraq. In short, we've tried to be better Howard Deans than Howard Dean. The results have been pathetic.

Oh sure, we sniped at him at times. We pointed out his flip-flops and his gaffes. But Dean's core strength is that he is tough enough to stand up to the Republicans. His supporters don't care if he's flip-flopped on issues or if he makes a gaffe or two. They just want to know he can take on Karl Rove.

Howard Dean is liberal aggression, and none of us have ever taken that on until today. But now I am relaunching my campaign around one simple slogan: Stop the War.

I don't mean the war in Iraq. I mean the war at home. I mean the partisan war between Republicans and Democrats that rages every day in Washington and produces behavior that would be unacceptable in any other arena of life. I mean the war that poisons our airwaves, clogs up our best-seller lists and stagnates our politics.

I've lived at the front: it's in Washington, D.C. This is World War I. Each party has its trench works. Each party has its heavy artillery. Anybody who dares wander from the predictable party lines and do something unorthodox gets his head blown off.

Nothing ever changes.

If Dean is our nominee, he may fight the Beltway wars more aggressively than other Democrats, but we will still be a nation at war. I have seen Dean up close. The man hates his opponents. His kind thrives only during times of domestic war.

If we nominate Dean, it will be bad for our party and bad for our country. It will be bad for our party because 40 percent of the voters in this nation call themselves moderates.

If we nominate Dean, George Bush will have a good shot at winning a large chunk of those votes. That's disgraceful after the partisan way George Bush has led this country. But it will be our fault because we nominated someone just as partisan on the other side.

But suppose Dean does win the White House. He'll propose some good legislation. I'll support it, but it will never get passed. Because each party will still be down in its trenches, and nothing will move except the bouncing of the rubble and the writhing of the wounded.

We've all seen the Dean style. If he is elected, we will be a nation at war every second of his term. I don't even want to think about what our country would be like after four years of that.

Remember when George Bush used to say he was going to change the tone in Washington? He lied about that. He couldn't even reach out to Jim Jeffords, a moderate in his own party. He was never going to reach out to Democrats. He is too intellectually insecure. He can't handle people who disagree with him, so he retreats into the cocoon of the like-minded.

I'm opting out of the game of tit for tat. I'm going to get us out of the trenches.

If I do nothing else in the Oval Office, I will free people to build new coalitions, explore new ideas and talk to one another for the first time in a decade.

This is an evenly divided country. That is the political fact of our time. It is about time we had a president who understands that, who has a strategy for governing in such circumstances. Howard Dean and George Bush do not. They just want to pound away and pound away and ram things through. More artillery, more troops, more screaming and more hatred.

As for me, I say no more war. I'm for movement. I'm for progress, and if you are, too, come along with me.

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 11/15/2003 12:22 PM (GMT -6)

Here is an article that was posted and highlighted by an atheist friend of mine over at TheoWeb and my response.

quote:
Bob Jenkins:

www.h-net.org/~hns/articles/2003/090403a.html

By Nathan Abrams
History News Service

The 5,280-pound monument of the Ten Commandments installed by the Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore may have been removed from the rotunda of the Montgomery, Ala., judicial building by federal court order, but the issue he raised of the proper place of religion in American public life will not go away.

Unless an un-breachable wall between religion and public life is properly and fully erected, the problems raised by Moore's original act will keep recurring.

Why? Because the United States is an extraordinarily religious country with a long tradition of using the Bible for non-religious, particularly political, ends. Indeed, English may be America's unofficial first language but, to all intents and purposes, Hebrew (in translation of course) comes a close second.

Moore's claim that the Ten Commandments form the basis of American law will not stand up to legal scrutiny, but his actions fit squarely within American tradition. American public life has long been permeated with the use of biblical language and symbols.

Over the centuries, the Bible has been overused in the United States to such an extent that it has become merely a device of political spin -- a set of empty and banal cliches, divorced from context and meaning, ready to be deployed at will.

Moore is simply the latest in a long line of descendants of the first Puritan settlers in America who felt a keen affinity with the Children of Israel. Puritans called their new land "Canaan" and built their institutions on their covenant with God. If we keep this covenant, said John Winthrop, the founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, "we shall find that the God of Israel is among us."

The Puritans firmly set their stamp upon American culture. In denouncing the Tea Act of 1773, Pennsylvania's Benjamin Rush turned to the Bible. "What shining examples of Patriotism," he wrote, "do we behold in Joshua, Samuel, Maccabeus and all the illustrious princes, captains and prophets among the Jews."

Like Moore, Thomas Jefferson and the other revolutionary leaders called themselves "Israelites" who were throwing off the yoke of the "Pharaoh" in their "Promised Land" during the American Revolution. On the very day that American independence was declared, a committee consisting of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson selected an official seal for the new Republic. Their design represented the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea as Moses was leading the Israelites to freedom.

Franklin, who had studied Hebrew, suggested that the inscription on the seal be in Hebrew. It read in that language "Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God." In addition, the Liberty Bell was inscribed in English with the words of Moses: "Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof." It's no coincidence that "The Ten Commandments," one is watched by millions of Americans every Easter.

What's more, the decision to locate the capital of the United States outside the territory of the individual states was influenced by the precedent of Jerusalem, which was not situated within the land of the individual twelve Jewish tribes. As a testament to this influence, a marble relief of Moses is in the House of Representatives.

When Judge Moore and his Alabama supporters use the Bible to justify his actions, they are no different from American leaders of the past. Americans have long incorporated religious imagery into public life. The Abolitionist crusade against slavery, which inspired the Union's forces during the Civil War, drew upon the Hebrew Bible, and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" derived from biblical prophets.

During the early Cold War, the Pledge of Allegiance was enlarged to incorporate the words "under God." In 1957, the words "In God We Trust" were added to dollar bills. Four decades later, at the verge of the Gulf War in 1991, using a phrase from Ecclesiastes, George H. W. Bush announced there's "a time for peace, a time for war". His son, President George W. Bush, probably knows his Bible better than any other book.

The excessive use of the seemingly simple and emotional language that the Bible can supply has cheapened it into a set of political slogans to be used whenever politicians see fit. Over the course of two centuries, American leaders have steadily blurred (if it indeed ever really existed) the boundaries between religious discourse and public life. Moore's installation of the Ten Commandments is simply the latest, physical embodiment of this old tendency. The time has come to put a stop to it.

Displaying the Ten Commandments or using Biblical precedents and language sends out a message of discord in a multicultural society. It privileges a Judeo-Christian ethic to the exclusion of other religions. If the United States is to be an all-inclusive society, then every recognized religion must have a right equal to Christianity to display its symbols in a public space. There are really two unpalatable alternatives: filling public space with all sorts of religious symbols, or excluding them and keeping the existing ones intact (ones, such as the Sabbath, which, in today's society, many people may no longer recognize as being religiously derived to begin with).

The court order to remove Alabama's Ten Commandments monument was the correct one. If we can now build on this foundation to erect an impermeable wall between the use of religion in public life, similar crises may be forestalled. Religion is too personal to treat as a political football, and our public space too important for it to become the preserve of one group.

quote:
Love-Warrior:

I thought the problem was that Moore kept the ten-commandments in the court-room and insisted they were the basis for law.

This seems like an over-reaction. Law is where we resolve our conflicts for how we govern ourselves. Accepting its authority shouldn't require embracing any particular religion, but its authority and alterability need to be accepted by all. Then, the question just comes down to on the basis of what may people seek to make changes in existing laws.

This presumes a dichotomy between political and religious. There is an inherent circularity in this reasoning. And the Bible's translations into English and German and other vernaculars did historically play a foundation role in the development of these languages.

If that is the language people know best then that is what they will use when they seek legal change. Saying that separation of Church and State entail their segregation has the effect of effectively giving more voice in gov't to secular-types than religious-types.

You can use religious language without making absolutist claims that circumvent the democratic process. Of course, one can also try to sway public opinion as was done by the religious language used by Martin Luther King Jr.

Examples? It seems arrogant to say it could become merely a device of political spin. Presumably the original authors had a message that transcends the attempt of others to spin it in any political direction.

Exegeting passages to buttress current-day positions is done with more than just scripture. Don't marxists quote Marx in rallying themselves around certain issues?

The Bible served as a good precedent, since it does emphasize the need to accept and obey law and to work out compromises between competing groups, in the US's case between the North and the South.

I don't know how the judgment over the cheapening of said language was made. It is true that much invocations of God in public life is cheap and pretty much meaningless, but that doesn't apply to the whole.

I also extremely dislike how the cultural wars have poisoned our politics, but this doesn't seem like the solution to that problem.

We can be inclusive without relinquishing our history and how that has come to be embodied in our political symbols. The display of the ten-commandments in some public arenas, not the one that Moore was displaying it in, need not be the imposition on other cultures/religions. Its not like they would force themselves on others, but rather just start conversations such as:why do we believe what we believe and how is this different or similar to what these commandments mean?

If we can organize a detente in the cultural wars, it is likely that Christians will splinter into different groups with different agendas. No group will possess that much overall political sway.
This will prevent religious trench warfare from affecting our public life so much.

It is simply inaccurate to say that Christians are one group and that the answer is to make them seek political changes using your language and concepts rather than the ones that come easiest to them. What this entails is saying the solution to the problems caused by the Cultural Wars is to make your side the unambiguous winner. However, positing this as the solution will likely just increase the acrimony and negative effects of the cultural wars.

dlw/George

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 11/17/2003 5:29 AM (GMT -6)

Clergy Group to Counter Conservatives

November 17, 2003
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 - In an effort to counter the influence
of conservative Christian organizations, a coalition of
moderate and liberal religious leaders is starting a
political advocacy organization to mobilize voters in
opposition to Bush administration policies.

The nonprofit organization, the Clergy Leadership Network,
plans to formally announce its formation on Friday and will
operate from an expressly religious, expressly partisan
point of view. The group cannot, under Internal Revenue
Service guidelines, endorse political candidates, and it
will have no official ties to the Democratic Party.

But the driving purpose of the organization, according to
its mission statement, is to bring about "sweeping changes
- changes in our nation's political leadership and changes
in failing public policies."

The Rev. Albert M. Pennybacker, of Lexington, Ky., chief
executive officer for the organization and the chairman of
its national committee, said: "The Christian Right has been
very articulate, but they have been exclusive and very
judgmental of anyone who doesn't agree with them. People
may want to label us the Christian Left. But what we really
are about is mainstream issues and truth, and if that makes
us left then that shines even more light on the need for a
shift in our society."

The organization seeks to counter groups like the Christian
Coalition of America and newly influential groups like the
Family Research Council and the Traditional Values
Coalition.

There are other liberal religious-based advocacy groups in
Washington, like the Interfaith Alliance, a nonprofit group
that lobbies Congress on policy issues. But the Clergy
Leadership Council will be the first national liberal
religious group, its organizers say, whose primary focus is
electoral politics and partisan political organizing.

Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana state representative who
is president of the Family Research Council, said such an
approach could be counterproductive when dealing with
churches.

"Trying to take a purely political message into church
communities has not been very successful for either
ideological side," said Mr. Perkins, a Republican whose
group usually supports Republican initiatives. "We've
learned that if you come with a party message you may
prevent some people, people who agree with you on some
issues, from hearing your message."

The new group's roughly 25-member committee is
predominantly composed of Protestant Christians. It
includes prominent figures like the Rev. William Sloane
Coffin, who was a leader in the Civil Rights movement and
the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the Rev. Joan Brown
Campbell, former general secretary of the National Council
of Churches. The founding group also includes Catholic and
Jewish members, and organizers said they hoped to draw
Muslim members as well.

"Clergy have to be careful not to rush in with solutions to
big problems, but when they see gross injustice they have
an obligation not to be silent," Mr. Coffin said. "The
arrogance and self-righteousness of the present
administration are very dangerous. And silence by members
of the clergy, in the face of such arrogance, is tantamount
to betrayal of the Gospel or the Torah or the Koran."

Several of the political group's founders are from
Midwestern and Southern states, including Kentucky, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia,
which Mr. Pennybacker called "battleground areas" in which
moderate and progressive Christians have been losing their
"political voice" to Christian conservatives.

Like many other religious organizations with political
agendas, the group is legally bound to focus on issues, not
candidates. The group's tax status as a Section 527
political organization exempts it from rules that affect
many other nonprofit religious organizations and political
action committees. It can raise unlimited money from an
unrestricted pool of donors, provided it discloses its
expenditures and income to the Internal Revenue Service.

While it cannot donate money to candidates, it hopes to
raise money for advertisements.

The group's list of issues includes the economy, health
care and civil liberties, as well as foreign policy issues,
and using faith, as stated in its organizational
guidelines, as "the lens through which public life is
viewed and consequently engaged." Many of the group's
members were active in opposing the war in Iraq.

The group also hopes to have a voice in Washington during
policy debates.

In the recent nearly 40-hour debate in the Senate over four
of President Bush's judicial nominees, religious-based
conservative groups offered running commentary to the news
media, suggesting that the nominees were being blocked
because of their religious faith. The Clergy Leadership
Network, said the Rev. Brenda Bartella Peterson, the
group's executive director, will seek to provide
alternative opinions in such debates.

Jenny Backus, a Democratic consultant working with the new
group, said: "There's been a concerted effort by Christian
conservatives to question the faith of people who disagree
with their positions in the same way that they question
their patriotism. The Clergy Leadership Network will now be
the amen corner for people of faith who express
disagreement with the administration and the Christian
Right."

The group's issue list includes no mention of hot-button
topics like abortion and gay marriage, which have been
crucial issues for conservative groups. "Our key issues are
people without jobs, people who are hungry, people burying
children killed in Iraq." Mr. Pennybacker said. "These are
real issues that override flashy talk about sexual
orientation."

John Green, a political scientist and director of the Bliss
Institute, a research center for the study of grass-roots
politics based at the University of Akron, said there were
more practical reasons for an organization like the Clergy
Leadership Network to avoid divisive issues.

"In many people's minds the words `conservative' and
`liberal' are firmly linked with positions on lifestyle
issues," Mr. Green said. "Within such a diverse coalition,
these clergy undoubtedly have congregations with different
views on gay rights and abortion. But they may be able to
find common ground on issues like war and peace, social
welfare and the need for jobs."

Ms. Peterson is the sole representative of the group
working out of its newly leased office space near the
Capitol, across from the Democratic National Committee
building. The group's organizers acknowledge that they may
have an uphill battle in gaining the kind of prominence in
Washington that some conservative Christian groups now
enjoy.

"We know it won't be easy," Ms. Peterson said. "But there
is an imperative that we be heard."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/17/politics/17CLER.html?ex=1070086124&ei=1&en=11c09eff740e0600

This group doesn't really seem to counter the religious right, since its focus is on very different issues than the religious right's issues. How it copes with the other "social" issues, that will not just go away as so many on the left wish for them to do so, is left undetermined.

The group falls short because of two things.

1. It does not seek a detente in the cultural wars.
2. It promotes issues from a religious standpoint, but it doesn't seek to promote the importance of disseminating more widely habits of political deliberation/activism, how doing so can be a way of Christians letting their lights shine.

dlw

DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 11/30/2003 12:10 PM (GMT -6)

DLW: Comments: The below article has four basic points. The first is that many in the media have very little direct contact with religious individuals. The second is that, since the early seventies, religious differences have been more prominent in politics, but, perhaps based on point one, the media treats the religious right as a much more newsworthy subject/threat than the growing secular left. The third is that religious acrimony has become more and more prominent. The fourth is that the secular views of the media/Democrat Party put it out of touch with "mainstream" USAmerica for which a belief in God is considered important.
Responses:I have little doubt of point one. Point two's development is unfortunate, given how the total number of people voting has also declined a fair amount since the early seventies. It is a legitimate for liberals to be upset about how the cultural wars have crowded out other issues and, in doing so, discouraged many from voting. What may be contended with is how should we deal with this problem. Wishful thinking like that of Howard Dean will not make it so that gays, abortion, and the confederate flag are no longer important in elections. What is required is real cultural détente where both sides get off their high-horses and admit the legitimacy of the concerns of the other side and workable compromises are reached on issues. If this can be done then, perhaps, the religious acrimony can be toned down.
I do have problems with the tone of how the author treats atheists/secularists. Disagree as we might, the better point is that Dems need to learn to be more sensitive to religious-belief as Amy Sullivan at Political Aims has pointed out. If that is accomplished then maybe the religious divide in politics will be reduced.

Are the Democrats Anti-Religion?
How the media's reporting on the Religious Right keeps it from seeing the story of the Secular Left
By Rod Dreher

As a practicing Christian, a political conservative and a professional journalist, I've long been amazed at how ignorant and uncurious my mostly intelligent and urbane colleagues are about conservatives, especially religious conservatives. Many have looked at me--their friend, despite my Catholicism and Republican Party registration--with the same slack-jawed incomprehension as elderly Southerners when they step off the tour bus in London and hear a black man speaking with a crisp British accent (I've seen this, and it's a hoot).
People like me--religious conservatives who are reasonably intelligent and sociable--aren't supposed to exist. You may recall the furor a decade ago when a Washington Post story described Christian conservatives as "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command." It's bad enough a reporter for one of the country's top newspapers made an error like that. It's staggering that it got through several layers of copy editing. For all the caterwauling about "diversity" in the media, you'd be hard-pressed to find the same uniformity of thinking in any Catholic church on Sunday as you'll find any day of the week in most American newsrooms.
True story: I once proposed a column on some now-forgotten religious theme to the then city editor of the New York Post. He looked at me like I'd lost my mind. "This is not a religious city," he said, with a straight face. As it happened, the man lived in my neighborhood. On his morning walk to the subway, he had to pass two Catholic churches, an Episcopal church, a synagogue, a mosque, an Assemblies of God Hispanic parish, and an Iglesia Bautista Hispana. He didn't see these places because he doesn't know anyone who attends them.
In the main, the men and women who bring America its news don't hate religion. In most cases, they just believe it's unimportant at best, menacing at worst. Because they don't know any religious people, they think of American religion in categories that have long been outdated.
My fellow reporters think I'm putting them on when I tell them I've been a practicing Catholic for 10 years and have only heard one sermon about abortion and none about contraception. Outside the Jewish community, Israel has no stronger supporters than among American evangelicals. That's been true for at least a generation, but the news has yet to reach American newsrooms, where there's a general assumption that these "fundamentalists" are anti-Semitic. Because journalists tend not to know religiously observant people, they see religious activity the only way they know--in terms of secular politics.
So what? Everybody knows that pro-life marchers and churches that resist gay "marriage" aren't going to get a fair shake from the newspaper. But this phenomenon is both broader and deeper than individual stories. In a media-driven society, the press sets the terms of public debate. It establishes the inescapable narrative of how society reacts to its challenges.
Anti-religious media bias also has profound implications for American politics. In an article published recently in "The Public Interest," social scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio say that journalists' parochialism blinds them to one of the biggest stories in American politics: how the Democratic Party has become a stronghold of fervent secularists, and how secularism "is just as powerful a determinant of social attitudes and voting behavior as is a religiously traditional outlook."
Among political journalists, what you might call the "official story" holds that religious conservatives bullied their way onto the American political scene with the election of Ronald Reagan, and rudely brought into the political arena the culture war that had been raging since the 1960s.

That's exactly wrong, say Bolce and De Maio, who attribute the "true origins of this conflict" to "the increased prominence of secularists within the Democratic Party, and the party's resulting antagonism toward traditional values."
Until relatively recently, both major parties were of similar mind on issues of personal morality. Then came the 1972 Democratic Convention, at which secularists--defined as agnostics, atheists, and those who seldom or never attend religious services--seized control and nominated George McGovern. Prior to that year, neither party had many secularists among its delegates. Democratic delegates were split between religious and moral traditionalists on one side, and secularists on the other. They fought over moral issues: abortion, women's rights, homosexuality, the family.
But in what Bolce and De Maio call a "secularist putsch," the non-believers triumphed, giving us what Richard Nixon mocked as the party of "acid, amnesty, and abortion," and instigating--with help from the Supreme Court on January 22, 1973--the long march of religious and moral conservatives to the GOP, which became the party of traditionalists by default.
By 1992, the parties had become thoroughly polarized around religious orientation. Only 20 percent of white Democratic delegates (N.B., this secular-religious antagonism is a white voter phenomenon, the authors say) went to religious services at least once a month, while over three times that number of white Republican delegates did.
But while the media have thoroughly reported the key role religious conservatives play in Republican Party politics, they've ignored the role militant secularists play in setting the Democratic Party's agenda. "Secularism," say Bolce and De Maio, "is no less powerful a determinant of attitudes on the contentious cultural issues than is religious traditionalism." Indeed, Republican traditionalists have not polarized politics by becoming more conservative, as conventional wisdom would have it. Instead, secularists (and to a lesser extent religious moderates) have become more liberal.
The divide has become so stark that the authors have discerned a new kind of voter: the "anti-fundamentalist." Twenty-five percent of white respondents in a survey called the American National Election Study expressed serious hostility towards religious conservatives, as opposed to only one percent who felt this strongly against Jews, and 2.5 percent who disliked blacks and Catholics to a strong degree. (Ironically, these are people who say they "'strongly agree' that one should be tolerant of persons whose moral standards are different from one's own.") Eighty percent of these voters picked Bill Clinton in 1996, with 70 percent choosing Al Gore in 2000.
In other words, if the country's first Catholic presidential candidate, Al Smith, ran for president today, his enemies wouldn't be the Bible Belt anti-Catholics rustics he faced in 1920, but today's urbane anti-Christian bigots of liberal coastal cities.
This could be the most important development in American party politics of the past 20 years, say Bolce and De Maio-and America's two leading newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have both completely missed it. In a search of the Lexis-Nexis database of domestic political news stories, op-eds, and editorials those papers published from 1990 to 2000, the authors found only 14 stories that mentioned the religious gap between the two parties.

During this same time span, the Times and Post published 392 articles on the gender gap-which represented a 9 percent differential in favor of the Democrats. The average religious gap in these same elections was 42 percentage points."
But their most striking finding was the near total lack of editorial and news coverage devoted to the increased importance of secularists to the Democratic Party. The numbers are mind-boggling: 43 stories on secularist Democrats, 682 stories on traditionalist Republicans. In 1992, the Times alone published nearly twice the number of stories about Evangelicals in the GOP than both papers did about secularists among the Democrats for the entire decade.
The bias is even worse among television journalists, who filled the airwaves with stories about the "Religious Right" and the Republican Party, but who didn't file a single story about the Secular Left's relationship to the Democrats.
I suspect that most reporters, editors, and producers would be shocked by these findings. They really do think of themselves as, to pinch a phrase, "fair and balanced." Yet Bolce and De Maio cite a poll showing that a majority of TV news directors and newspaper editors felt that Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians "have too much power." Fully one-third considered these believers to be "a threat to democracy." The same survey found that only four percent thought nonbelievers had too much influence, and the number of media professionals who perceived secularists as a threat was … zero.
America is a far different place from its newsrooms. Belief in God is, for most Americans, a sign of character. According to a March 2002 national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, more than half of those polled thought negatively of "nonbelievers." Only half that number had a low opinion of the "Christian conservative movement."
Bolce and De Maio wonder if the media elite consciously do the Democrats a favor by not pointing out what, for all intents and purposes, they are: the Godless Party. "Perhaps it is for this reason more than any other," they write, "that we do not hear in election-night analyses and postmortems that Democratic candidates have shorn up their base among the unchurched, atheists, and agnostics, in addition to the ritualistic accounts and warnings about how well Republicans are doing with evangelicals of the Christian Right."

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