Some articles of interest to me
Ron Suskind's analysis of George Bush's type of faith: ![[WWW]](/www/moin/htdocs/classic/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
The New York Times > Magazine > In the Magazine: Without a Doubt
the New Pantagruel: Hymns in the Whorehouse: A Dialogue on the Presidential Election
Progressive faith did not lose this election by Jim Wallis:
-
We've now begun a real debate in this country over what the most important "religious issues" are in politics, and that discussion will continue far beyond this election. The Religious Right fought to keep the focus on gay marriage and abortion and even said that good Christians and Jews could only vote for the president. But many moderate and progressive Christians disagreed. We insisted that poverty is also a religious issue, pointing to thousands of verses in the Bible on the poor. The environment - protection of God's creation - is also one of our religious concerns. And millions of Christians in America believe the war in Iraq was not a "just war."
-
For more on that, we turn to: Rick Warren, founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, and author of the best-selling book, "The Purpose Driven Life"; author and essayist Barbara Ehrenreich-- her most recent book is "Nickel and Dimed: Surviving in Low-Wage America"; Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, a Christian ministry that advocates for social justice; and Morris Fiorina, a political science professor at Stanford's Hoover Institute and the author of "Culture War: The Myth of a Polarized America."
The New Republic Online: Polls Apart:
-
If this is what passes for rational discourse on the left--and for too many liberals these days, it is--then just who is it that belongs to the "reality-based community" and just who is it that suffers under the weight of what the left used to call "false consciousness"? The question merits an answer, since Wills and otherwise sensible voices on the left--such as The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, who professes himself "alarmed that so many of our fellow citizens could look the other way and not hold Bush accountable for utter incompetence in Iraq" and "amazed that a majority was not concerned about heaping a huge debt burden on our children just to give large tax breaks to the rich"--see their task as raising the level of consciousness of Americans out of step with reality. But what if their own estrangement leads not to insight, but rather to blindness and, more important, to separation from the very Americans they mean to influence?
Postelection Perspectives / 'Holy war' over moral values or contempt for opinion?:
-
Put simply, the contempt and condescension leveled at Bush voters by liberal commentators is disturbing. Many who advocate toleration and respect for diversity appear to be far less committed to those values as applied to people who disagree with them. Americans who attend church with some regularity, who support civil unions but not same-sex marriage, who favor some regulation of abortion, and who dislike soft porn on prime-time TV are not ignorant religious fanatics bent on avenging their loss in the Scopes Monkey Trial. Rather, they are the mainstream of America. If Democrats force them to choose between religious conservatives in the Republican Party and anti- religious elitists in the Democratic Party, Democrats probably will lose.
Contempt for popular opinion reveals an anti-democratic strain among some of today's Democrats. Many of them are too young to remember, but some of the social policies of the 1960s and '70s were imposed by appointed bureaucrats and unelected judges rather than elected representatives. One of the results was a backlash that gave Republicans control of the presidency for 20 of the next 24 years during which time they transformed the federal judiciary from a liberal to a conservative force. Capital "D" Democrats should remember that small "d" democracy is a slow, incremental process. They should treat their fellow Americans in the red states as thinking people who want the best for their country. Discussion will be more productive than derision.
