Outreach, Anyone?
Kevin Drum had this to say about how liberals can reach out to those who voted for Bush but who are not "hard-core evangelicals." Specifically, he said:
All right, Kevin, right back at you: we're never going to win over the hard-core secularists, those who say that a person isn't a person until the mother agrees to bring the baby home, who say that anyone who dares challenge evolution shouldn't bother asking them for a letter of recommendation for graduate-school admission, and want to force God-fearing people to accept inverted (or perverted) sex as natural and normal to the point of denying us our freedom of association. What's more, we shouldn't try. Secularistic extremism conflicts with the core values of conservatism (not to mention with the way God intended the world to run), and the only thing we can do is continue to oppose such people with every resource at our command. No amount of "reaching out" is going to touch them. And this is definitely true of people who speak openly of forming their own liberal federation, or who demonstrably attempt to murder those who disagree with them.
But we don't need to reach such people anyway. They represent a very narrow core who make a lot of noise and have a lot of (heretofore) powerful voices behind them. (After Dan Rather's career as a forger, followed by his Election Night blatherskite performance, the Old Media are not nearly as powerful as they once were.) Plenty of John Kerry's voters are not so extreme as that. (Remember that Constitutional amendments to clarify marriage passed even in States that Kerry carried.) These are they who are never comfortable with the idea of abortion, but still believe (incorrectly, but understandably) that a baby isn't a baby until some arbitrary time has passed. (How in the world do you sympathize with someone you can't even see with the naked eye?). Likewise, they recognize that human beings are a cut above the animals, but are unwilling to challenge the impressive-looking scientific dogma that evolution is "the right answer" to the question of how we got here (and also on how old the earth is). They are not prepared to attend a gay "wedding," but they somehow are convinced that present law forbids a patient in a hospital to grant visiting privileges to his (or her) roommate (of either gender) if he/she wants, or that wills bequeathing all one's worldly goods to one's roommate are unenforceable and always subject to contest. And they see how some of us are very inefficient in our use of natural resources, and you have to admit that this is very poor witness.
In short, they disagree with us, but with better witness, they might realize that
I'll give you a real-world example: Recently I went to my (part-time) workplace and asked for a new version of a certain document that consisted of an inch-thick stack of papers, three-hole-punched for loose-leaf binders. My manager offered to get me a thick, heavy binder to put it in. I said, "Why bother with that? I already have a binder containing the obsolete version of this document--so I'm going to remove the old pages, toss them into the paper-recycling pile, and put the new document into the old binder, which I've barely used anyway."
And she said, "Wow! You're trying to save the planet!"
I wasn't thinking in such grand terms. I was just thinking about being efficient, about not having yet another loose-leaf binder lying around (that had my employer's name on it, BTW), and mostly about using what I already have. But that manager showed that she might be reachable if we would but demonstrate that we can be good neighbors. So on the issue of conservation of natural resources and especially on pollution, we can come to an agreement with more people than you might suppose.
No, I'm not interested in regulations that do nothing but distort the market (and harm the tax base to the point where they cost more money than they save). But neither do I approve of factories that spew out sulfuric-acid fumes with impunity--that's just downright un-neighborly. With a vast improvement on the science that we use for such decisions, we should ban outright the spewing of the worst pollutants--and as for the rest, let's put a price on them that is appropriate for the social costs that each pollutant actually incurs.
Similarly, the sun will probably never shine brightly enough, nor the wind blow hard enough, for a combination of solar and wind power to solve all of our energy needs. But that shouldn't stop us from using these sources wherever we can, even if all we can do is save a little money on our fuel bills. And while outright subsidies for such projects might not have an economic justification, they certainly have a military one--or at least one built on the concept of homeland defense, which goes directly to the God-given functions that government performs [see Romans 13:1-7].
So yes, I can "reach out" to anyone who has a reasonable misunderstanding either of my position or of the realities of our modern world. My job is to educate, and to bear witness. And part of witness is to live a life consistent with God's prescirption for man's relationship with man--individually and collectively (i.e., "society"). That's an argument that the hard-core liberals will find very hard to beat--and I think they know it.
Kevin Drum, BTW, caught a lot of grief for his remarks, as you can see by reading the comments to his post. I have nothing further to say about the comments than I've already said about the crazy talk of secession and even murder--not to mention specific felonies committed both before and after the election by Democrat voters against Republican voters, politicians, and volunteers.
Here's the thing: we're never going to win over the hard core evangelicals, the ones who want to ban abortion, teach creationism in biology classes, and recriminalize gay sex. What's more, we shouldn't try. Religious extremism conflicts with the core values of liberalism, and the only thing we can do is continue fighting these folks tooth and nail. No amount of "reaching out" is going to touch them.(Hat Tip: World Mag Blog)But the fact is that we don't need to reach them anyway. We didn't lose the election by much, and there are plenty of red staters who aren't extremists. They're the ones who are uncomfortable with homosexuality, but understand that a steadily increasing acceptance of gay rights is probably inevitable. They don't want to ban abortion, but feel like it's common sense to require parental notification. And they're ready to agree that we need to do something about global warming, but that doesn't mean they take kindly to thinly veiled accusations that they're personally responsible for it just because they drive an SUV or eat a Big Mac.
In other words, they disagree with us, but not so much that they can't be brought around or persuaded to vote for us based on other issues. Too often, though, a visceral loathing of being lectured at by city folks wins out and they end up marking their ballots for people like George Bush.
All right, Kevin, right back at you: we're never going to win over the hard-core secularists, those who say that a person isn't a person until the mother agrees to bring the baby home, who say that anyone who dares challenge evolution shouldn't bother asking them for a letter of recommendation for graduate-school admission, and want to force God-fearing people to accept inverted (or perverted) sex as natural and normal to the point of denying us our freedom of association. What's more, we shouldn't try. Secularistic extremism conflicts with the core values of conservatism (not to mention with the way God intended the world to run), and the only thing we can do is continue to oppose such people with every resource at our command. No amount of "reaching out" is going to touch them. And this is definitely true of people who speak openly of forming their own liberal federation, or who demonstrably attempt to murder those who disagree with them.
But we don't need to reach such people anyway. They represent a very narrow core who make a lot of noise and have a lot of (heretofore) powerful voices behind them. (After Dan Rather's career as a forger, followed by his Election Night blatherskite performance, the Old Media are not nearly as powerful as they once were.) Plenty of John Kerry's voters are not so extreme as that. (Remember that Constitutional amendments to clarify marriage passed even in States that Kerry carried.) These are they who are never comfortable with the idea of abortion, but still believe (incorrectly, but understandably) that a baby isn't a baby until some arbitrary time has passed. (How in the world do you sympathize with someone you can't even see with the naked eye?). Likewise, they recognize that human beings are a cut above the animals, but are unwilling to challenge the impressive-looking scientific dogma that evolution is "the right answer" to the question of how we got here (and also on how old the earth is). They are not prepared to attend a gay "wedding," but they somehow are convinced that present law forbids a patient in a hospital to grant visiting privileges to his (or her) roommate (of either gender) if he/she wants, or that wills bequeathing all one's worldly goods to one's roommate are unenforceable and always subject to contest. And they see how some of us are very inefficient in our use of natural resources, and you have to admit that this is very poor witness.
In short, they disagree with us, but with better witness, they might realize that
- They actually agree with us on more than they might think, and
- on other issues, Christian doctrine is not so radical as they might suppose.
I'll give you a real-world example: Recently I went to my (part-time) workplace and asked for a new version of a certain document that consisted of an inch-thick stack of papers, three-hole-punched for loose-leaf binders. My manager offered to get me a thick, heavy binder to put it in. I said, "Why bother with that? I already have a binder containing the obsolete version of this document--so I'm going to remove the old pages, toss them into the paper-recycling pile, and put the new document into the old binder, which I've barely used anyway."
And she said, "Wow! You're trying to save the planet!"
I wasn't thinking in such grand terms. I was just thinking about being efficient, about not having yet another loose-leaf binder lying around (that had my employer's name on it, BTW), and mostly about using what I already have. But that manager showed that she might be reachable if we would but demonstrate that we can be good neighbors. So on the issue of conservation of natural resources and especially on pollution, we can come to an agreement with more people than you might suppose.
No, I'm not interested in regulations that do nothing but distort the market (and harm the tax base to the point where they cost more money than they save). But neither do I approve of factories that spew out sulfuric-acid fumes with impunity--that's just downright un-neighborly. With a vast improvement on the science that we use for such decisions, we should ban outright the spewing of the worst pollutants--and as for the rest, let's put a price on them that is appropriate for the social costs that each pollutant actually incurs.
Similarly, the sun will probably never shine brightly enough, nor the wind blow hard enough, for a combination of solar and wind power to solve all of our energy needs. But that shouldn't stop us from using these sources wherever we can, even if all we can do is save a little money on our fuel bills. And while outright subsidies for such projects might not have an economic justification, they certainly have a military one--or at least one built on the concept of homeland defense, which goes directly to the God-given functions that government performs [see Romans 13:1-7].
So yes, I can "reach out" to anyone who has a reasonable misunderstanding either of my position or of the realities of our modern world. My job is to educate, and to bear witness. And part of witness is to live a life consistent with God's prescirption for man's relationship with man--individually and collectively (i.e., "society"). That's an argument that the hard-core liberals will find very hard to beat--and I think they know it.
Kevin Drum, BTW, caught a lot of grief for his remarks, as you can see by reading the comments to his post. I have nothing further to say about the comments than I've already said about the crazy talk of secession and even murder--not to mention specific felonies committed both before and after the election by Democrat voters against Republican voters, politicians, and volunteers.
posted by Temlakos at 3:38 PM
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