May 9, 2004
TWO TO TANGO (via Jeff Brokaw:
he Politics of Partisan Neutrality (Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio, May 2004, First Things)
Americans who want to understand conflicts between Democrats and Republicans during the election season have received precious little help from the media. While reporters usually recognize that there is some sort of problem about “values” and about “faith-based” principles, and that the Democrats and Republicans are often on opposite sides, writers and editors tend to publish news and analysis as if the situation were as follows: The Christian right, having infiltrated the Republican Party, is importing its divisive religious ideas into our public life, whereas the Democratic Party is the neutral camp of tolerant and pluralistic Americans.This way of framing the matter predominates, not only because it reflects the personal beliefs of many journalists, but also because it draws upon a long American tradition of suspicion and fear of committed Catholics and evangelical Protestants. (In the elite newspapers and magazines, the number of journalists in either of those groups is tiny.) It is thus comfortable for journalists to conceive of religiously based political conflict in terms of an aggressive Christian right advancing upon a beleaguered neutral and pluralistic center and left.
What the journalists leave out of their accounts is the fact that the nonreligious have also become aggressive actors on the political stage and that they possess and promote, in fact, an overarching religious worldview of their own—one that can fairly be called secularism.
This point is strongly supported from the results of our analysis (using the Lexis-Nexis database) of how the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post wrote about the culture wars between 1990 and 2000. Over this ten-year period, these three newspapers published just eighteen articles linking the culture wars to the secularist-religious cleavage dividing the Democratic and Republican parties. During this same time span, however, these papers published 929 news stories about the political machinations of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, while doing only fifty-nine stories about the pivotal role played by secularists in these conflicts. The press did not overlook the culture wars, just the involvement of secularists in them.
The authors go on to provide a good look at how secular activism has claimed the Democratic Party.
One easy way to frame the above is to look at gay marriage, where secular activists and the Courts changed several thousand years of Western law but it is the attempt of the religious to preserve that tradition which is reported as radical and divisive. Meanwhile, all of the polling done shows that the conservatives are in the majority on the issue.
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 9, 2004 8:59 AMLet's call a spade a spade. They use the term secularism to make the reality, Marxist socialism acceptable. The Democrat party has been brilliantly infiltrated and usurped by the progressive socialists. I suspect it began in earnest during the McCarthy hearings and done so well over time that many of the original Democrats have either accepted or never realized it.
Lenin's soul must be smiling as it burns in hell.
Posted by: genecis at May 9, 2004 1:42 PM"...where secular activists and the Courts changed several thousand years of Western law..."
So? Activists courts also changed racial segregation in the US, as well as laws regarding "race mixing" and any number of other barbaric, illiberal and anti-freedom laws. Indeed, arguments from tradition are some of the poorest excuses for the sort of bigotry and prejudice you attempt to justify here.
Posted by: Plutarch at May 9, 2004 8:08 PMPlutarch:
They need no excuse, the Court is frequently mistaken.
Posted by: oj at May 9, 2004 8:34 PMI may be wrong, but I believe the reference to "several thousand years of Western law" is not too mild hyperbole. First, there was and is no such concept as "Western law." What was the west? The dark Celtic forest? The Roman attempt to civilize? The medievel attempts for coalescence into Christian principalities and later, nation-states?.
I believe that marriage was first a tribal act and then solely a religious "life-cycle" event. I grant and support the fact that marriage - the joining of the young to produce the next generation - was the norm and the law, even in Greece,where homosexual practice was not in disfavor. That acceptance ended with the near universal acceptance of Christianity and its beliefs in this regard, bottomed on the core biblical Judaic law determining the practice to be an "abomination."
However, regardless of the acceptance or non-acceptance of the practice, marriage remained essentially a private, religious matter well up into the modern day. Excepting the upper class, where rulership and lands were at issue, there was no state action in marriage matters - even no recording of marriages - in several western states of the United States well into the late 1800s.
I do not believe that the states - or the courts that purport to interpret the laws of those states - should involve themselves to the extent of determining that one of our our core cultural bases in wrong. At bottom, this is not a racial, sexual or religious issue. Harkening back to discredited miscegenation laws are inapposite. I do not accept that the states should accede to the frantic demands for validation of a conduct or behavior that our culture has named wrong and, in many times and places, as criminal.
What then to do? I believe that the states - given the challenge - should clearly meet that challenge and declare that marriage, as such, is between a man and a woman [I leave for another time the questions that arise when one or both of the applicants claims to have changed his or her sex], to be recorded in the appropriate state register.
I see no harm in any two persons, of whatever sex, registering as domestic partners, for the purposes of inheritance, property ownership, medical care plans or the like. I do see harm to the public weal in granting the tax relief of a married couple. That benefit was occasioned and granted primarily due to the cost of raising the next generation.
Posted by: Sydney J. Chase at May 10, 2004 9:51 AMI may be wrong, but I believe the reference to "several thousand years of Western law" is not too mild hyperbole. First, there was and is no such concept as "Western law." What was the west? The dark Celtic forest? The Roman attempt to civilize? The medievel attempts for coalescence into Christian principalities and later, nation-states?.
I believe that marriage was first a tribal act and then solely a religious "life-cycle" event. I grant and support the fact that marriage - the joining of the young to produce the next generation - was the norm and the law, even in Greece,where homosexual practice was not in disfavor. That acceptance ended with the near universal acceptance of Christianity and its beliefs in this regard, bottomed on the core biblical Judaic law determining the practice to be an "abomination."
However, regardless of the acceptance or non-acceptance of the practice, marriage remained essentially a private, religious matter well up into the modern day. Excepting the upper class, where rulership and lands were at issue, there was no state action in marriage matters - even no recording of marriages - in several western states of the United States well into the late 1800s.
I do not believe that the states - or the courts that purport to interpret the laws of those states - should involve themselves to the extent of determining that one of our our core cultural bases in wrong. At bottom, this is not a racial, sexual or religious issue. Harkening back to discredited miscegenation laws are inapposite. I do not accept that the states should accede to the frantic demands for validation of a conduct or behavior that our culture has named wrong and, in many times and places, as criminal.
What then to do? I believe that the states - given the challenge - should clearly meet that challenge and declare that marriage, as such, is between a man and a woman [I leave for another time the questions that arise when one or both of the applicants claims to have changed his or her sex], to be recorded in the appropriate state register.
I see no harm in any two persons, of whatever sex, registering as domestic partners, for the purposes of inheritance, property ownership, medical care plans or the like. I do see harm to the public weal in granting the tax relief of a married couple. That benefit was occasioned and granted primarily due to the cost of raising the next generation.
Posted by: Sydney J. Chase at May 10, 2004 9:52 AMThe longer this goes on, the better The Handmaid's Tale looks as a how-to-manual.
Posted by: Ken at May 10, 2004 12:41 PM