STARBUCKS TORQUEMADAS

Christians and Karl Rove hold no monopoly on values(Floyd J. McKay, Seattle Times, November 10th, 2004)

The problem with equating "moral values" and Christianity —or any other religion —is that movements based on one set of religious tenets will inevitably drive toward the extreme. That is, those who have felt the faith will attempt to expel apostates or convert those outside the fold. The faith test becomes ever more strict, expelling moderates and rewarding zealots.

Morality is found within the heart and soul of each human being, and is not equated with any one religious faith. Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. were of different faiths, but their moral vision changed the world. Great good and great evil have proceeded in the names of popes and ayatollahs.

The task for Democrats is to do well by doing good, particularly at the state and local levels, and to prevent the irresponsible exercise of power by a national establishment now in the hands of one party. It is not to conduct a revival meeting.

Republicans who seek to succeed Bush must now pass a litmus test of religious faith or risk losing "the base." Bush was unique in his ability and willingness to place his personal faith on public display. Would-be imitators of either party do so at considerable risk.

The race to be most pious ultimately moves a nation to extremism, a path all of us should hope to avoid.

This is all very trite and vapid. Like many floundering progressives, Professor McKay uses the spectre of hypothetical religious extremism to avoid confronting the realities of 2004. His inability to see secular progressivism as a competing political faith that has been proselytizing intensely and implementing an increasingly dogmatic and undemocratic agenda for many years prevents him from recognizing where the intolerance and extremism in modern society actually lies.

What are the “value” issues that currently divide the religious right from the secular left? On the right, one thinks of traditional symbols like Christmas trees and the Ten Commandments in public buildings, the preservation of traditional marriage while accepting civil unions, individual responsibility but with a desire to assist the disadvantaged, military strength, domestic security based upon protecting the general public, limited restrictions on pornography in public, public sexual modesty, a democratic and federalist approach to abortion, greater parental involvement in public education, preserving rights to gun ownership that have existed since the Revolution and a criminal process designed by elected legislators, not judges.

On the left, we have the destruction of traditional marriage by judicial fiat, subservience of national sovereignty to global opinion, antipathy to growth based upon trendy, unsettled science and the paramountcy of nature over humans, public education directed exclusively by teachers’ unions and bureaucrats, free abortion for anyone anywhere under any circumstance, sexual exibitionism, domestic security based upon the sanctity of dissent, the confiscation of most guns, unfettered and constitutionally protected pornography, affirmative action for ever-expanding categories of oppressed, a culture of victimhood and psychological dependency, the rigorous exclusion of all religious symbolism from public life and a steady constriction of the powers of elected representatives through the judicial appropriation of legislative powers.

So who more resembles the Inquisitors?