[IP] more on My (longish) essay the morning after
Begin forwarded message:
From: Benjamin Kuipers <kuipers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: November 5, 2004 1:05:45 AM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: "Professor Jonathan I. Ezor" <jezor@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, Benjamin Kuipers
<kuipers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] My (longish) essay the morning after
For IP, if you wish.
At 3:31 PM -0500 11/4/04, David Farber wrote:
MORNING IN AMERICA; MOURNING FOR AMERICA
Professor Jonathan I. Ezor
Touro Law Center
jezor@xxxxxxxxxxxx
...
I literally cannot understand how anyone, let alone a majority of
American
voters, could give George Bush another term after what he has done
with his
first.
I've heard a lot of this, both before and after the election. I've
even said it a number of times. We simply can't comprehend how people
could support George Bush. And of course, this contributed to our
defeat. We were blind-sided: clobbered by something we had made
invisible to ourselves, so we couldn't see it coming. Since we had
made it invisible, even the visible evidence was treated as irrelevant
noise.
We ignored the issue of religious and moral values. We dismissed them
as the concerns of "right-wing fundamentalist extremists", who we
figured would be a marginal and unreachable part of the electorate.
Both Right and Left seemed to agree that religious and moral values are
equivalent to being anti-abortion and anti-gay-marriage. We wrote
those issues off, and those voters. The Left and the Right agreed that
religious and moral values are the exclusive domain of the Right.
I've heard many Democrats mystified how so many people could vote
against their own economic self-interest. But there's a lot of people
for whom religious and moral values *are* more important than voting in
their own economic self-interest. Many of them were quite unhappy with
things that the Bush administration had done. Some voted for Kerry.
But most saw that only one candidate was deeply concerned with
religious and moral values, so they reluctantly sent Bush back to the
White House, with all his flaws.
It didn't have to be this way. The Civil Rights movement was driven in
many ways by religious and moral values, and so was much of the
anti-Vietnam protest. Martin Luther King spoke deeply and directly to
the shared religious and moral values of the nation. Not so Jesse
Jackson and Al Sharpton, but even they are far more effective than any
of our white Democratic candidates.
We Democrats argued policy and economic advantage, while the
Republicans argued Right and Wrong. Guess who got the votes?
Where were the voices on the Left quoting the Bible: "As you have done
to the least of these my children, you have done to Me"? This connects
the problem of social justice to the religious basis that drives much
of the country. [I can feel many of you squirm just reading this, much
less imagining saying it as part of a campaign!]
Where were the people thundering to Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, "Thou
shalt not bear false witness!"
You don't have to be committed to the Bible as Holy Writ to know that
it contains a lot of important wisdom, and that it speaks deeply to the
most fundamental values of a large and vital part of our population.
If we Democrats act as though that aspect of the electorate is
invisible, or simply cede it to the Republicans, we deserve to lose.
And of course, we did. [Given the world situation at the moment, we
should probably get educated about the Q'uran, for exactly the same
reason.]
Now let me really grasp the Third Rail in this argument ...
We Democrats have allowed the abortion debate to be framed in a way
that, ultimately, we can't win. (Maybe they can't either, but we
certainly can't.) We've allowed the two visible positions on abortion
to polarize to absurd extremes: Ultimate Evil versus Personal Whim.
We need to take a morally defensible position on abortion, recognizing
the moral weight of the act of abortion. The decision of when abortion
is the lesser of evils should not be made by the federal government,
but by the woman with her family and physician. But we must
acknowledge that the lesser of two evils is still an evil.
It is a moral scandal that there are almost a million abortions a year
in the United States. Democrats should be able to work with
Republicans to reduce that number by *every* means possible. Not just
abstinence education and adoption, but sex education and contraception
too. We've allowed ourselves to be marginalized into the absurd
position of claiming that abortion is a morally neutral act. Most
people, and virtually every parent, knows that that is simply not true.
There are times when abortion is the lesser of evils, and it is not
the government's role to make that decision. But a million a year is
way, way too many. We should frame the effort to reduce the number of
abortions through responsible behavior. The position that should be
marginalized is the one that wants to ban sex education, contraception,
and abortion.
We Democrats are supposed to be the party that welcomes diversity. We
had better be able to welcome a diversity of serious religious and
moral values, not just ask our supporters to check them at the door.
Otherwise, they will go where they are welcome and valued for this
important part of themselves.
Ben Kuipers
--
Benjamin Kuipers, Professor email: kuipers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Computer Sciences Department tel: 1-512-471-9561
University of Texas at Austin fax: 1-512-471-8885
Austin, Texas 78712 USA
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kuipers
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