Cherielabombe said on Barbelith that it's important to make it clear that, for example, working for equal rights is _what Jesus would do_. I think that's a wonderful formulation - making it clear that you understand the way that these people think, and that you are ready to act in a secular fashion according to a broader ethics that tallies with their own.
with all due respect, i think you're missing the point on this one. i've had a lot of arguments online and elsewhere with evangelicals on this very subject. first of all, they don't see supporting gay rights as being charitable. they firmly believe that gay people, in general, are leading a sinful life that leads to drug abuse, STDs, domestic abuse, promiscuity, heartbreak, suicide, and pedophilia in this world, and, of course, eternal damnation in the next. they don't see what we're doing as being charitable, they see it as enabling an self-destructive addiction to gay sex. they think that the "homosexual lifestyle" is not only morally wrong, but bad for you, and they have some pseudoscience and such to back it up. they think they're being charitable in the "tough love" sense: telling the homosexuals what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.
also, if pressed, they will point out that Jesus was not about tolerance, he was about truth. he went among prostitutes to save them from prostitution, not to condone their lifestyle. he came not to bring peace, but a sword. no one goes to the Father except through him.
so, if you try to go the "what would Jesus do?" route, you will get an emphatic, well-argued response that that is most certainly not what Jesus would do, and that the liberal media and soft/false moral teachers have given you the wrong impression of Jesus. do you have a few moments to hear about the real message of Jesus? your soul could be at stake... etc etc etc.
frankly, they've heard that one, and they've heard it often enough that they have a canned rhetorical response which they drill into wavering teens at Bible study. they have been warned that the liberals will try to distort Jesus' message of real love to match their twisted, self-indulgent, and unhealthy liberal version of love. they all know the drill on this one, and you're not going to make any headway there. and it doesn't just apply to cultural issues - it applies to things like welfare, where they've all been drilled on the conservative dogma of the "cycle of dependence" and how they have to be willing to let people fail, so they can learn for themselves how destructive their lifestyle is and adopt a better Christian life. to them, poverty is the result of bad moral choices, e.g. teenage pregnancies, drug abuse, single-parent households, etc., and poverty in America is the direct result of the decline of the family.
But that seems to me to be a perfectly good way to communicate (although more directly than John Kerry did): I have my beliefs, I respect your right to hold your beliefs, and I am not going to force you to act against them, but I have to think of what is good for all the American people when I legislate.
it's not just a question of moral issues as moral issues: they sincerely believe that all of America's problems are the results of deviations from God's instruction manual, and that by bringing America back to God, they will make everything else better, because God's Law isn't just some arbitrary set of rules, it's what's really best for us. when Americans started putting their own needs above God's Law, they began to destroy themselves and you can see the results in the ghettoes of America. you will never, ever, ever get these people to accept that anything which violates God's law as they understand it would ever be what's "good for all the American people."
I like that last one in particular: so there’s no genuine spiritual foundation behind any of this, just resentment at being history’s have-nots.
i'm going to come out and say this: all moral/spiritual/cultural beliefs are basically evolutionary responses which are attempts to adapt to material needs. people valued stability and tradition in feudal Europe because they lived in an agricultural society that needed them to believe in stability and tradition in order to survive. people began talking about the rights of the individual and so on and so forth because they were living in an emergent industrial society which needed to treat people as individuals in order to function. etc etc. people in a given place and time develop the moral convictions that help them function on a political and economic level. that's all there is to "morality."
First, because it doesn’t work: Kerry tried to win the residency without winning the South, and we see how well that worked.
this, i will concede, is a problem, and it's the core problem we need to address. it's an issue of strategy.
“Wait for them to die off” doesn’t strike me as a particularly pragmatic strategy, either.
it's not going to be too much longer. given:
1) the increasing demand for oil combined with the approaching peak of supply for oil
2) our ballooning debt combined with the impending baby boomer retirement
3) their total dependence on government spending we're not going to be able to afford for much longer
4) the inevitable rush to globalism
given all of those things, they're already dead, they just don't know it yet. we have to start acknowledging that rural America is, by and large, a Third World country which has been insulated from the reality of that situation because they're under the same umbrella as us. we're not going to be capable of extending that umbrella much longer, and the only question that will remain is whether we allow them to drag us down into obsolescence, or if we are able to remain stable and prosperous enough during the rough times to come to be able to help their next generation with development.
We cannot abandon our brothers and sisters to ignorance and misery and manipulation by the cynical and the hateful. We cannot allow our brothers and sisters to be used as tools of their own undoing. This stops here.
I have to believe that these people can be saved.
i appreciate the sentiment, and i sympathize, but has it occurred to you that there might be limits to American power?
we, as Americans, have persisted in the delusion that we can do anything, and we've limited our discussions to whether or not we should. the Republicans say we shouldn't, because people need to learn to stand up on their own two feet, and the Democrats say we should, because that's what a decent, civilized society does.
however, both sides are predicated on the arrogant presumption that we can do anything. it is past time to recognize that this is not true. we cannot save rural America from imploding anymore than we could "save" Vietnam from Communism or "save" Iraq from Saddam. Red America is fucked, and there's not a fucking thing we can do about it right now.
the next two or three decades are going to be absolutely brutal for both Americas, as a result of our massive debts and the fact that we're deeply wedded to an obsolete production model and a fossil fuel-driven infrastructure which is starting to hang like an albatross around our necks. when someone's drowning, the first rule lifeguards observe is making sure that they don't put themselves in jeopardy and transform a situation with one person drowning into two people drowning. right now, Red America is drowning. however, we're not too much better off, though we are better adapted to weathering the storm. if we let them drag us down, we're both fucked, probably forever, whereas if we successfully make the transition out of an industrial economy into a fully postindustrial economy, we can integrate them later.
that, frankly, is the best possible scenario. it's not pretty, it's not nice, but all the alternative are worse. it's all well and good to talk about how we should save them, but the simple fact is that we can't, and trying is only likely to get us both fucked. hard decisions need to be made. think of it like triage - you have to take the patient with the best chance of survival, and focus your primary efforts on them first. |
