Here’s a great email from my cousin Lorrin (better known as Andy) to my mother. He’s a much better writer than I am. The email refers to his wife, Marvyne, and to my brother, Jeff, who has appeared on this blog before, and who is quite upset about the election results.
The Faith Patrol dropped by today to make sure my picture of Jesus is properly displayed over the mantel and check out my church attendance punch card. A little unnerving, but a small price to pay for a moral society, at long last, under the watchful eye of our God-loving Maximum Leader.
Actually I’m starting to get slightly depressed myself, not because of the election results, which of course I welcomed, but because of the extreme bitterness of many of the Bush-haters. I don’t recall anything like it, except maybe during the Vietnam era. You’d think we were on the verge of a homophobic Christo-fascist dictatorship, the paranoia fanned by the news media, which loves nothing more than to seize on a dubious generalization and flog it to death. I think it’s a gross exaggeration that exacerbates antagonisms in a way that’s most unhealthy for the body politic.
“Moral values,” especially the gay marriage issue, were certainly a factor in the election, and people who saw it as the overriding issue probably gave Bush the margin of victory. But then the nutty far-out left and the lopsided black vote would have given Kerry the margin of victory if he had won. Anyway, the born-again Christians don’t constitute as much of a monolith as the Michael Moore/Barbra Streisand/George Soros left–at least 20% of the evangelicals went for Kerry. And they couldn’t possibly impose a repressive Christian agenda on contemporary secular America even if they wanted to, which I don’t think most of them do anyway. They just feel beleaguered, unable to insulate themselves or their children from a pervasive anything-goes social and media climate that they see as having lost its moral compass.
The liberal media does its best to portray Bush as a religious nut (long article in the New York Times Magazine just before the election, for instance), but while I think his faith is genuine he doesn’t flaunt it unless he’s prodded by reporters and he’s given absolutely no indication that he chooses this or that policy because he thinks God tells him to. He may think or at least hope that God is on his side, but he doesn’t pretend to be God’s agent on earth. In his post-election news conference he went out of his way to emphasize religious freedom and diversity, everybody’s unequivocal right to “worship as he or she sees fit,” or not worship at all, as he made a point of saying a couple of times.
My own youthful atheism has mellowed into a somewhat more tolerant agnosticism–I still find it hard to comprehend that intelligent people can believe in Christian mythology, but some obviously do and I don’t begrudge them their faith. I certainly don’t feel threatened by them. Aside from abortion, which is kind of a special case, I think they’re generally far less coercive than the secular left, which of course has its own “moral values” and doesn’t hesitate to impose them on the rest of us with the help of sympathetic judges, advancing liberal social policies–on abortion, gay rights, affirmative action etc.–that often defy majority opinion and could never be democratically legislated outside of the courts. Just because secular moral values differ from the Christian perspective doesn’t mean they’re not moral values.
As it happens, I’m strongly pro-choice myself, pro-gay rights (if not necessarily gay marriage), dubious about the war and the deficit, vehemently opposed to life-at-any-cost fanaticism like John Ashcroft’s attempt to overturn the Oregon law permitting assisted suicide in terminal cases, unhappy with the administration’s one-sided support for Israel. But I had no reservations about voting for Bush, partly because I thought John (“I have a plan”) Kerry was a flatulent phony who offered no realistic alternatives on Iraq or anything else. Those endless references to his supposed Vietnam heroism and that ludicrous PR stunt, dressing up in a silly camouflage suit and going goose hunting in the probably delusional belief that it would help him with the redneck vote.
I don’t know if you check out Nick’s blog, but he posted a very good piece on Sunday about the utter political conformity of the left-wing milieu he finds himself surrounded by in Nashville–the herd of independent minds, as somebody once described it. It rang a bell with me because it’s very similar to my own milieu here in blue New York (perhaps a mirror image of your situation in Idaho, although I suspect that Boise itself is less rock-ribbed and I’m sure you have friends who agree with you). Like most of our own friends, acquaintances and relatives, Marvyne remains an unreconstructed Democrat but unlike some in our circle has taken the Bush victory in stride, though she dislikes Bush probably more than I dislike Kerry. As I told her, she’d vote for Mortimer Snerd if he was for abortion rights and against the war. But I helped her cancel out my vote by driving her to the polling place. Of course she would have walked there otherwise so there wasn’t much I could do to prevent it and I thought I might as well curry a little favor with the in-house opposition.
I’m genuinely sorry to hear that Jeff is so depressed by the current scene that he doesn’t want to teach political science any more. I hope events will persuade him that he’s too pessimistic. Happy Thanksgiving…Lorrin