I can’t stop thinking about the issues raised by the Archbishop of Australia in his article. I have always been of the opinion, that, yes, we do have to put up with having a billion dollar porn industry and an abortion rate in the tens of millions, etc., etc., as the price of freedom and democracy. When real freedom is granted to a species that has been without it for millenia, for, in fact, its entire recorded history, with minor, criminal exceptions, then one must expect a lot of unfortunate choices. My hope has been that, as Miles Davis once said about kicking his heroin habit, you can get tired of anything. And, I have believed, there is no real alternative to letting free people work through their bad choices.
At the same time, as the father of four children (now grown, thank the Lord), two boys and two girls, I am not at all sanguine about having my kids raised by gansta rap, video games, internet porn, and other nefarious influences which are more or less completely beyond my control. I don’t think one has to be a crazed, fanatic, religious fundamentalist to be uncomfortable with the modern American environment in which one is forced to live and raise one’s children. So it doesn’t surprise or alarm me that perhaps many voters were influenced by “moral values” in their election choices. Good luck to them, although I doubt that there will be any perceptible changes in our society just because George Bush is president.
Unfortunately, the good Archbishop does not really go into detail about how we are to achieve “democratic personalism”. He calls it “a work of persuasion and evangelisation, more than political activism.” Fine, but that’s what we have now.
I can easily blame Osama Bin Laden, Al Quaeda, and their ilk for their tyrannical death cult, but I can not easily blame the many Muslims who are reluctant to adopt Western-style value-neutral democracy. Is there some middle way that I am missing?