NQR : Topgallant : Rants

Reclaiming liberal morality

Originally posted November 7, 2004:

Biggest outcry I heard from my other post: That there's nothing you can do to change the minds of these people. You're wrong. There is something all of us can do, and it is simply this: reclaim our morality. The assholes in the SBC conference who made fighting homosexuality their top priority over healing families and teaching men and women how to make their marriages last don't have a coup on morals. And yet they have made everyone think they have. You want to know which Protestant denomination has the largest divorce rate? Guess who. And yet these people are the ones who have convinced American protestants that they know what's right and that their definition of right and wrong should inform our political beliefs.

Throughout this election year, as I read the news, as I listened to debates between primary candidates and as I watched the debates, there was one thing I kept wishing, over and over again, that I would hear coming out of a democratic candidate's mouth. And I never heard it.

You know what that one thing was? It was simply this: because it's wrong.

I wanted, just once, to hear a democrat say, firmly and simply and with conviction, "I don't support the war in Iraq because sending people to their deaths on the basis of a lie is wrong."

Or maybe, "I don't support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage because ignoring the Ninth Amendment and using the constitution to restrict personal freedoms is wrong."

Or maybe, "We should have signed the Kyoto Accord because breaking our promise to the rest of the world to uphold environmental standards which were rendered useless without American participation is wrong."

Or how about, "Doing things that affect our neighbors across the world without allowing them to have a say in our actions is wrong."

I kept waiting, all year long, to hear this come out of some political candidate's mouth, somewhere. And you know--I never heard it. During the debates, even though I thought Kerry did a fantastic job, there were a number of times I kept thinking, 'okay, all he has to do here is say, this is a fundamentally flawed view of the world you're presenting, Mr. President, because it's wrong.'

I never heard it.

I once read an unforgettable post from someone on my friends list--it may have been

sister_magpie--wherein they reported a liberal college professor saying with fiery conviction to his students that he felt a lack of conviction was the undoing of the democratic party. His basic argument was simply this: what's wrong with saying "this is wrong" and doing it from a liberal standpoint? We're letting the religious right steal our moral fundamental core out from under us. We're letting them appropriate it for themselves and reinterpret it so that those of us who are pro-choice, pro-gay rights, anti-war look like crazy leftist loonies who are out of touch with America rather than people whose views are just as valid and just as founded in concepts of right and wrong as the fundies.'

We are all wary of imposing our moral beliefs on others. We're wimpy bleeding hearts, right, sure, fine. But we have to draw a line somewhere, because 48% of us are weeping and raging about the election results. Why? Because we know it's wrong. We don't just maybe sort of have an opinion. You don't have the highest voter turnout in history, you don't have people , you don't have people this vitriolic and angry and upset, because of moral apathy. We voted our moral consciences, and now our moral consciences are livid.

It's about damn time.

If we are to recapture the moral voice of this country, then we need to work on focusing on right and wrong, and specifically why we are right. We ought to be using it. We have tried to reason with the Religious Right, we have tried to persuade them, and when all else failed we have tried to ignore them. But what we need to do now is fight back, and when I say fight back, I mean fighting back using their own tactics of using moral arguments rather than strictly rational ones. I am not suggesting that we get involved in more screaming matches, because that's the last thing we need. I am saying that we need to position ourselves from the moral high ground--because we have it. We have it in spades, folks.

What we need is a liberal revival. That's right. A revival. You know what happens in a revival? Billy Graham or someone like him gets up on a podium and he convicts the audience with an awareness and an understanding of their sin. In a revival, people are persuaded in a moment of what Christians call "conviction" that the way they have been living is wrong. We need a liberal revival, a revival that people from the South, West, and Midwest can respond to. If you want to get people in the center of America to see liberal values as worth supporting again, you have to let them see them as values first. What would Jesus do? He sure as fuck wouldn't have bombed Iraq. He wouldn't give a damn who married who, and he would tell people that if they don't think educating children and ending poverty is more important than bombing tyrants in other countries, then they might as well try passing their camel through the nearest needle before they come knocking on the doors of heaven.

What we need is a new Dr. King. We need a new voice of moral authority who can articulate principles that the Religious Right has robbed us of by claiming gay rights and abortion as the highway to hell, and insisting that the only thing standing between America turning into Soddom and Gomorrah is the Republican party.

I have been looking carefully at Barak Obama in the last couple of days. Reading over his opening speech from the Democratic Convention, the thing that struck me is that this man is as beloved as he is because he presents his politics as moral values--as a system of belief that is fully compatible with American patriotic ideals. He has not watered down his beliefs, he has simply couched them in simplistic, moralistic terms. And it works because it's impossible not to hear him speak and not get fired up about America, even when he's making generalizations that you know logically are more for rhetorical effect than anything else. It works because he, like Bush at his smarmiest and most confident, exudes confidence in America and American values. That is a uniter like nothing else, and that is why people are responding to him so warmly. And unlike Bush, he has the moral high ground, which is why his very presence in the Democratic party is so refreshing.

I am not suggesting that Barak Obama is the Dr. King for our generation. But I am saying that he has the right idea: he has realised that moral reassurance is the thing liberal leaders today lack, that the rest of the country so desperately needs to hear.

When we learn to say to the 52%-ers, "We are all Americans, we share the same values," they will listen to us. When we learn to embrace their values and recognize that we all have in common a desire to help our country be greater, we will have their ear. And when we have their ear, it is vital that we show them that we are people of principle, of moral conviction and courage, and that we are not ready to accept their view of America as the inevitable future, because their view of the future is wrong.

Democrats all over this country grew a backbone this year. Now it's time to take it one step further, and meet conservatives where they're at. What Bush is espousing, what conservatives are responding to, is an ideology. But we have an ideology, too: an ideology of peace, of civil liberties, of an America where everyone is welcomed and provided for. We support those things because they're right. And as long as we believe in the rightness of those things we have a moral obligation to ourselves and to each other to make our voices heard.

So speak out. Speak out to everyone you know, forgetting for a while your political or religious affiliation. Speak to one another as individuals, person to person. You may not have God on your side, but you do have something far more tangible: you have 48% of America. Train yourself to be unafraid to speak from the courage of your convictions.

One of the calling cards of "compassionate conservativism," at least as I experienced it growing up, is the phrase "speak the truth in love." By this Bible verse, evangelicals are taught to gently admonish their friends, be they believers or non-believers, as to the error of their ways. By speaking the truth in love you are showing them that you love them even though you want them to see where they are going wrong. It's the Christian equivalent of a mild Intervention.

If you want to win the conservatives back? Give them a dose of their own medicine. Show them that we love them. We love the South--how can you not love the place that gave us Louis Armstrong, fried chicken, Oxford, Mississippi, and Pat Summitt?--and we love the midwest, with all that lovely symmetry and corn. We love our fellow Americans. And as enraged and upset as we are with some of them right now, that time will pass, and the love will remain. More importantly, so will our moral conviction that what is happening to this country is just plain wrong.

Speak the truth to conservatives, in love. You will be surprised at the response.