More on values voters
The post below is just one look at this issue, which I believe is the best one.
Here’s another one, honed more specifically to this election and the very dicey issue on the Missouri ballot of cloning and embryonic stem cell research, with public funding.
Scarcely a day goes by without some new warning that religious fanatics are destroying American liberties. One of the most widely publicized is by former Senator John Danforth of Missouri, who is both a lawyer and an Episcopal clergyman and also speaks as a Republican who longs for the good old days when the party was interested in things like balancing the budget, before it was “captured†by religious fanatics.
Like Professor Robert George (below post), Dr. James Hitchcock cuts through the rhetoric and exposes the contradictions and deceptions.
Danforth is passionately in favor of embryonic stem-cell research and dismayed at people who object that it involves taking human life, and here the old image of the Republicans as merely the party of business comes back into view – those who are pushing for this in Missouri claim that it will bring huge economic benefits to the state, so that voters are being asked in effect to choose between their wallets and their consciences.
Ironically for a man of the cloth, Danforth’s account of true Republican principles seems to confirm the old claim that his party does not care about people. The Terri Schiavo case woke him up to the dangers of the “religious right.†But whereas the most basic task of government is to protect life, and Terry Schiavo’s fate obviously raises questions that will trouble the nation more and more, Danforth appears to see no moral issue at all, only a violation his party’s supposed traditional commitment to limited government and state’s rights.
As noted below, and in this Hitchcock piece, all these issues involve a moral judgment. They expose the hypocrisy of opposing religious values in an election.
In his warnings against conservative religious believers, Danforth inevitably falls into the trap that is built into the very idea of liberal “pluralism†– urging believers to be charitable and tolerant in their public utterances even while almost hysterically condemning the “religious right†as a threat to the Republic.
…It might seem possible to resolve this contradiction by proposing that, if people disagree about things like abortion, government should simply do nothing. But no one really believes this. Those who oppose the war in Iraq or capital punishment, for example, insist that there is a moral and religious obligation for the government to act on their judgment. In reality, rather than conservative believers “intruding†religion into politics, the battle is often between two rival theologies.
Another good reminder that every vote is for someone’s values. The outcome determines how our nation is governed.
