Allowing others to be other is what we call modernity. In my view, it is worth defending. And that’s why I think of myself as a conservative rather than as a reactionary. I like the pluralism of modernity; it doesn’t threaten me or my faith. And if one’s faith is dependent on being reinforced in every aspect of other people’s lives, then it is a rather insecure faith, don’t you think?
– Andrew Sullivan on religion and politics.
The weird yet perennial “war on Christmas” rhetoric – in which, regular as Santa Claus, the conservative commentariat gets up in arms about some perceived slight to the Christian origins of the holiday – has always mystified me. It’s transparently mean-spirited to transform the words “Merry Christmas” into a proclamation of cultural dominance, to the point that the neutral “Happy Holidays” has become more Christian in spirit. Over in Washington State, the addition of an atheist belief statement to a holiday display has set off an arms-race of symbolic appropriation culminating in demands to include a Festivus pole and a sign saying that “Santa Claus will take you to Hell,” finally forcing the state government to place a moratorium on additions.
Max Blumenthal writes that this absurdity has its roots in Anti-Semitism. Because you know who really hates Christmas? The Jews:
Unlike their more respectable counterparts, Brimelow’s writers dared to name the true anti-Christian Grinch: Jews. The winner of Brimelow’s 2001 War on Christmas competition, a “paleoconservative” writer named Tom Piatak, insisted that those behind the assault on Christmas “evidently prefer” Hanukkah, which he called the “Jewish Kwanzaa,” a “faux-Christmas.”
Which makes perfect sense; nothing offends a racist like showing basic courtesy to someone different from them. Saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” implies that you can’t assume some random person on the street is Christian. That doesn’t strike me as particularly scary or bad; but for the Christmas Warriors, it’s the end of the world as they know it.
Anti-abortion groups are using the economic downturn as the basis for an argument to pull government funding of Planned Parenthood. William Saletan points out how insane this is, if you want to reduce the number of abortions:
If you define pro-life as preventing abortions, Planned Parenthood is the most effective pro-life organization in the history of the world. … What Planned Parenthood does, more comprehensively than anyone else, is to distribute the means and knowledge to control your risk of getting pregnant when you don’t want to be pregnant. And those two things, combined with pressure to exercise that control assiduously, are the surest way to prevent abortions.
Via the Daily Dish.
Someone attending a sporting event at Mennonite-affiliated Goshen College got his or her panties in a knot because Goshen, doesn’t play the National Anthem before games. (Just as with my alma mater, Eastern Mennonite University, Goshen takes the Mennonite loyalty to Christ over the state very seriously.) So this disgruntled sports fan called conservative radio talk show host Mike Gallagher to berate a liberal arts school with a student body somewhere south of 2,000. MWR reports that, apart from the McCarthyite concern with pledging allegiance to state authority, Gallagher is worried that pacifist Mennonites may not represent war fairly:
On his New York-based The Mike Gallagher Show, eighth in the nation in audience size, Gallagher criticized Goshen in a Nov. 7 broadcast, then invited Bill Born, dean of students, to speak on the show Nov. 10.
In that broadcast, Gallagher said he appreciated “the Christian nature of the Mennonite church,” but was concerned about whether Goshen was teaching against war in U.S. history.
“How would any student get an honest assessment of war at the Goshen College environment?” Gallagher said.
What Gallagher means, of course, is that pacifist history professors can’t be trusted to represent war as useful or necessary. And frankly, he’s right. In eight years of Mennonite private-school education, I took a lot of history classes, and I can’t say I ever got the impression that war was worthwhile. But that wasn’t because my teachers were teaching propaganda – it was because they fully represented the costs and consequences of armed conflict.
My question to Gallagher is, how can a history teacher honestly tell her students that war is useful or necessary?
On Slacktivist, lefty evangelical Fred Clark reams the State of California for “un-Californian” behavior and makes a very important point about recently-passed anti-gay-marriage ballot measure Proposition 8:
For all the scaremongering “defense of marriage” language used by supporters of Proposition 8, the passage of this silly measure actually dealt the institution a severe blow. What had been a right is now only a privilege — a privilege that the state is free to withhold as it sees fit. Yielding that kind of power to the state is not the sort of thing that a free people ought to be doing if they wish to remain a free people.
I can’t resist this one: a (very) minority religious group is suing a Utah town because it wouldn’t accept their donation of a monument to sit beside a Ten Commandments plaque in a public park. The New York Times says the case goes to the Supreme Court tomorrow. The minority religion in question is called Summum – it apparently incorporates elements of Gnostic Christianity and ancient Egyptian iconography. The monument they to donate would have been carved with the text of Summum’s Seven Aphorisms, which are supposed to have been given to Moses along with the Ten Commandments.
The situation is a real-world version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument against mixing church and state – once you incorporate one religious narrative into state-sponsored architecture, science curricula, or whatever, how can you argue that any religious narrative isn’t appropriate for inclusion? (The FSM is a facetious Creator originally proposed for inclusion in Kansan public school science classes, as an “alternative” to both scientific explanations and Christian Creationism.) The Summum church has a point. And that point is (perhaps contrary to their actual wishes) that the Ten Commandments has no more business in a government-funded public space than the Seven Aphorisms do.
It’s real. In spite of frantic flipping between (at various points) tallies by NPR, the New York Times, good ol’ FiveThirtyEight, and the BBC, I actually saw the news first from “The Daily Show” election special.
I have never felt so proud of my country. Americans did the right thing, even if after trying everything else first. Barack Obama’s win tonight represents a victory for deliberation over impulse and for nuance over polarization. He withstood some of the ugliest things Americans are willing to say about other Americans, and reminded us that we are all in this together. There is a lot of work to be done – and much of it just undoing the work of the previous President. But if anyone can do it, it’s Barack Obama.
Enough from me. Take a gander at a presidential candidate who speaks, and thinks, like a President.
Andrew Sullivan wins for best metaphor describing the December 2007 to November 2008 campaign:
The more I think about it the more this election day feels like one giant collective, global puke. That Bush-Cheney thing never quite settled with us, did it? We’ll feel a lot better but a lot more tired once the last heave is over.
Yeah, I finally watched Barack Obama’s half-hour message, online. It’s an excellent wrap-up to a too-long campaign and it hit all the right notes for me, anyway. Some of it is production values, of course, but there were genuinely affecting passages, especially when Obama tied his own story to the particular issues he addressed, as with education or health care. Folks have compared him to John F. Kennedy quite a bit, but I think actually the better parallel is with Abraham Lincoln – a man who essentially came from nowhere by dint of study, ambition, and genuine vision. He’ll have a lot to live up to if he wins – but I’ll be proud to punch my ballot for Barack Obama.
Postscript: What if, instead of public financing, we just gave every candidate a half-hour block of TV time to use as he or she would in the week before Election Day? This long form emphasizes, if anything, the sheer volume of substantive policy proposals that make up Obama’s platform – and might point up a candidate who didn’t have anything substantive to say.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell officially endorsed Barack Obama for President on Meet the Press this morning. But, incredibly, that’s not the most important thing he had to say in the interview. Referring to the Republican whisper campaign that claims Obama is a crypto-Muslim, Powell said (around 4:38 in this video):
Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, “What if he is?” Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be President? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop this suggestion, “He’s a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorism.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
Powell puts his finger on the ugly nature of the Muslim Obama rumors, which has bothered me basically from the first time I heard it, but hasn’t been much discussed in any major media outlet: why should it make a difference if Barack Obama is Muslim? As long as he’s an American citizen, his religion shouldn’t matter in a run for the Presidency. On the Media only picked it up last week – though once they did, they dissect the issue with the acumen you’d expect. More even then the endorsement, which is a big deal, I hope Powell’s MTP appearance starts a conversation about this.
