Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

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Godless Party

Ann Coulter caught hell for suggesting liberals and Democrats were "godless," and a few months ago Amy Sullivan wrote in The Washington Monthly that Democrats were poised to gain ground among religious voters. Today Sullivan admits in Slate.com, that it isn’t working. Among the best lines in the story is "random-seeming insertions of Bible verses into floor speeches came off as Tourette’s syndrome for Democrats."

Discussions - 10 Comments

Oh, my!

"...Tourettes Syndrome for Democrats."

That is just too, too good!

Many thanks for the laugh of the day!


DaveK

That is a good line, and it rings all too true. Democrats need to leave personal salvation and instrumental religiosity to the Republicans.

Thanks, Steve, for catching this. My take is here.

Oh come on - do you guys really believe that 50% of the country is literally godless? How does that square with only 5% of the country being Atheists? What are the other 45%?

No, of course not, but I’d say that a substantial proportion of the Democratic Party’s activist base is hostile to traditional religion.

But Daniel, look at America, and American culture. Does this really look like the culture of a people that worry about what God thinks?

Relative to much of the Western world, America is a Christian, or at least a religious nation. But is that true in any absolute sense? Please!

Kate, there is more to America than what appears on the boob tube, or can be found in the pages of Vanity Fair, or People Magazine.

When a young man walks into an Army Recruiting office determined to enlist in the Airborne and defend his country and her cause, that’s another moral moment in our storied history, although Entertainment Tonight isn’t on hand to so record, the Heavens see, the Heavens observe, and the Heavens record it’s value. God isn’t up there jotting down the numbers of wrongful deeds done, or good deeds, left undone. To understand the Almighty, to even begin to grasp the enormity of the incarnation, one must understand love, it’s power, it’s passion, it’s zeal. Only then can one begin to get a handle around a verse such as "Is love as strong as death, passion as powerful as any grave?" A love so vast that it needs eternity itself to slowly unfold, is a love not eager to find fault, not easily swayed to hold a grudge, nor inclined to find cause for separation. Such a love must be driven away, such a love must be banished, such a love does not depart on it’s own.

God stated what he desires, regard demonstrated "in spirit and in truth," he isn’t looking for pharisaic gestures. If he were, he could find all he wants strewn throughout islam.

Dan M that is a passionate view and I hope you live up to it. On the other hand you are being unfair to Kate. Kate makes a good point...and again the issue here is how you conceptualize/ontologize religion. I think democrats are all a bunch of secular christians...if you will permit the contradiction. The defining element being Isothymia(in the precise sense that Fukuyama defines it). I would have to say that compassionate conservatism strikes me as Tourette’s syndrome for Republicans. Both religious democrats and compassionate conservatives are in a sense attempting to find(or steal) middle ground by appropriating the ontology of the opposite party. Democrats feel the need to express "piety" and Republicans feel the need to express "liberality". Unfortunately for people like me the Democrats are clueless...they are anti-religion without really being anti-religion. They like to talk about seperation of church and state...but they don’t understand that the "secular" ethics they replace it with is twice as noxious, and just as much of an imposition. In a certain sense one can say that the modern welfare state is the democrat version of theocracy. I believe the democrats literally believe that nonsense about the budget as a moral document.

In a certain sense you can see the Libertarians as the true "atheists"...the democrats employ a partial version of the "seperation of church and state" argument to undermine the theocracy of the right...and the right employs libertarians to undermine the theocracy of the left.

I didn’t intend on being unfair to Kate, nor really criticizing her. I was just trying to expand her view. There’s a great deal of truth to her comment. We know it.

But there is another America, that is apt to go unobserved, is under the radar screen, so to speak. And we need to bear that in mind.

I wasn’t really trying to address politics, or political tactics.

Dan M, in #7, yes, I know you are right. My third son wanted to be a Marine when he was in high school. He was to go off to Parris Island and his training in September of ’01. Before 9/11 he kept talking about what a good deal it was for him, and incidentally, the other good news, was that he would be doing something for his country. 9/11, everything changed and suddenly he was all about what he might get to do for his country, and incidentally, it was a good deal for him. It was a wonderful thing to see and to experience, that transformation in him, when it needed to become a moral choice. He volunteered to be on the first planes out of Hopkins.

I suppose he did the same sort of thing after he impregnated his girlfriend and then moved heaven and earth, by which I mean the Air Force and the Marines, to get her married to himself and out of the service as the Air Force superiors were wanting her to abort. He loved the child, unseen but incarnate. He loves the woman and every day makes the moral choice to work at a tedious job to support them both. I wish he feared God more and made more cautious moral choices, but trust God will not hold such things against him.

And you are right, America is full of such people, "under the radar screen" as you put it, or with morality and a concern for God that might even be under their own "radar screens" until push comes to shove. I did not see you as being unfair to me at all. I love to push the arguments.


John, what you say about Democrats and their "secular" ethics being obnoxious is just so true. If religion, as a word, means to tie back, then they are surely trying to tie us all back with "political correctness" or whatever we are calling it these days. At least Christian religiosity has the excuse of an Absolute! What is the "liberal’s" excuse for denying us liberties?

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