Frank Rich in the NY Times has a must read piece for Reeps and Dems alike today. Fascinating stuff. On "Moral Vlues" it's Blue in a Landslide Some key grafts: Thoughts?
Neither party has exclusivety on "moral values", nor the betrayal of them. The Republicans just happened to do a better job of getting voters to vote for them in 2004. That's absolutely all there is to it.
Bingo. So many people have cited BushCo's "core values" as what drove their decision. The Kerry campaign did such a lame job of clearly delineating their candidate's core values, it came across to a lot of Americans that Bush was the only one with "values."
And that's the bottom line. Frankly, the last truly moral guy to occupy the White House was Jimmy Carter, and we all know how well that worked out. Politicians are, on the whole, an amoral class of people and to vote for one candidate or another because you think he represents your moral values better is a fool's errand. After all, either party will sell your moral values down the river in the name of political expediency. George W. Bush has no better moral values than John Kerry, just different ones. And the proof of this is in the actions of both men in political office.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any others." "It is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand." John Adams "Before any man can be considered a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe." James Madison
That blurb of Madison's is reminiscent of the non-denominational stuff I hear from Freemasons. The Great Compass-and-Straightedge, that kind of thing.
"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!" John Adams "During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution." James Madison
Do you always take quotes out of context? Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!" But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell.
Who controls the British Crown? Who keeps the Metric System down? We do! We do! Who leaves Altantis off the maps? Who keeps the Martians under wraps? We do! We do! Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star? We do! We do! Who robs cave fish of their sight? Who rigs every Oscar night? We do! We do!
Nice correction. Anyone who has ever truly studied Madison and his efforts to strike the proper balance on rights in the Constitution knows that religion, specifically Christianity, had a major influence on his view that religion is very important in government. He viewed Christianity in it's pure form, to be a model of tolerance and moral principle.
However, what he viewed as Christianity in its pure form is highly debatable. As anyone who has studied the founders knows, they were very wary of using religion or atheism at the core of government, as the French revolution affirmed for them. The founders did not intend to set up a constitutional theocracy. They mention God ONCE in the Constitution, only to say in the year of our Lord. Slice it however you want, but God is not in the Constitution, and has never been in the laws.
Why? People need things to believe in. If it wasn't religion, they'd find something else. Considering godless China has yet to collapse under the weight of its own immorality, I don't see why religion must be so central to the world. I have no wish to destroy it, but to see it as foundational is only true because you can't imagine anything else.
Along the same theme, Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the US: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ed...2004/10/31/walking_the_walk_on_family_values/