12/16/2004
It was, I believe, in answer to the question, "Are you a communist?" that Franklin D. Roosevelt declared himself to be a "Christian and a Democrat." We will not hear such a declaration from a leading Democrat again any time soon, not even in 2008. Some wilderness voices are calling for Dems to show more respect for the Christian and NASCAR mumbo-jumbo of American "culture" as if Americans are a quaint Stone-Age tribe that has just been discovered in the jungle between Penna. and Calif. However most post mortes are concluding that the Democratic Party wasn't liberal enough: The swing-voters couldn't see a real difference between Bush and Kerry, so they stuck with the incumbent.
In Roosevelt's day and in the few decades following, there were left-wing Christians who, along with their non-Christian and atheistic confreres, were motivated by concepts of community and human dignity that had their origins in religion and continued to echo through society even as the influence of religious faith diminished and the rationales were forgotten. That faith-based idea of human dignity held that Man was precious, special, as it says in the Declaration of Independence, endowed with inalienable rights, rights that could not be ruled or voted or judged or chosen away by human beings themselves.
There are still Christians and Democrats, but they tend to be more Democratic than Christian (just as Christian Republicans tend to be more Republican than Christian). Christian Democrats advocate keeping one's religion to oneself and out of public life. It should be no surprise that such people also advocate keeping religion out of religion.
Human dignity has been replaced by "animal dignity." Nobody but me calls it that, but that's what it is. Humans are just animals to be treated with a kind of humaneness bestowed on puppies and kittens. It is a kind of humaneness that can be altered and repealed by humans because it has no supernatural basis. It is a kind of humaneness that allows for the killing of some for their own good or for the good of the species or for the benefit of any one who can assert a "right." We are all organisms struggling, crawling over each other like bugs for survival. The workings of a world in which it is assumed or pretended that there is no God always favor those with the most power.
Liberalism has also deteriorated into image-feeding, feeding the image that one is intelligent, that one is superior.
Intelligent/superior people would never resort to war. Intelligent/superior people know that sexuality is an accident of nature and can be altered by science and therefore does not matter. Intelligent/superior people can see past the fact that atheists were the biggest butchers of humanity in the last century, and remain focused on the real enemy, Christianity, particularly Catholicism, a malady that must be wiped out.
All of this is leading to the point that liberalism is now about naked self-interest and vanity more than it is about helping others, about making the world a better place. In proof of this, I give you the Washington, DC metropolitan area, one of the most liberal regions in the country. Every other SUV going up and down upscale Wisconsin Ave./ Rockville Pike, where you can shop for everything, had a Kerry/Edwards sticker. Housing values have doubled in the past few years and folks are mortgaging for Bentleys and wineries in their backyards.
Yet at the same time in this liberal stronghold where, it is certain that diplomacy can solve all international conflicts, while the property values have risen, the amounts given to service agencies that help the local poor have dropped steadily. As the ML 430s have been traded in for Hummers and the gas grills have come with more dials, the number of working poor--not bums on welfare--without homes, living in cars and storage bays, has been increasing.
I'm thinking of one house nearby. It is brand new--what we call a "McMansion"--built on a tiny plot of land where a smaller house once stood. Last October, its little bit of front yard was bristling with Kerry/Edwards signs. The owners could have gotten a similar house for less money in Kensington or Silver Spring or Gaithersburg, but they had to have Bethesda. To get their Bethesda McMansion, they probably made an offer of five or six figures over the original asking price. Does it bother these McMansion owners, do they even think, that they contributed to upward pressure on housing prices all the way down to the crappiest apartment in Southeast DC? I doubt it. It doesn't trouble DC liberals that when the affluent half shrugs off and pays higher and higher prices for housing, food, fuel and health care, the other half is getting bid out of life's necessities.
I recently saw a line of peace-loving Montgomery-Countians threaten riot when a new cash register at the grocery store was opened and they weren't the first to be invited. At ritzy Balducci's there is a sign taped to the bathroom door: "If door is locked, the bathroom is occupied." This is to keep the enlightened citizens of the world from ripping the handle off because it does not occur to them that there are other people in the universe.
Copyright © 2004 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.