Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Politics

  • A Consistent and Principled Approach

    In a poll taken before the last election respondents indicated strong disapproval of congress (31% approve/63% disapprove) as a whole, and yet by an almost equal margin (60%/33%), they indicated approval of their own congressman (Fox Poll 10/13/06). This type of result occurs repeatedly in polls. I’m just using those numbers as an example. Similarly polls (and general observation) shows that people disapprove of attorneys as a profession, but like their own attorney, or certainly want a good, hard-hitting attorney on their side if they are in trouble.

    It’s very likely that these differences in perception have something to do with who each of those people are working for. My congressman has to try to serve my district, for example by trying to keep military bases here, get federal road projects here, and so forth. There are 434 other congressmen who don’t share his priorities on those district based items, and thus it is very unlikely that the people in any single district will approve of the whole of congress as much as they approve of their own.

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  • Identifying Moderate Muslims

    Laura has a short post over at Pursuing Holiness on Pakistan and a move toward moderation legislatively. The particular form of moderation involved is preventing women who are raped from being charged with adultery. Personally, I’m eagerly awaiting the announcement of a moderate stoning, so that I could get some idea what that would be like (no, not actuallly!).

    MSNBC has an article on this titled Pakistan lawmakers OK changes to rape law, and it’s subtitle, Death penalty for extramarital sex dropped; Islamic fundamentalists angry is also of interest.

    I think our response to this sort of thing, including both the original problem, the reform, and the response of some other Muslims can be problematic.

    1. We might become hostile to Islam as such. This is an unacceptable option to me, simply because I know from personal experience that there are Muslims who are good people, who make good neighbors, and who would abhor the mistreatment of women (a severe understatement for charging a rape victim with adultery) as much as I do.
    2. We can put our heads in the sand because we don’t want to seem intolerant, so we don’t want to these Muslims, lest we seem to be intolerant of all Muslims. This, in my view, would morally reprehensible. We must, I believe, combat evil, and this is undoubtedly evil.
    3. We can do our best to identify specific people and policies and oppose those. This is what I try, not always successfully, to do.

    This is one of the problems with our “friends” in the Middle East. In many cases it’s a “with friends like these” situation. In order to fight one form of evil, we get tangled with another. When I was in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in that part of the world during the first gulf war, I really thought about this. Who was it that I was defending? In general, my response had to be that they were not people I would want to defend, if I had the choice. This is not about them being Muslims. It’s about them being tyrants and enforcing sadistic laws and policies.

    I’m going to continue to try to distinguish Islam itself from many of its adherents. But I’m not going to let that stop me from making it clear that certain policies are simply evil. The treatment of women in many countries of the Middle East is one of those policies.

  • Tolerance or Homogenization

    I value tolerance. Even more, I value and celebrate diversity. But frequently I see definitions of tolerance that must be considered self-destructive.

    I usually encounter these in the form of straw-man arguments. Someone may ask me if I believe in tolerance. When I acknowledge that I do, they will ask me then whether I will tolerate some form of intolerance or another. The answer to that is, “It depends.” Whereupon I’m informed that I really don’t believe in tolerance because I don’t tolerate everything.

    I believe in tolerance as a value, not as an absolute. I don’t believe in tolerating everything, merely as much as it is possible to tolerate practically. If someone believes in firing a machine gun into a crowd of people, I find it quite appropriate not to tolerate his belief, at least if he has the intention and the means to act on it.

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  • Voter Turnout Higher – Wow

    MSNBC reports that voter turnout is slightly higher than the last midterms and was just a tad over 40%.

    I have to say that I’m less than overwhelmed. Where are the other 60% of registered voters, not to mention all the ones who don’t bother to register. You can’t tell me that there was nothing to vote on this time. At least here in Florida there were a number of significant issues, and I know there were in several other states.

    I believe it is appropriate that those who want to rule do so, but I can’t imagine what the rest of the voters are thinking, if anything.

  • Divided Government Again

    Well, I wanted it to happen, and it did. We have divided government. The good news is that the Republicans lost some ground, the bad news is that the Democrats won. Of course, the second had to happen if the first did.

    What annoys me as an independent voter is hearing Democratic strategists claiming that independent voters “turned to them” and talking about the kind of mandate they get from that. There is only one real mandate–that is that you got elected.

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  • Go Vote!

    News stories are now talking about the drive on both sides to get out the vote today. It amazes me that it takes this much effort to get people to go make some choices about their government. But I know from the times I’ve worked in political campaigns that the results often come down to who managed to do a better job getting their supporters out on election day.

    My wife and I will not make it to the polls until evening, when we may have to stand in line. In fact, I hope we will have to stand in line. That would mean that our precinct has good turnout. I’ll pass by the pollling place several times today, but we like to do this together. We always go over the sample ballot and discuss our votes and the reasons for them in the days before the election, and then we go together. We don’t always vote the same way. Sometimes people, especially couples, find it hard to discuss politics when they disagree strongly on candidates, but while we sometimes disagree passionately, we have never found it so. We just mark one ballot with different colors and we can tell where we’re going to cancel out.

    Some folks out there are telling themselves that their vote doesn’t count and it isn’t important. But just because you can’t cast the deciding vote doesn’t mean what you do isn’t important. In sports we give special mention to the player who drove in the winning run, or scored the winning touchdown. But it’s not like that in politics. Not only do we not know who cast the vote that gave a candidate a lead, even the percentages will become part of the political debate over the next few years.

    If you think this election is less important because it’s not a presidential year, think again. It may be that you think your vote isn’t important because you only worry about the presidential election in which you’re one of many millions. But I’m sure you have local races. Local races are important.

    This is a team activity in which everyone can participate. Get off the bench!

  • What if We’re to Blame?

    Robert J. Samuelson has an excellent article in Newsweek with this title. He comments on the way politicians follow the polls, and how we, as voters, demand contradictory things:

    Americans favor balanced budgets. But in 66 years of surveys, taxpayers have never said their income taxes were too low, reports Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute. A Gallup poll in April found that 48 percent thought their taxes too high and only 2 percent too low. Americans also think government spending is hugely wasteful; 61 percent said so in a 2004 poll by the University of Michigan. But locating that waste is hard. A recent Fox News poll found that only 19 percent favor cuts in Social Security, 21 percent in health care, 19 percent in education and 25 percent for the military.

    Read the whole article. It’s worth it!

  • Hidden Hate – Open Rebuke

    Yesterday I had planned to write a response to the Ted Haggard situation, but other issues got in the way, and then the story developed. I was going to talk some about the meaning of forgiveness combined with accountability and openness. I would have said that we didn’t know yet precisely what had happened, but that he had done the right thing by stepping aside and letting an independent oversight board take a look.

    All of those things are true still. We don’t know precisely what happened, but we do see a bit more fire and less smoke. I would still say that forgiveness involves putting aside our resentments so that we do not poison ourselves with anger, but at the same time that forgiveness doesn’t remove consequences of someone’s bad choices. Accountability is still a key, and simply the fact that there are structures in place that look like accountability doesn’t mean that a person is really being held accountable.

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  • Of Scummy Politicians and Cynics

    Last night my wife and I were watching television, and getting inundated with political ads. Now we don’t generally use these ads to determine who we’ll vote for. I try to research as much as possible about the candidates, and so does she, and then we share our conclusions. It’s a good exercise in learning to express these issues objectively as she and I don’t agree on everything. Sometimes we’ll go through the issues and simply because of different weight we put on different issues, we’ll find ourselves voting on opposite sides.

    But we share several views about elections. One is that we dislike negative ads. Another is that we dislike empty ads, ones that tell you so little you can’t even claim they’re false. In principle, I think negative ads can be necessary and useful, but they are so rarely accurate that it’s hard to remember that on occasion a minority of such ads might have value.

    Since we live in Pensacola, Florida and two of the three major local stations are actually in Mobile, AL, we get a full crop of these ads from both Alabama and Florida. After watching this flurry of ads, almost all of them negative, I comment that the ads were enough to make just about anyone into a cynic.

    And that’s one of the problems with American politics right now. Often there is cynicism driving a lack of participation. Now I’m not saying the cynicism is not well-founded. There are a lot of scummy politicians out there. But non-participation simply gives scummy politicians permission to be scummy. If you allow yourself to be driven from the polls by negative ads, you may well be contributing to the election of the person who put those ads on. If both sides are behaving in the same way, your non-participation again gives them comfort in believing that’s how the game is played.

    “But what can I do?” you may ask. “They’re all corrupt!”

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  • Atheist-Christian Discussion

    I have noticed from time to time that Christians become very angry with atheists or other skeptics in debate simply for being and saying who they are. Many regard any questioning of their faith positions as impolite, and some even regard such discussion as a form of persecution. It has always seemed odd to me.

    When I discuss theology with an atheist, for example, I expect that he or she will:

    • Deny the existence of God
    • Deny the truth of substantial portions of the Bible
    • Find miracles vanishingly unlikely at best, and most certainly denying the virgin birth and the resurrection
    • Find the idea of the atonement fairly silly
    • . . . and many, many more obvious differences of opinion

    These seem so obvious to me, but I’ve encountered some Christians who become offended when a skeptic expressed each of those positions. I’m not sure how one can fail to be offended when someone says he’s an atheist, and yet suddenly become offended when he also mentions that he believes God’s existence is about as probable as that of the tooth fairy. It seems to me that one implies the other.

    So if I wish to have a conversation with such a person–and I’m pretty much interested in dialogue on philosophy and religion with most anyone–then I have to realize we will differ on these things, and accept that in order to dialogue, we will both have to express our differences. Since I believe in God, and an atheist by definition does not, he will have to tell me in one way or another that he thinks I’m wrong. He might use words like misguided, deluded, or something similar. He may well explain all my spiritual experiences as the result of physical causes, and call them delusional. He might point to the doctrine of hell (in the form in which many accept it) and describe God, were he to exist, as a mass murderer.

    To put it bluntly, I’m quite happy with any or all of those options. If that is what someone believes, that is what I’d like them to express to me. I’m not saying they don’t need to consider the public relations angle in general. But I would like to know what they actually think.

    This little post was inspired by Duane Smith’s post Thoughts on Richard Dawkins at Cal Tech. I have to confess that I really enjoy reading Richard Dawkins. He writes wonderfully well and explains difficult topics with great clarity. I can read and enjoy him, and appreciate his writing, and yet disagree profoundly. It sounds like I would have enjoyed his presentation as well, as I have enjoyed hearing him interviewed on TV. In fact, while he is often vilified as the true example of an over-the-top atheist, I have found him to be very careful and precise in stating what he does and does not belief. He’s not unaware of the nuances in theology, even though he doesn’t choose to give those of us who “practice” those nuances much room to maneuver.

    Having said all of that, I still should make clear that I disagree with Dawkins in a substantial way. I’m a theist, and he’s not. I’m in the crosshairs of some of his remarks. But why should I not be?

    It seems to me that in much of what passes for dialogue in the public forum we have gotten whimpy about ideas. I’m not talking about name-calling, ad hominem attacks, and diversionary tactics. Those detract from the issue. But I’d really like to know where it is that Richard Dawkins has behaved in this way. I can and do get somewhat heated about his comments about providing a religious education for children. But based on the remainder of his beliefs, I have a hard time seeing how he could avoid the conclusion that children would be better off without any form of religious indoctrination.

    In fact, I would ask my fellow Christians to look and see whether the shoe does not fit all too well. Often religious education is not education, but is really just indoctrination. I hear complaints from church leaders all the time about young adults leaving the church, but often those same church leaders are looking for teachers who will “teach the young adults the truth” and keep them from going astray. When I had the opportunity to plan curriculum for youth, I went out of my way to let them hear about other faiths. There was a field trip to a synagogue, I invited an Imam to come in and talk about Islam, we read materials about positions other than those of our own denomination.

    Do I still disagree with Dawkins on this point? From what I’ve read thus far, I very much do. But I don’t think he has stepped over any sort of line in saying so.

    If we, as Christians believe that there are things that are true and things that are false, and that it’s worthwhile to accept the truth and reject falsehood as much as we are able, perhaps we need to encourage each person to express his or her understanding of what is truth, and let’s test this in open discussion. If we are to do this, we have to drop the notion that a particular view is by nature impolite. And while I’m at it, for the same reason we can’t cut off discussion from the conservative side of the spectrum. If we try to shut up those who believe that homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle, or that all abortion is evil, rather than engaging in discussion, we will make it harder to find good policy positions.

    Courtesy is good, but when courtesy is interpreted as a demand to cut off expression, then it can easily become a danger.