I just wrote a comment to a thread on Jordan Cooper’s site, where he had posted a link to the Sojourners Take Back The Faith site, which asks for signatures. There were comments like:
—This petition, no matter the title, leaves one feeling as though God must surely be a Democrat. A bit one sided. Regardless of how polite the bashing is… should it not be equal?
—-I had a similar response to Robb’s. Really, the only thing in the article that doesn’t favour the Democratic Party is the “respect for human life” part, and of that, it’s really only the abortion issue.
I went off…but ran out of room …the post was limited to 1000 words, so I truncated it, and posted the whole thing here. I posted to my Sojourners category instead of my “political category” (Democracy) to indicate that this , for me , is a theological issue, not a political one. The issues this petition lifts up are NOT “democratic issues”, as one comment said, but issues that “are as old as the Scriptures” (as JFK, yes, a Democrat, once said about the issue of race). He then, too, was speaking about how we cannot separate “political” issues from the issues. Is it not the purpose of politics to basically DO GOOD; to seek to lead a society in the ways of justice in our life together?
So, here’s the post (from the comments at jordancoooper.com
People,
Ever wonder why the Bible says so much about the poor, and against things like “money is the root of all evil”? Commenting that most of it seems to sound “Democrat” illustrates to me that you don’t get it. This is NOT a Democratic movement. It is a movement by CHRISTIANS who feel that they should emphasize some VERY CLEAR and PRETTY UNAVOIDABLE messages of the gospel (like PEACE, among other things.) This group has laways been an advocate for these types of issues, and always is and has been critical of ANY administration (including Clinton’s).
They realize that Christians who also emphasize these very clear messages of the Bible nedd to get out to vote, because they feel, (asnd so do I) that there has never been an administration that so “attacked” so many programs aimed at improving our society, and helped in some way the disadvantaged, not has there been a more dangerous and arrogant crew running the national defense.
I feel that there are multitudes of reasons besides these for being “concerned” as Christians, and one of the reasons for concern is that so many Churches so unqwuestioningly acquiesce and spring to defend this administration’s “Godliness”, and I feel it is ANYTHING BUT that.
My loyalty is to what I consider to be the Biblical call to live as Jesus calls us. There are many areas of public and international life that are taking a beating because of the policies of this administration, and so it is readily apparent to me that the more “Biblical themes” one recognizes, the more “problem areas” one sees with the Bush administration.
The Democrats are by all means not perfect, but they are certainly apparently the only realistic political alternative to the Bush administration.
Visit my blog ; I am quite anxious to see this group out of Washington, and stopped from the environmental, economic, and international damage they are doing. The damage from these three things will far outweigh any lack of “progress” in abortion laws; in actuality, abortions never rose under Clinton’s “Prochoice government”, so I am unconvinced that having an “anti-Abortion platform” is even working; the social programs supported more often by Democrats seems to do as much to “keep abortion rates down” as “talking about being ani-abortion”.
I have been reading your blog for a while and I keep looking for an e-mail address somewhere but I can’t find it so I am contacting you like this. I really like your blog and I wanted to invite you to check out mine. I think we are kind of working on the same issues, although my opinions and style are much more extreme than yours and I use bad language a lot mostly as a matter of principle. I am a gay potsmoking Christian who sees no contradiction in that. I have been keeping track of other websites that seem to be aiming to create some kind of “religious left” in this country and I felt like it was about time we became more aware of each other b/c things are getting pretty critical. So I am contacting you now as a way of getting started on that…I hope you visit my blog and that you aren’t too shocked by my material- be assured that I am shocking only because I am trying to reach those as far out of the mainstream as I am and to do that it is necessary to be very very down-to-earth
Peace
Jenny
Hi. I posted this on Jordon’s blog as well, but since you finished over here, I thought it appropriate to re-post:
Dale, I agree with you fully. My point was simply (and I imagine Robb intended the same thing) that the petition doesn’t seem to be totally neutral. I don’t support Bush, and I really don’t care for what he has done, or is trying to do with social programs, the war, etc.
I don’t disagree with the petition (in fact, I posted a link to it on my own blog), I was just noting that my initial reaction saw that the article wasn’t as neutral as it appeared to be. That apparent bias is probably the result of the fact that Bush seems to be operating contrary to so many Biblical principles…
Marc,
Thanks for that comment. You are right. The only “qaulification” I would make on totally agreeing with you would be to say that I think there SHOULD be a bias, and inthe direction of what one considers to be Biblical mandates. In this instance, there’s an awful lot of evil going on. It’s hard to be , or I guess impossible to be “nonPartisan, only my insistence is that the partisanship is to Biblical values, to the chagrin of the Religious Right, who thinks they have most , if not all of it down. And I think thewy base their support of Bush on some weak points: the big three “issues” that I mentioned as the Republican “appeal” to the Religious Right, and phooey on the 999 other moral issues of our day.
I do appreciate and thank you for your reply, though, and hope you feel free to do so anywhere else on this blog.
Dale
Jenny, (I also emailed this to you)
I love the “Cool People That Don’t Link to Me Yet” section. That’s a great label, and I’m proud to be in that list. I’ve been looking, and nothing yet I’ve seen is at all offenseive, and to tell you the truth, nothing probably will be, to me. I’m pretty earthy myself, and probably squelch too many “gut reactions” from my blog. Anyway, do you have an RSS feed? I see you’re on Tripod. I like to use RSS for the sites I read because all new posts are right there in my RSS Reader when I open it, and it dind-dongs at me when new posts come in, so it’s like being emailed with every post, except its all neatly organized.
Anyway, when I get around to doing links, I’ll add yours. But then I’ll just be “nice” and I still wanna be cool. I’ll be reading more.
Dale