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“Some Democrats Believe the Party Should Get Religion,” reads a headline in the New York Times. Clever Democrats are trying to come up with a plan to frame their agenda in “moral and religious language.” Don’t laugh. They’re serious. According to the Times (reg. req.):
Bested by a Republican campaign emphasizing Christian faith, some Democrats are scrambling to shake off their secular image, stepping up efforts to organize the “religious left” and debating changes to how they approach the cultural flashpoints of same-sex marriage and abortion.
I don’t know if it’s a true assessment of what Democratic leadership is planning or just the newspaper’s way of looking for a story where none exists.
To win elections in this country, Democrats have to change who they are. That’s why many seem to hate the label “liberal.” Hate it. Although it aptly describes who they are and how they think, they prefer euphemistic variations on the theme (“progressive” comes to mind). It doesn’t fool anybody. What you call yourself isn’t as important as what you do and what you stand for. For instance, how is a party that believes two men should be allowed to marry going to make “inroads” into the socially conservative (not to mention Christian) electorate? It’s senseless.
If some liberals are so convinced they can do it, does it mean they’ll put away support for skin color preferences for the sake of “diversity?” Never will they do that, ever. Too much is at stake with the “black vote”, and groups like the dinosaur NAACP would be all over them like white on…Is that a racist thing to say?
Back to the Democrat “strategy” that won’t work:
But Democrats disagree about how to establish the party’s spiritual credentials. Some play down the need for changes, saying poorly framed surveys of voters leaving polls are overstating the impact of conservative Christian voters. Others argue that Democrats need to rephrase their positions in more moral and religious language. And an emboldened group of Democratic partisans and sympathetic religious leaders warn that Mr. Bush has beaten Democrats to the middle on social issues like abortion that resonate with religious traditionalists, arguing that the party should publicly welcome opponents of abortion into its ranks and perhaps even bend in its opposition to certain abortion restrictions. [My emphasis]
It’ll never happen. As you may have guessed, Democrats have a litmus test for abortion. How many pro-life Democratic leaders can you name? Such people are shunned. (Unfortunately, Bush has “pro-choice” people on his staff). But one of their members has a suggestion:
“Our platform and the grass-roots strength of the party is pro-choice,” said Elizabeth Cavendish, interim president of Naral Pro-Choice America. The party needs more religious language, Ms. Cavendish said, but not new positions.
How can one couch a pro-child killing position in religious (they mean “Christian” but just can’t bear to say it) language? This I’ve got to see. Others say they need to convince us Christians that socialized medicine and cucumbers and condoms can reduce abortions. Is it any wonder these people keep losing elections? With that kind of tired logic…
And get this. Someone named John Green thinks that we conservative Christians lean right on issues like child-killing and homosexual “marriage” and left on all the other stuff:
Many conservative Christians who vote Republican because of their views on abortion and same-sex marriage are working class or middle class, and they often hold liberal views on economics, social welfare and the environment, said John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron who conducts polls on religion and politics.
Don’t laugh. He’s serious. I wonder what kind of people he’s polling and how he defines “liberal” to arrive at such a counterintuitive result?
Take some advice from an amateur, liberals. Leave the social conservatives and Christians alone and go after the liberal Christians, who may buy into the choice-is-a-moral-value platform. We know what the Bible says about murder and we know that abortion is wrong, period.
Democrats, who think Bush is not as intelligent as they are, suddenly attribute to him uncommon genius in winning voters with “carefully drawn positions on abortion and same-sex marriage.” This is why Democrats keep losing elections. They see nuance everywhere, never learning from their egregious mistakes. Ordinary Americans like plain, non-nuanced language. I, for one, am solid on my pro-life and anti-homosexual “marriage” positions. How liberals plan to hide their agenda with enough finesse to win over conservative Christians (like myself?) is a mystery. Truth is truth. It is absolute, not relative, and that is something liberals need to understand.
Bush has his own problems. In light of some of his less-than-conservative moves, I’ve been thinking about giving the Constitution Party a closer look. (I glanced this past summer.) If more Christians voted for those candidates, perhaps we’d see a rightward shift in the Republican Party. I don’t know what Bush has in mind for his second term, but I hope he unbinds himself from the chains of compromise and go for it. If more conservative Christians voted for the Constitution Party…
One last bit of comedy before I let you go. Liberal Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who supports skin color discrimination in hiring, is opposed to faith-based initiatives on the grounds that some discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring. “If you use federal funding, you can’t discriminate. We can’t compromise on that.”
Isn’t that like the pot calling the kettle…Is that a racist thing to say?
Update: A commenter says that the sin of Sodom was inhospitality, not homosexuality. This is an age-old and false claim. That God destroyed the cities with brimstone and fire because the inhabitants were merely rude is truly silly. The word used to indicate how the men wanted to “know” Lot’s male guests clearly indicates what you think it does. I’ll get into this later. In the meantime, I highly recommend James White’s book, Same-Sex Controversy. This Reformed pastor, teacher and debater expertly lays out why this idea is preposterous and how homosexuality is condemned, based on the whole Bible.
Update II:
The Bible and HomosexualityThe Authority of Scripture
It is extremely revealing to note that almost every pro-gay group within the church shares one thing in common: they reject the Bible as being fully the Word of God. Of the above mentioned denominations which have accepted homosexuality or are sympathetic to it, none of them believe that we have God’s inerrant Word in the Old and New Testaments. Likewise, the many pro-homosexual books that have come out almost all reject — or even ridicule — the church’s historic stance on the inspiration and authority of Scripture.
Three different lines of attack on Scripture are found in the various pro-homosexual literature. The first is simply to ignore the biblical writers on the grounds that they were men who oftentimes made mistakes, and thus to reject what Scripture says as being morally authoritative. Thus John Barton states that “the Bible is not a code at all; it is a big baggy compendium of a book, full of variety and inconsistency, sometimes mistaken on matters of fact and theology alike.”And elsewhere, in John Boswell’s widely cited work, we find: “In considering the supposed influence of certain biblical passages…one must first relinquish the concept of a single book containing a uniform corpus of writings accepted as morally authoritative.”18
A second attack relates to the first — that is, the biblical writers were ignorant about homosexuality. They did not know all that we do today, it is argued, and so we must judge and interpret the Bible with our modern understanding of biology, psychology, sociology, and so forth. “With the quantum leaps that have been achieved in biology, psychology, and sociology, minds in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries must subject traditional religious arguments about nature to more thorough and critical analyses.”
It is not within the purview of this article to give a detailed defense of the inspiration and reliability of the Bible. However, the simple response to these attacks is that both Judaism and Christianity have always held to the full authority of Scripture, as did Jesus Himself. In speaking of the Old Testament, for example, our Lord succinctly declared: “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). Parts of Scripture cannot be accepted while other parts are rejected. And in speaking of the guidance His apostles would receive, including guidance on their future writings (i.e., the New Testament), Jesus told them: “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you” (John 14:26; cf. 2 Tim. 3:16).
It is ludicrous to believe that the Creator of the universe, in guiding the biblical authors, was ignorant concerning the things we now know about homosexuality through modern biology, psychology, sociology, and so forth. To deny scriptural statements about homosexuality on these grounds is to completely deny God’s superintendence in the authorship of Scripture.
A third type of attack is to state that it really does not matter what heterosexuals think the Bible says about homosexuality, because homosexuals must interpret Scripture in view of their own experiences. Hence, in the book Building Bridges we find the statement that “the scriptures contain some insights that can be made known to the Christian community only through the testimony of lesbian and gay people.” Thus homosexuals must “interpret the scriptures in the light of their own experiences.”
The problem with this is that a person could justify any type of behavior by saying that Scriptures pertaining to a particular behavior can only be understood by those who engage in such behavior (e.g., incest, adultery, fornication, and even bestiality). Those who believe this should remember the words of our Lord: “Therefore take heed that the light which is in you is not darkness” (Luke 11:35).
Read the rest. Also see The Unthinkable Has Become Thinkable.
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David Limbaugh posts leftist e-mail. Compared to the missives I get, this one is mild.
Joe Carter: “Emboldened by the reelection of President Bush, many evangelicals are expecting their support to be richly rewarded over the next four years.”
Somehow, I don’t think we will be.
Update (11/18): Jeff the Baptist on the sins of Sodom.
