3/7/2005
The Hippo and the Moose Need a Little Fireside Chat
The Hippo counsels the Moose to shut the fuck up. No, really. Until you actually know what you're talking about, you should cease and desist mooing, or moosing, or whatever it is they call it when mooses bellow uncontrollably.
For instance when you write:
The greatest predictor of voting behavior is the frequency of church attendance. The Democratic Party is perceived as a secularist party. This phenomena is extremely costly to the party in one of the most religious countries outside the Muslim world. That is why the Moose urges the donkey to reconsider its hostility to faith in the public square. That doesn't mean merely mouthing Biblical passages in support of the minimum wage. Sometimes it appears that the only religion Democrats accept is a theological belief in church-state separation.In general, my fellow imaginary mammal, I notice you often make statements of the form: The Moose urges the Donkey to stop doing X. X is usually something like hating the military families, hating religion, hating tax cuts, or in general hating America. And needless to say, we don't hate any of these things. I agree that the Ann Coulters and Sean Hannitys of the world have spent their careers trying to convince people that these things are true. But they're what we liberals like to call crazy Republican hacks. And the fact that you keep saying that we should stop doing things that these nutcases accuse us of, makes me tend to believe that you're the one out of touch. Either that, or you are maliciously trying to propagate Republican talking points. In either case, stop it.
So, here's a question for you. What would you call somebody with these stands on social issues:
- Pro choice.
- Pro civil unions.
- Believes that the "Christian church must never be a mirror image of any government, whether Democrat or Republican, totalitarian or democratic."
- Seeks the "eventual reduction of the availability of guns in society."
- Who "rejects war as a usual means of national policy."
(technically, the UMC doesn't have a position on the Iraq War, but the head of social policy, Jim Winkler, said that the war was "without any justification according to the teachings of Christ." I'm going to make the inferential leap here, and say he was against it.)
Why do the Methodists hate America? How did they get so out of touch with our mainstream values?
Of course, I'm being facetious. The Methodist Church is like the Peoria, Illinios of religions. It is pretty much by definition the mainstream. Certainly more so than some overpaid hack in the DLC.
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