How could all this have played out differently?
If people on both sides of the aisle had been willing to be even a little reasonable, we could have avoided this ugly, ugly fight.
1. The Democrats could have exercised a little caution and not filibustered Neil Gorsuch, who was and is a spotless, blameless nominee and was going to be confirmed one way or another. There was absolutely no reason for the Dems
I just don’t know where to begin here. Dennis Prager, a well-known conservative commentator whose articles run once in awhile on National Review Online, has produced another head-scratcher titled “A Defense of Evangelicals Who Support Trump.” Just what we need! Erick Erickson, a true Christian conservative, has already written a rebuttal in which he says, “Dennis Prager Is Just Wrong Here.” To which I say, “Yay, Erick!” I want to do a little more eviscerating on points not covered by Erickson. My main divergence of opinion with Erickson is his insistence that Christians didn’t need to dirty their hands in the last election by voting for either major-party candidate or indeed by voting at all, but that’s a topic I’ve covered more than thoroughly and so I won’t go into it here.
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
I am going to assume that you have already read or will read my review of this book over at my main site, Intentional Living. As I said there, this is a dense, challenging book that will reward readers who take it on.
For the purpose of this post, however, I want to concentrate specifically on some ideas that help explain why so many earnest, sincere Evangelical/ Fundamentalist Christians felt that they had to vote for a lying, cheating, adulterous playboy with a pro-choice Liberal Democratic background and a profane, vulgar vocabulary. Their votes reflected a failure of the mind in several different areas. I hope the following won’t sound too scathing, but we are in a predicament today that does not allow for mincing of words. America has elected an utterly unfit man to the Presidency, and Evangelicals helped to put him there. Why?
There’s a great novel by Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier, that begins this way:
”This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
That line would also apply to the article below. Sure, there are greata-bigga-huge problems with Obamacare that need to be addressed, and should have been addressed before the thing was rammed through. But you can’t just jerk the rug out from under people.
I had done some deep logical reasoning, I thought, on the whole you-have-to-vote-for-Trump-because-of-the-Supreme-Court issue, and then I ran across this excellent article by Ian Tuttle which went several orders of magnitude deeper.
1. This is how I’m dealing with it. I refuse to disengage from the political sphere.
2. As citizens we have the responsibility to hold our leaders accountable, no matter which party they represent.
3. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.
Pretty clumsy wording. Sorry.
I had said a couple of months ago that the best article I had read this election season (now mercifully over, so at least we can be thankful for that) was this one by Leon Wolfe over at the conservative website RedState.com.
The article is by Ross Douthat, a young conservative writer whose books I now plan to read. Here’s a good representative section:
I want at some point to write a short e-book about the history of the abortion issue in America: how we got to where we are, what would have to happen in our culture to change the attitudes that helped bring about legalized abortion, etc. But today I’d like to examine how the pro-life position has been exploited by politicians, thus causing credulous but sincere people, many of them Christians, to unthinkingly support anyone who is willing to say the right words.
America will only be a great nation when we have leaders of strong character who will defend both unborn children and the dignity of women. We cannot trust Donald Trump to do either. Therefore we urge our fellow citizens to support an alternative candidate. (You can read the entire article at “Pro-life Women Sound the Alarm: Donald Trump Is Unacceptable.” I posted it on my Facebook page back in August.) Amen! Preach it, sisters