Wizblog

Absolutism Among Liberals

Here's another piece on the order of the Goldberg column, that is, one that points up the same brand of moral absolutism among liberals that they decry in Bush voters. Libby Sternberg at The Weekly Standard.

It's ironic, isn't it? The left is made up of scores of people ready to paint Bush and Republicans with the "moral extremist" label. "Bush's victory signals the triumph of belief over fact," Garry Wills moaned in the New York Times two days after the election. He sees the election in stark terms--the victory of fundamentalism over reason. In other words, if you don't share Wills's values and voted for Bush, you're stupid.

Maureen Dowd claimed the president "ran a jihad" in America--"jihad" is a word Wills used as well. And columnist Thomas Friedman wondered if he lives in a country where religion trumps science, lamenting that the Americans who voted for Bush have a different vision of what America is.

And perhaps there's some truth in that claim. Maybe the Americans who voted for Bush have doubts about whether homosexuality is a choice and don't want to rush to change sexual-bond institutions that have benefited society for centuries because of an extremist agenda that implies either you're for gay marriage or you're a bigot.

Maybe the Americans who voted for Bush have questions about when life really begins and don't want to support a party that refuses to acknowledge those concerns.

Maybe the Americans who voted for Bush wonder just how much involvement between church and state constitutes an infringement on First Amendment proscriptions against state-sponsored religion. Maybe they are troubled by absolutists who want to wipe faith out of every aspect of public life.

These doubts and concerns don't make them stupid or intolerant or bigoted or faith-based zealots ready to wage a jihad against those who disagree with them. It makes them average Americans. When Bush acknowledged his own doubts about the homosexuality question, he was speaking to them, telling them they don't deserve the ugly labels absolutists from the left use to denigrate their concerns. He was legitimizing their reasonable doubts about the left's absolutist ideology on values--gay marriage, unrestricted abortion, and an approach to state/church issues that more resembles the intolerance of anti-religion China than the tolerance of state-sponsored-religion England.

In other words, in the moral values debate, perhaps the Republican voters saw the left as the fundamentalists waging their own jihad, unwilling to acknowledge reasonable differences of opinions, let alone well-motivated doubts.