A Hard Look at Values Voters
Posted: October 23rd, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Last week there was a “Values Voter Summit” in Washington, DC, where about 6,000 Christian conservatives listened to presentations from a number of the GOP candidates. Evidently, in their straw poll following the presentations, Mitt Romney came in first, with Mike Huckabee a close second and Ron Paul a strong third. (I rather like Ron Paul, who feels as I do about the Iraq War.)
What baffles me is this whole notion of even considering one of these GOP candidates (except, perhaps, Ron Paul) if you truly are a “Values Voter”. What could these values be?
Well, one value might be ensuring that same-sex couples are denied the basic right to marry the person they love. That would be the “Exclusionary Value”. People in clubs rely on this value all the time to keep other people out. And then there’s probably some value associated with the Second Amendment - maybe the “Athena Value”, whereby one upholds the right to wear full body armor and carry a concealed weapon…although I have trouble reconciling this with that troublesome little Commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. (But, then again, that’s not a “value”, it’s just a commandment.) And then there is surely the Right to Life Value - and since no one really LIKES abortion, and we all like life, the title itself skews public opinion. The question really comes down to who we think should be making very personal life-altering decisions concerning women and families…and I don’t think the federal government should be in the business of restricting our options in this realm. Another widely held value among Christian conservatives, which I’ll call the ”Ostrich Value”, calls on us not to educate our children about safe sex, in the hopes that, if they don’t know how to have safe sex, they won’t have sex at all. A stupid assumption if there ever was one. But what does result from this sort of sex disinformation is a higher frequency of unwanted pregnancy, and - tada - abortion. So the Ostrich Value and the Right to Life Value are contra-indicative.
What about the values that attach to our role in the greater, global community? What about the Right to Life with respect to Iraq? And possibly soon with respect to Iran? The same candidates (and voters) who take a very sanctimonious posture when discussing the immorality of abortion don’t seem troubled by the death and destruction this administration is wreaking on the middle east…where there are babies too, by the way. What about the very Christian value of doing unto others as we would have them do unto us? How does that synch with denying anyone the right to marry? And when we take that “Athena Value” and look at what the availability of guns has wrought in our inner cities, how can we possibly think that fighting to save the broadest interpretation of the Second Amendment is the right thing to do? Has the term “Christian conservative” become an oxymoron? I think that, perhaps, it has. If Christ were still in his grave (and we know how that story goes), he’d be rolling over.
