Answering Anonymous

Back in August I wrote a blog post requesting evangelicals who planned on voting to Barack Obama to help me understand why, given his positions on abortion. For a long time I didn't get any responses except for a couple of high fives from people who agreed with me, which I appreciated but was not what I was looking for. Well, I'm thrilled that somebody who disagrees with me finally responded. I worked up a response, and since it took me quite a bit of time and since I have agreed to Brian's challenge to do this NaBloMo thing, I decided to respond to Anonymous in a blog post rather than in the comments section. So please go read the original entry and Anonymous's thoughtful response before reading the below.

Anonymous,

Thanks so much for your response! Of course I don’t mind – I’m very glad for your thoughtful and honest response. I’m so glad that we can have this conversation knowing that in Jesus Christ we have a bond stronger than politics could ever create. That leads to a much more productive and sincere conversation that what you’ll find over at the DailyKos or a number of other places, so I just wanted to first off thank you for the respectful tone of your response, not accusing me of racism, etc etc. I’ll do the same in my response to you.

You made some good points, and I’m going to try to respond to them as best I can.

It was easier to vote on moral issues in the past, when it seemed like the other stuff wasn't as important, but when you are faced with choosing between two candidates solely based on their moral stance, or choosing largely on your concern for how they would actually RUN the country, I no longer feel that choosing solely on morals is acceptable.

Interesting point. What changed? I mean, why was it easier to vote based on the abortion issue in, say, 2000 or 2004? I am assuming you mean the recent economic downturn. The current unemployment rate is about 6.1%. It’s true this is quite high. But implicit in your point here is that Barack Obama’s economic policies are the answer to the economic hardships that people are facing, which is a premise which I don’t accept. Yet, for the sake of argument, let’s say that were true. Are economic hardships really a reason to allow an injustice like abortion to remain legal and to become ever more available? To go back to the slavery analogy I made in my blog post, do you realize how difficult it was economically for the South after abolition? Practically their whole economy was dependent on free labor which suddenly became illegal. But slavery was awful enough to put above economic interests. We never make moral decisions in a vacuum – there’s always a cost – always a trade-off. So even if I accepted the notion that Obama’s economic policies were better for the poor (which again I do not accept) I would find this argument somewhat weak.

At some point, to me, it becomes an AMORAL decision to let millions of other families suffer economic hardships so that they guy in charge will support my moral goals.

I think what you have done here, perhaps without even noticing, is portrayed my anti-abortion stance as a little pet project of mine and a few wacky Christians, while portraying your economic goals as something that ought to be universally recognized as sort of a higher moral, or maybe even something that somehow transcends morals in importance. I reject that. Abortion is an objectively wicked thing that should be eradicated. Let’s not minimize the evil of abortion. It’s a horrible injustice! It’s not merely “my moral goal”.

You may find this short-sighted, given your concerns about the Supreme Court, but I would like to point out that several judges appointed to that Court in the past did not vote the way they were expected to when nominated.

That’s absolutely true and a great point. This is something I have thought about too and it definitely concerns me. Stevens was nominated by Ford, Souter was nominated by Bush I, etc. However I do think this is something that has been recognized by the conservatives as well and I think the last two were vetted more carefully than some of the past nominees as a result. I think we have learned our lesson here. Roberts and Alito seem thoroughly solid and I believe we now know how to separate the wheat from the chaff better than in the past. Another point that you didn’t make but has concerned me is, will a veto-proof Democrat supermajority confirm a supreme court nominee that they don’t like? Probably not. I am not sure what to do about this. By the way a left wing supermajority seems yet another reason not to vote for Obama.

(if they even are extreme because I do dispute some of your arguments on this subject)

Really? Please expand on this because I find this to be pretty much indisputable. If the case I made isn’t strong enough (I thought I cited my sources pretty thoroughly though), please read this. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2008.10.14_George_Robert_Obama's%20Abortion%20Extremism_.xml

If you still don’t believe he’s extreme I don’t know what else to say – we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this. I think his actual record – which differs sharply from his rhetoric during his campaign – speaks for itself. I think Obama is banking on the hope that we’re not going to go digging into his record when courting the evangelical vote. And I think he may be right.

John McCain's healthcare ideas and his economic plans would continue to force families to make difficult decisions and to suffer in ways we can't even imagine because we don't have to live that life. It is our responsibility as Christians to recognize a need and step in to help in whatever way we can -- volunteer in soup kitchens in your area -- I bet you'll see a lot of people you never would have expected to see in a place like that, having to feed their families off of charity and desperate for a government that can help get them back on their feet again.

Howard Dean (DNC chair) said a while back that “Our moral values, in contradistinction to the Republicans, is that we don't think that kids ought to go to bed hungry at night." I found this very offensive, but not surprising because that’s the attitude that the left in this country tends to have towards the right in this country, but they are usually not so upfront about it. As somebody who has only ever voted for Republicans, I would like to announce that I officially am not in favor of kids going to bed hungry at night. There I said it. Glad to get that off of my chest J Seriously though - I do sort of see that attitude implicit in your point here. Democrats want to feed people, Republicans don’t mind if they go to bed hungry. It’s simply not true. We have different ideas about how best to achieve “liberty and justice for all” but let’s give everybody the benefit of the doubt that we all do so with good intentions.

To illustrate my point, take a look at this breakdown of states where people are most personally generous vs. states where people are the least personally generous, and who those states went for in the 2004 election.

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2005/11/generosity_inde.html

It’s quite telling, and what it says is this: The left (blue states) believe that they are not personally responsible for being generous, but that they express their care for the poor in who they vote for because they view it as the government’s responsibility. The right (red states) see it as their personal/the church’s responsibility to help the poor. And both sides vote, and give, accordingly.

Have you seen the reports of the charitable donations given by Barack Obama and his running mate Joe Biden? Both are pathetically low. I make much less than Barack Obama or Joe Biden, and if I do say so, have given much more than both of them combined (up until Obama began running for president, when his charitable donations increased significantly).

As it happens, I do volunteer at a soup kitchen in inner city Dallas (not trying to brag – I don’t go all the time but I’ll admit to being a little annoyed that you assumed that I don’t at all), and I would like to point out that this soup kitchen is run by a church. Not the government. My point here is that, while I totally agree that caring for the poor is the responsibility of the church, I don’t at all accept that this translates to a mandate for the church to vote for candidates who give lip service to the care of the poor while making economic policies that are bad for the economy in general, which hurts the poor along with everybody else. Why do you say in one sentence that the job of the church is to step in and help, and then in the next sentence suggest that the church is a sort of “temporary solution” until the government steps in and takes care of these people. Why isn’t the church the final solution for helping these people get back on their feet? If it is indeed the government’s job, how far should the government go? Where does one draw the line in terms of cradle to grave care of people? If more government is necessarily better, then why wasn’t the Soviet Union a paradise? What country do you think we should look to as a model with regard to what level of care to provide to the poor? The UK? I was in the UK this past week and was approached by several beggars. France? Their unemployment rate is 8.7%! Spain? 8.1%! When do we decide that the government has done enough? When it removes all suffering? But that’s never going to happen!

I find many similarities between Barack Obama’s policies and those of Jimmy Carter. Under Carter the Misery Index (unemployment rate + inflation rate, which is a good snapshot of how much financial strain people are under) reached it’s all time high of 20.76%. It currently stands at 11.04% but during Bush’s presidency it was under 10% until May of this year – most of the time way under 10%. Does this point to a problem of 8 years of Bush when we enjoyed a robust economy for 7 of those 8 years (even following 9/11)? Perhaps it’s a business cycle that we’re on the rotten part of right now. Or maybe it’s the fact that the Democrats took over both houses of congress in 2006. Either way, it is even today way under the 20.76% number under Carter. Doing something like raising taxes during a recession, which is what Obama clearly plans to do on “the rich” (the definition of which seems to change regularly), is exactly the kind of thing that can drive that number back up to the Carter levels.

Take a look at the numbers here: http://www.miseryindex.us/indexbymonth.asp

Look at the trend under Carter, then under Reagan. I’ll admit that it looks pretty good under Clinton, although from 1994 on he had a Republican congress, plus the internet bubble was forming near the end of that decade and it subsequently burst leading Bush to inherit a mild recession which his tax cuts helped curtail.

Are you aware of the Democrats’ role in the Fannie Mae crisis?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aSKSoiNbnQY0&refer=columnist_hassett

Is it really good for the poor to give these people the free reign that they would have under a president that will sign everything that goes across his desk? What accomplishment of Barack Obama’s qualifies him, in your mind, to be the most powerful man in the world?

We are not living in a society where the poor are just lazy. The idea of government assistance being abused by lazy people may have been a valid concern at one point in our past, but these people who are suffering right now are REAL people, people you went to college with, people you may have been friends with, people who do or used to HAVE a "real" job and are willing working hard, but who just can't make it because of the way the economy is right now, and the current government is not helping them, and John McCain's economic plans will not help them.

I agree with you that the poor are not necessarily merely lazy. Even if they were, I read a book by one of my heroes of the faith, Tim Keller, called Ministries of Mercy, where he makes the case that the church has the responsibility to “feed my sheep” regardless of whether it is being abused. He also makes some really insightful points about the poor’s economic status being a metaphor for what we all are spiritually apart from Christ – so we are not better than any of them. At all. That book has impacted me deeply. However I don’t see how this translates to me voting for someone who wants that job to be the government’s job instead of the church’s. And again, I don’t think that it’s at all a given that Barack Obama’s policies will help them and John McCain’s policies will not.

I believe that if we really care about saving human life and preserving human rights, we have to consider all humans and not just the unborn ones.

Agreed. Let’s be clear, though, about the “hierarchy” of these concerns. Is bringing everybody into the middle class, as it is defined in 21^st century America, on the same level as whether we consider an unborn human being a human being? Is bringing everybody into the middle class, as it is defined in 21^st century America, really what Jesus meant by “feed my sheep”? Government is not the only, or even the best, solution to the economic crisis we’re now facing. But government is the only entity that can guarantee equal protection under the law for unborn babies.

I don't think it makes me a bad Christian to believe that some fights may need to be left to other days to help more people now.

Also agreed. I hope that my original post made it clear that I didn’t imply that Christians who vote for Obama are “bad Christians”. I certainly didn’t mean to. I think I even mentioned in my original post that I consider the people who I know that are voting for Obama to be better than me. I am just confused. Your response has helped me to understand a little better the thought process that leads to your vote and I appreciate that. I frankly think you are misguided in doing so (as you probably think I am), but I definitely don’t question your motives. But I do encourage you to think about the above and ask yourself whether your predictions about the outcomes of an Obama vs. McCain presidency for the poor are really so certainly true, against all the evidence I have presented above, that it’s worth forfeiting the abortion issue, because to me it seems that this is what we’re doing.

Thanks again for your response.