Do Cultural Conservatives Establish the Norm in America?

While reading your piece, Cultural Conservatives Actually Represent the Norm, I was struck by the following inconsistency that leads me to believe that you are totally disingenuous. You wrote, liberals rarely try to reason with us in an article that contains not a single instance of a rational argument.

That some belief is the norm does not constitute a rational argument for it's correctness or rightness. Once the norm was that everyone believed the sun revolved around the earth. How Galileo paid the price of being different; yet Galileo was correct. It was once normal to believe that slavery was acceptable and not morally wrong, but that normal belief was wrong too. More recently, normal belief in America was that if Viet Nam fell to the Viet Cong, all of Southeast Asia would too. That belief was named the domino theory. It too was false. So arguing that something is normal is not rational. It is, in fact, a claim of the ignorant.

But what strikes me as most disturbing about those who take your point of view is the lack of specificity in your claims. I don't know who the liberals are that you're talking about. But what is more important, I don't know what you're talking about when you talk of moral values. You specify abortion, stemcell research, and homosexual marriage--each associated in some way of another with sex. And I don't know what moral system such claims are based upon. Certainly not either of the two commandments of Christ. Certainly not the Ten Commandments. Sex isn't mentioned there, unless you read the commandments about adultery and coveting as sexual. But neither of those seem to justify the claim that abortion, stemcell research, and homosexual marriage are immoral as long as aborting a fetus in not viewed as murder. And I, as someone who would ordinarily be called a liberal, although I have serious reservations to the application of that term, have serious qualms about the morality of abortion too. But I have none about stemcell research and homosexual marriage. I don't see them as moral issues at all.

I am concerned, however, about your pick-and-choose morality. Oh, you don't care about lying? That is rife in American politics, but you don't object. You don't care about corruption? That, after all, is a form of theft, and American politics is full of it. Isn't the visitor's gallery in the Texas legislature called the owner's box? But you don't object to it. And although you claim to care about the rights of the unborn, you seem not to care a whit about what happens to them after they are born. It's okay if they don't get prenatal care, it's okay if they are born into poverty, its okay if they lack access to medal care, its okay if they are given inferior educations, its okay if they survive on inadequate diets. I could go on and on. So, I have concluded that your moral claims are disingenuous. You're the pot calling the kettle black.

Think about it. For centuries Christianity was characterized as opposition to behavior that committed any of the Seven Deadly Sins. If you dont know what they are, you ought to look them up. Tradition had it that the commission of any one of those Deadly Sins would consign one to eternal damnation. Thus the use of the word, deadly. Americans today seem to have converted those seven sins into the Seven Virtues to Live By. That being so, we can hardly call this a Christian or a moral nation, and it matters not what people claim to be or how often they go to church. What matters is what they do.  That we have converted these sins into virtues is also what gives rise to the Moslem claim that we are the Great Satan. If we took a close and honest look at ourselves, perhaps we would agree. (Rod Dreher at the Dallas Morning News 11/7/2004)

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