Flexible Standards on Religion
An excellent opinion piece examines the hypocrisy of the religious views of some liberals.
Open the pages of a liberal magazine or peruse the liberal blogosphere, and you’re bound to come across denunciations of the religious right, if not religion itself. The “reality-based community,” as self-satisfied liberal bloggers call themselves, was a term created in direct response to the “faith-based community,” what the Bush administration called recipients of money from its Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Given the religious right’s use of “faith” to justify hoaxes such as “intelligent design” and the ruinous attempt to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, the left had good reason to criticize, and sometimes mock, the absurdities that are the inevitable result of religion mixing with politics.
Yet the left, with its healthy skepticism toward religion, has shown itself to be cynically flexible over the past few weeks in response to the utter insanities emitted from the big mouth of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor, mentor and friend of 20 years. Suddenly, some liberals have discovered a newfound love for extremists who hide behind the cloth to justify their radical views.
He goes on to make this observation:
The double standard some liberals have employed in response to Wright makes one seriously consider their oft-stated preference for rationality, reason and secularism over superstition and prejudice.
This reminds me of a thought I keep having. Many pundits will assume any argument to support their party regardless of the overall consistency of the rhetoric. Thus we have conservatives who staunchly support the idea of staying out of international affairs, until a conservative president goes to war with Iraq. Or we have liberals who staunchly support constitutional rights except for the second one. Its rather alarming when you consider how much of either political party consist of people who seem mostly uninterested in rhetorical continuity.
It leaves one with the cynical, and paradoxical, view that a parties principles are determined solely by the other party’s views. This most obviously is the case when a political position in which the prevailing party lacks public support for a position. In those cases, no matter what underlying principle must be sacrificed the minority party will develop a rhetorical position to tap into that potential majority of voters.
May 7th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
First of all, as to the article: while I’d be the last to claim that politics in this country isn’t full of hypocrites,I don’t think this particular argument is valid. The claims Rev. Wright have been making aren’t religious claims, they’re claims about civil rights, racism, and anti-american conspiracy theories, which liberals have been rationalizing for a long time. If Rev. Wright was saying that God sent hurricane Katrina to punish us for tolerating gays, I certainly don’t believe the liberals would defend him just because it would help Obama. So I don’t think there’s an inconsistency there.
As for your larger point, part of the problem is that we’re talking about 3 different things: individuals within a political party, the political party as a whole, and the media coverage of the political party which is often the only thing we really know about the party. I think that *most* individuals probably have fairly consistent beliefs, with maybe a few unexamined inconsistencies; I think that political parties contain enough people with oposing views that whenever the political landscape shifts, new people flock to the head of the party, giving the appearance of hypocrisy; and I think the media decides on what the story is going to be on any given day and then finds the few vocal people in either party willing to come on the news and espouse the desired viewpoint, making the entire process seem completely erratic.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:26 am
“Many pundits will assume any argument to support their party regardless of the overall consistency of the rhetoric.”
Humans in general will come up with all kinds of reasons to support whatever position they happen to believe in at the time. It is not rational, it will never make sense.
I like to think about split-brain patients who’s corpus callosum has been severed: Often when the Right side of the brain produces some action, the Left side will automatically confabulate a story to explain why, even if the story is completely false. The patient will however believe this account to be true. I believe that whole brained people regularly confabulate explanations to support their more deeply held beliefs in an attempt to maintain consistency.
May 8th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
confabulate. nice word.
-anonymous