Unfortunately, life isn't led in the abstract. After I got out of high school I started seeing where those beliefs seemed to lead. How disappointing to discover that you disagree with most everything you were supposed to believe. I suppose I never really was a Conservative; I just thought it was cool to be able to say so.
Among those beliefs:
- Approval of apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia.
- Opposition to the civil rights movement. It's almost comical to watch today's Conservatives--like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin--fall all over each other declaring Martin Luther King their idol. Their Conservative forebears declared him a Communist and un-American.
- Opposition to Civil Rights laws. "States rights" was the code word then and it seems to have crept back into the Conservative vocabulary again.
- Social Security and Medicare are bad things (even though they have virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly).
- Prayer in public schools.
- Opposition to the Voting Rights Act.
- Opposition to minimum wage laws.
6 comments:
Politicizing Christianity has been around the time of Constantine.
Lutherans of conservative theological persuasion seem to have an affinity to baptize the Republicans as the chosen people.
Christians of similar sentiments, I'm thinking of those in the southern states, have had the tradition of saying the same about Democrats.
Who's right? Neither.
One man spoke so glowingly of Rush Limbaugh you would have thought Rush was the thirteenth apostle.
When I told the man that Rush was recently married---for the fourth time--to a woman half his age and paid homosexual activist Elton John a cool million to perform at the couple's wedding reception, he turned ashen gray.
Democrats have no claim on the moral high ground, either. Censored Senator Rangel is the latest in a long list of scoundrels. The repealing of the "don't ask, don't tell" gives truth to the lie.
When President Bush II sent then Sec. Powell to the UN to force the issue of war with Irag, he did so knowing the information fed to Powell was deliberate misinformation which the Bush II administration later admitted.
Thus, the warning "Trust not in princes..."
Things are not as they seem but the plans of kings are like water in the hands of the Lord.
The problem with the vague blanket list of things conservatives opposed is that it glosses over the actual specific arguments which were made at the time and which are actually quite astute in some cases.
Take the apartheid example, which implies conservatives were oppressive rather than just trying to keep their kids safe. South Africa was extremely sparsely populated when whites arrived. Once they built up a thriving country, Africans began moving there in droves. Rather than prohibit them, they just tried to live separately which is what both groups would have done anyway had whites never moved their in the first place. If South Africa under apartheid was so terrible, why did Africans keep moving there? Because it was better than what they had. Now whites have to leave because the country is falling into disarray.
Each of the other examples is similar. The conservatives were right on the specific points. They didn't market their ideas as well, which is why we end up with a vague list of good sounding ideas that don't work in practice.
I don't think the list is vague at all. It's quite specific. You are free to defend these positions as you wish, but I found your defense of apartheid to be pretty feeble. Racial segregation is a bad thing unless it's inconvenient for someone? Sound like moral relativism to me. I thought only liberals were guilty of that.
So MLK Jr was a communist then but a hero now? I kind of thought he was a hero back then but Conservatives denounced him.
It's possible to be an apologist for all sorts of things, but that doesn't mean they are right. Some people still "astutely" claim that slavery wasn't so bad.
The list is quite specific and Conservatives were on the wrong side of all of them.
"I found your defense of apartheid to be pretty feeble."
Could you be more specific?
"Racial segregation is a bad thing unless it's inconvenient for someone?"
Huh?
"The list is quite specific and Conservatives were on the wrong side of all of them."
The specific arguments that the conservatives made against them were not all wrong. And many of those things are not what their nice sounding names would have you believe.
"Social Security and Medicare are bad things (even though they have virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly)."
This is just not true. SSI is the program that pays benefits to the elderly poor. SS and Medicare transfer wealth from the young to the old who by and large are not poor. It is regressive.
"Apartheid was not simply separating the races. Blacks had inferior rights as well."
But they still kept coming to South Africa from other African nations where they could have had equal rights. Of course that was worse suffering than the unequal apartheid system.
"Your argument seems to be that apartheid was practiced against blacks for their own good."
No it isn't.
My argument is that being a second class citizen in South Africa was a reasonable choice because the countries they came from were so terrible. South African whites treated them better than other Africans did.
My (final) argument is that institutionalizing second class citizenship for specific group is--ipso facto--wrong. You can rationalize around it all you want, but you won't convince me it is right. I know which side of that argument I want to be on.
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