Would Lincoln Really Side with the WingNuts?

Hugh Hewitt didn't like John Danforths' op-ed piece challenging the Republicans to reclaim their party from the extreme religious right. Nope, he didn't like it at all. He saw it as a call to abandon the principles of Lincoln. Huh.

Hewitt opines that Danforth's daily concern for the deficit instead of the current concern over the threat of gay marriage means that Danforth was asleep at the wheel, that it may have been one reason a "super-majoritarian opinion on marriage got rolled".( I'll confess, I have no idea what majority opinion "got rolled".) I find it a bit alarming that a daily concern over the deficit is equated with being asleep at the wheel, though it explains a lot.

Hewitt goes on to defend the current obsession with preventing gays from marrying, suggesting that the reason the current party's agenda seems too "religious" is because three state courts have " unilaterally decreed a massive rewrite of the country's shared tradition on marriage, obliging those who want to defend marriage as it has existed for all of the country's history to advocate for a Constitutional amendment." I would argue that these state courts did their job - they interpreted their state's constitutions. And all you have to do is actually look at the argument against gay marriage used in the courts in Massachusetts to understand why they lost. The arguments were specious and the Ethics Scoreboard summed it up quite nicely: "In the absence of any concrete documentation of factors justifying the withholding of equal treatment under the law for gay citizens, the court in Goodrich has clarified a hierarchy of values, starting with the Massachusetts Constitution."

Hewitt moves on to the right's obsession with Schiavo case, saying that the concern isn't for Terri after all but is instead a fight against the slippery slope towards euthanasia. He cites Vermonts consideration of legal suicide in support, unfortunately suggesting that assisted suicide for terminally ill patients requesting help and confirmed by more than one doctor to be in command of their faculties with euthanasia - with killing people who become "inconvenient" to society. The slippery slope argument is a convenient one and presumes that the public, the courts, the Congress, can't distinguish between issues that have some common thread, in this instance death, but live on opposite ends of the spectrum. I prefer to have more faith in our country and our government. Too bad Hewitt doesn't. 

The part of Hewitt's post that really drove me to respond was his contention that the courts and the left are setting the agenda. Really? If the left were setting the agenda, we would be talking about universal health care, veteran's benefits, fair distribution of homeland security dollars, eliminating poverty, repealing tax cuts to the wealty, figuring out how to solve the impending medicare funding crisis. It certainly wouldn't be all about Terri Schiavo, gay marriage, and privatizing social security. As for the courts, they hardly set the agenda. They can't initiate any action. They can only respond to the cases brought to court. Sure, on appeal they can refuse to rehear a case. But that's a case that's already been through the courts. It's a far cry from setting an agenda.

Hewitt says that the "center-right coalition, which includes many people for whom faith informs a world view, has decided that the demands of the radicals are not going to be agreed to without a political fight." I say that's great. It's not the pollitical fight we object to. It's the religious one or rather the infusion of religion into a political fight. I must note, however, that anyone who deems the agenda of the Dobsons and Falwells and Reeds of the world "center-right" has a very skewed view of the political landscape. No wonder he thinks anyone on the left is a nut case.

Hewitt continues by reprimanding Danforth, accusing him of aiding in the effort to deligitimize the agenda of the "center-right" coalition. He'd rather Danforth and other retired politicians simply share their views on the issues. The problem here is that the real issue is the one Danforth addressed - the abandonment of traditional conservative principles in favor of a far-right religiously driven agenda. Traditional conservatives should share their opinions - on gay marriage, Terri Schiave, and the hijacking of the Republican party.

Hewitt ends by claiming that influential conservative Christians continue to support traditional Republican principles identified by Danforth - limited government, low taxes, limited regulation, free markets, judges that interpret law and don't legislate, national defense, free trade, an engaged foreign policy. Huh. Is there really a hugh and cry on the religious right to reduce the deficit (isn't that being asleep at the wheel)? To fix the trade imbalance? To limit government from meddling in state issues like education and Terri8 Schiavo's case? To support judges that interpret the law even when the law doesn't support the conservatives' social policies? I don't think so.

Hewitt does though. And he adds four new "principles" to the conservative list:

• reduce the number of abortions,
• empower parents in the lives of their children,
• preserve marriage as it has always been, and
• assure that schools are not the preserves of left-wing ideology

He posits that these goals are consistent with the ".historic traditions of the party of Lincoln", that it's arrogant to say they aren't. What qualifies them as such? The moral certainty with which they are made. He claims that Danforth's  plea for the party to return its roots is really a demand that they abandon their roots, that he's demanding that "morality not play a part in  the party's council." I think that's a stretch. Lincoln's moral certainty regarding the evils of slavery should not be equated to the religious right's certainty that schools are bastions of left-wing demagogues, that parents need to be empowered. It demeans the fight to end slavery and elevates a political principle to the level of moral absolute. And just what does empowering parents entail? What would Hewitt say should be done to keep the liberal demagogues from running rampant in colleges? We already know what they'd do on abortion (ban it to the back alleys) and marriage (straight and narrow only). What's next?

It's the moral certainty, the righteousness, the superiority of the far right that's so offensive. The insistence on imposing their own moral views on the rest of the country, even when those views aren't shared by the majority. It's the denigration of tolerance as an amoral relativism instead of a respectful virtue. It's the wailing and gnashing of teeth in their self-declared oppression, convinced that they are the minority under attack by the God-hating liberals who have no principles, morals, values. It is this that the Republicans are harmed by and should reject. Hewitt makes it all that much clearer.

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