The Party of Abnormality
One of my oldest, dearest friends is a liberal
the real thing. He makes no bones about it, calling himself a
secular humanist with an aversion to revealed
religion. Utterly
honest and principled, he was enthusiastic about John
Kerry and is distressed by President Bushs reelection.
The analysts are already
reaching a consensus on the decisive factor in this election: not so much a
particular issue as the general climate of moral values and
their traduction in todays America. This concern was a great asset
to the Republicans, who played it for all it was worth and then some.
Bush not only affirmed moral
absolutes, but suggested that opponents of the Iraq war are moral
relativists and, yes, secular humanists. Not very logical, but it seems to
have worked, thanks to Kerry and the Democrats.
As my friend bears witness,
Kerry had a strong appeal to the unchurched and the unbeliever. His
professions of Catholicism didnt bother such people at all, because
his faith has no particular content. He has the demeanor,
and the voting record, of a New England Unitarian. More Catholics voted for
Bush than for Kerry. Kerry won heavily among voters who saw the Iraq war
as the most important issue at stake, but this wasnt enough.
Writing in the New York
Times, Garry Wills, another professed Catholic, notes plaintively
that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in
Darwins theory of evolution. To him Bushs victory
signifies the baneful results of religion undomesticated by
Enlightenment values. If you believe in the Virgin Birth, it
seems, you are probably the sort of person who supports Bushs
jihad against the Muslim world.
I suspect that if the election
were about moral values alone, Bush would have won by a
much wider margin. His war is troubling to many people otherwise
inclined to support him, but some of them voted for him anyway because
they perceived that his faith is real and Kerrys rings hollow. That
is, they trusted him to lead in a way they couldnt trust Kerry.
![[Breaker quote: Making it easy for the Republicans]](2004breakers/041104.gif) Put
otherwise, if religious voters had felt that Kerry was
one of us at heart, the bad news from and about Iraq this
year might have been enough to topple Bush. But we never felt that Kerry
was criticizing Bush from any matrix of conviction.
Kerry exemplifies the moral
faddism of modern liberalism, which infallibly gravitates to the abnormal
against the normal: abortion, gay rights, and sexual license
in general, with government throwing its weight on the side of each new
fad that comes along. He couldnt even bring himself to repudiate
same-sex marriage except in the most muffled,
nuanced way, leaving himself plenty of room for future
reversal.
It isnt just Kerry; this is
now the style of the Democrats in general. Their moral faddism, with all
its morbid energy, is a given; it has no limits except those imposed by
political prudence. They disagree among themselves only about how far to
go at a given moment, but the open-ended logic of their positions is clear
enough. Today they take positions nobody imagined 20 years ago; who
knows what theyll be calling for 20 years from now?
If every election becomes a
referendum on normality, the Democrats will keep losing. The Republicans
have already figured this out; the Democrats may be beginning to catch on,
but unfortunately theyve already married themselves (so to speak)
to abnormal causes, which they, like Wills, equate with enlightenment.
The hive-like moral conformity
of the intellectuals is among the wonders of the modern world. They are
positively attracted to perverse ideas like same-sex
marriage. Never mind that this never even occurred to the
sodomites of antiquity, who understood perfectly well that the point of
marriage was to care for children: As soon as the notion was proposed
amongst us, the putatively enlightened rallied unanimously to it. Nobody
laughed, let alone dissented.
The Democrats immediately
adopted the idea, thereby conceding the Republicans a monopoly on
common sense. This is a steep price to pay for victory in San Francisco,
Provincetown, and other precincts where the only thing youre
discouraged from putting in your mouth is tobacco.
You dont have to be very
conservative to have qualms about suddenly discarding old traditions and
institutions in deference to the latest bright idea. But weve
succumbed to the shibboleth of change without stopping to
ask what is being changed into what.
Joseph Sobran
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