Paul Krugman had a column in the New York Times entitled Gore Derangement Syndrome speculating on the reasons that Al Gore drives so many on the right to the brink of insanity:
Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.
And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.
The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,†but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.†And so it has proved.
Krugman goes on to explain the detrimental effect that accepting certain basic facts about climate change would have on GOP dogma. It seems odd to me that, more and more over the past 10 or 15 years, on the national level, the choice between R & D is becoming basically a choice between faith-based policies and fact-based policies.
There are a number of us who are faith-based who are quite fed up with the President and much of the GOP. They are taking their marching orders from the Fundamentalist strain of Christianity. They are so hell-bent on the New Jerusalem needing to be established in Israel(with the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple) that they fail to see that many Palestinians are Christian.
And the Iraq war? Just because daddy didn’t finish the job is not a good enough reason to enter into war according to the “just war theory.” But right wing fundamentalists believe that Muslims need to be converted or wiped off the face of the earth. (Sounds like the same rhetoric we hear from Muslim fundamentalists!)
And then when it comes to global warming-doesn’t God call for Adam and Eve-the “first humans”-to be good stewards of creation? Did that responsibility stop with them? God didn’t give us the earth and its resources to squander and destroy. He called all of creation “good.”
Sooo…the bottom line is that a number of us Christians do not wish to be lumped into the political agenda of the religious right.
I was being glib, I’ll grant you that.
But, seems to me that the distinction is that you are describing people of faith who do not make policy decisions based on faith to the exclusion of the factual context of the policy. In other words, your policy preferences are guided both by your faith and by observed facts. You don’t just ignore facts that are inconvenient to your faith.
Exactly! And I listen to how my faith shapes my experiences with the facts. It isn’t easy. I sometimes wish that I could either have blind faith, or place all my trust in just the facts. Then again, I rather enjoy debating the grey areas!