Category: Culture

Here is a look at “moral values” that some continue to insist decided the 2004 Presidential Election. The first view is from the Red area with a rebuttal from a Blue state supporter:

Conservatives in rural Ohio big key in Bush victory

OTTAWA, Ohio (AP) – Glen Beutler lost his job making patio doors when his employer shut down three years ago.

He was exactly the kind of voter John Kerry was counting on to help him defeat President Bush.

Instead, Beutler and many of his neighbors across rural Ohio worried about the economy voted for Bush because they felt he shared their values on issues such as abortion, gay marriage and gun owner rights.

“Around here, family and values still comes first,” Beutler said.

“It was nice to see the rural people have the advantage this time,” said Cora Bour, the GOP chairwoman in Seneca County.

“In our area, we have a lot of farmers and people who are just down to earth,” she said. “A lot of people see that in President Bush. A lot of it had to do with his faith too. That’s the way we are around here.”

Am I Blue?
I apologize for everything I believe in. May I go now?

By Michael Kinsley

Sunday, November 7, 2004 Washington Post

There’s just one little request I have. If it’s not too much trouble, of course. Call me profoundly misguided if you want. Call me immoral if you must. But could you please stop calling me arrogant and elitist?

I mean, look at it this way. (If you don’t mind, that is.) It’s true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose abortion and where gay relationships have full civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values — as deplorable as I’m sure they are — don’t involve any direct imposition on you. We don’t want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same gender, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?

We on my side of the great divide don’t, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don’t claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree?

I simply find it amazing that people will vote against their best interests for the sake of “moral values”. Our government was created to protect the rights of all citizens. It is highly unamerican for a group to pass laws or support candidates who want to discriminate simply because “they” don’t like what they want to outlaw.

As Kinsley said, how arrogant is that?

The same people who voted against Kerry because he “might” want to ban guns (though he never said it) are the same ones who want to prevent a group of people from committing to the person they love in a legal union.

They are the same people who want to force women to carry unwanted babies to term yet don’t bat an eye at the government sending their children into a war that was not needed and hasn’t made the nation safer.

They are the same people who trust Bush with the economy even when they lose their jobs or savings to unethical business practices allowed and encouraged by the same administration.

A friend of mine tried to say, before the election, that the electorate was ignorant if they voted for Bush. I tried to dissuade him from saying that with no evidence. Now I am coming around to his way of thinking.