My family enjoyed the annual Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas Spectacular show this week for the third year in a row – this time in Boston.
They always end the show with a live nativity scene and a slightly modified version of the attached story, which I thought was worth sharing in its modified form as we approach Christmas Day:
Nearly two thousand years ago in an obscure village, a child was born of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village where He worked as a carpenter until he was thirty. Then for three years He became an itinerant preacher.
This Man never went to college or seminary. He never wrote a book. He never held a public office. He never had a family nor owned a home. He never put His foot inside a big city nor traveled even 200 miles from His birthplace. And though he never did any of the things that usually accompany greatness, throngs of people followed Him. He had no credentials but Himself.
While He was still young, the tide of public opinion turned against Him. His followers ran away. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was sentenced to death on a cross between two thieves. While He was dying, His executioners gambled for the only piece of property He had on earth–the simple coat He had worn. His body was laid in a borrowed grave provided by a compassionate friend…
Nineteen centuries have come and gone and today…Jesus is the central figure of the human race. On our calendars His birth divides history in two eras…
This one Man’s life has furnished the theme for more songs, books, poems and paintings than any other person or event in history. Thousands of colleges, hospitals, orphanages and other institutions have been founded in honor of [Him]…
All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the governments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned have not changed the course of history as much as this One Solitary Life.
Whether we believe in Him or not, it is worth reflecting during this holiday season on how it is possible to bring about positive change in our world without achieving success by conventional definitions.
Reflecting on that brought me back to two of my favorite quotes.
The first is from Henry David Thoreau, who said:
If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music in which he hears, however measured, or far away.
The second is from Micah 6:8 in the Old Testament, which says:
He has shown thee, O man, what is good, and what the Lord doeth require of thee, but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.
Happy holidays to you and yours.
[Open full post]Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard takes a fascinating look at the previously behind-the-scenes activities of a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. in an article entitled “A Lobbyist’s Progress: Jack Abramoff and the end of the Republican Revolution.”
Here is how the story begins:
In honor of the tenth anniversary of the fabled Republican Revolution–for precisely a decade has flown by since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives…let us pause…to ponder the story of Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon…
Abramoff was until recently a registered lobbyist, and Scanlon offers himself as a public affairs specialist, but more precisely they are what Republicans in Washington used to call “Beltway Bandits,” profiteers who manipulate the power of big government on behalf of well-heeled people who pay them tons of money to do so. Sometime around 1995, Republicans in Washington stopped using the term “Beltway Bandits”…
After describing how tens of millions of dollars flowed to various entities affiliated with both men, will there be any real consequences?
A funny thing happens when you talk to lobbyists, especially those with Indian casino clients, about the Senate investigation of Abramoff and Scanlon. None of them will talk for the record, of course, but they are surprisingly unanimous that all this unpleasantness will soon blow over.
Ferguson then addresses the deeper and more troubling issue underlying the status quo:
Stripped of its peculiar grossness, Abramoff’s Indian story really is just another story of business as usual in the world of Washington lobbying…That closed, parasitic culture of convenience –with its revolving doors, front groups, pay-offs, expense-account comfort, and ideological cover stories — is as essential to the way Republican Washington works, then years after the Revolution, as ever it was to Democratic Washington…
I came across another quote…from a profile of Abramoff in the National Journal in 1995, soon after Abramoff had announced he would become a lobbyist, back when the Revolution was still young.
“What the Republicans need is 50 Jack Abramoff’s,” Norquist said. “Then this becomes a different town.”
It was a bold statement, typical for the time, but even then it raised a question we now know the answer to: Would Republicans change Washington, or would it be the other way around?
I remember well that election night in November 1994 when it seemed real change might occur. Unfortunately, we have – yet again – relearned the lesson from the words of Lord Acton who taught us how power corrupts, regardless of party affiliation.
Big government means there are plenty of spoils to divide among the many powerful pigs at the public trough.
The next time your Senator or Congressman tries to impress you with the spoils he or she is bringing home to your district, take a step back and remember that the true price you are paying for any suggested benefit must also include the pro-rata cost of feeding every other pig across America who eats from the public trough.
Most importantly, what is often forgotten is that the spoils they are so eager to divide up represent a meaningful portion of the incomes of American working families and retirees – who are usually unrepresented at the table when these spoils are given away.
We must never forget that all families pay quite a price for these giveaways: It means less of their own hard-earned incomes is available to be spent on their own tangible needs, on things such as food, clothing, medical care, education, etc.
And that is why big government means less freedom for American working families and retirees.
Also of interest in Achorn’s piece was the possibility of a potential quid pro quo between Montalbano and Murphy and Chief Justice Frank J. Williams. For some time, Williams had advocated that executive oversight, ie. the Governor, be removed with regards to the day-to-day operations (firings, hirings, raises, etc.) of the judicial branch. Interestingly, the legislature continued to maintain their oversight responsibilities. Obviously, Governor Carcieri opposed this plan, and he was supported by Common Cause, who charged Williams with attempting a judicial “power grab”. In addition to the opposition by the Governor and Common Cause, some legislators had legitmate questions regarding the “judicial independence” portion of the budget. According to the Providence Journal’s report on the debate on June 25, 2004:
The Senate yesterday easily approved the $5.9-billion spending package for the fiscal year that begins July 1. The longest debate came over the promise of new budget powers for the judicial branch.
Sen. Leonidas Raptakis, D-Coventry, moved to delete an article that would allow the judiciary to submit its budget directly to the General Assembly without revision by the governor.
Sen. Marc Cote, D-Woonsocket, said such a “serious and weighty issue” deserved more debate. “In my opinion this type of amendment and policy decision — to have it incorporated into the budget is bad government,” he said.
Sen. J. Michael Lenihan, D-East Greenwich, called the provision, “by any reasonable standard, a huge change in how we operate our budgets,” and deserving further scrutiny.
But Lenihan suggested that the measure had other problems, including its allowing the courts to set up a separate purchasing system and exempting them from public procedures for establishing new regulations. He questioned how the governor could assemble a budget with “no idea what the package is going to ultimately cost.”
A former Finance Committee chairman, Lenihan also said he knew “full well . . . just how generous the legislature has traditionally been to the court system.” The fact that the Assembly will now be the only body reviewing the judiciary’s spending, “quite frankly scares the hell out of me,” he said.
Sen. James C. Sheehan, D-North Kingstown, had a different complaint. Sheehan suggested that the language violates the constitutional requirement that the governor present an “annual, consolidated operating and capital-improvement state budget.”
However, the plan had its defenders, who cobbled together enough support to pass the bill with the “judicial independence” portion intact.
Then, in a seeming coincidence, and only twelve days after passage of the budget with the “judicial independence” provisions, Montalbano’s son was hired to work as a data entry aide in the Rhode Island Superior Court.
Asked whether there was any connection between the two events, Montalbano spokesman Greg Pare said the Senate president, D-North Providence, acknowledged Stephen was his son: “Beyond that he has no comment.”
Really sounds on the up-and-up, doesn’t it?
To justify the removal of the Governor’s executive oversight, Montalbano stated that, “Let’s recognize that separation of powers doesn’t mean that all executive power is vested in the governor, because that’s not what I meant when I put it on the ballot in November.” It’s too bad for Montalbano that Rhode Island voters believed that all executive power is vested in the Governor. The attempt by Murphy and Montalbano clearly shows they have a different interpretation of Executive power than most of Rhode Island’s voters. We must be sure to disabuse them of their wrongheadedness. If we allow them to keep their foot in the door, it won’t be long before we will find ourselves right back where we started a decade ago.
NOTE: This post was modified at 7:30 AM on 12/22/2004. The original, and shorter, post was “a work in progress” that I mistakenly put up. Then we had a problem with our server, so I couldn’t update it in a timely fashion. I apologize for the confusion.
[Open full post]Ed Achorn of the Providence Journal has published an important editorial in today’s paper that highlights how Rhode Island House Speaker William Murphy and Senate President Joseph Montalbano are, in Ed’s words, “boldly trying to nullify the [78%] landslide vote of November 2” for a constitutional amendment that brings separation of powers to the state.
I would encourage you to contact these two elected officials and your own elected Rhode Island officials as soon as possible to register your complaint loudly and clearly about this unprincipled behavior. The editorial provides a directory for all state officials.
In standing up to such an undemocratic action by Rhode Island officials, the citizens of Rhode Island must again assert their belief in self-government and our demand that all elected officials obey the laws of our state.
After pulling together the two previous postings of The Naked Public Square Revisited, Parts I & II, I returned home this weekend to find the December 27 issue of National Review with its cover article entitled “Secularism & Its Discontents.” In the article, Ramesh Ponnuru offers some further insights into the debate about the public square.
Ponnuru reiterates how inappropriate name-calling has become the norm:
…most liberals, including religious ones, do find Christian conservatism dangerous in a way that makes it similar in principle, if not in virulence, to the Taliban…The idea that Christian conservatives and Islamofascists can be reasonably or fairly compared in this fashion is such a common-place that people who propound it often do not seem to think that they are saying anything provocative…
Putting things into perspective, Ponnuru notes:
My point…is to note that introducing nearly every one of these policies [of the religious Right] would merely turn the clock back to the late 1950’s. That may be a very bad idea, but the America of the 1950’s was not a theocracy.
America at the time of its Founding was, by contemporary standards, including contemporary conservative standards, shockingly illiberal…
At the same time, Ponnuru offers the following appropriate suggestion to religious conservatives:
To the extent that religious conservatives are jumping from policy disagreements to accusations of bigotry against some persons – and this does happen – they ought to stop. And while there is no constitutional requirement that people make political arguments in terms that can be understood by fellow citizens with different religious views, it is a reasonable request.
He then turns his attention to how liberals often twist the relationship between faith and reason in this debate:
The way liberals typically deploy the distinction between faith and reason in public-policy argument could also stand some interrogation. There are good reasons to think that it involves real unfairness to religious conservatives, or at least to their views.
Liberals tend to assume, without reflection, that the rational view of an issue is the one that most non-religious people take. The idea that a religious tradition could strengthen people’s reason – could help them reach rationally sound conclusions they might not otherwise reach – rarely occurs to them…liberalism’s general tendency is to identify reason with irreligion.
When you have read the likes of Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, it is hard not to find this reaction just plain annoying – not to mention just plain ignorant.
Ponnuru states the core problem in a way complementary to how Neuhaus did in the previous posting:
Liberalism’s hymns to reason always end up truncating reason. They are pleas for open debate designed to rule things out of debate…Let us imagine a conservative who says that abortion should be illegal because it kills human beings. His liberal friend responds that this sort of theological talk is inadmissable in a democracy because it violates the rules of open debate. We can see that this liberal has misrepresented his friend’s views and shut down the discussion – all in the name of reasoned argument. Yet that conversation happens all the time in our politics, and somehow we don’t see it.
If I’m right about liberalism’s instinctive reflexes, then contemporary liberalism has forfeited the creed’s ancient claim to promote civil peace…But if liberal secularism amounts to the unwitting imposition of the views of an irreligious minority on a religious majority, then it hardly seems likely to foster social harmony. Nor has it.
Finally, Ponnuru offers a sobering thought on what this all means during a time when Americans face a dedicated and evil external foe:
[Open full post]Liberalism’s confusions about church and state matter more now that we are in a war with actual theocrats, murderous ones. It is one thing to fight a war for religious freedom, pluralism, and modernity. It is another to fight a war for those things as liberals understand them…
I heartily recommend reading Andrew’s aforementioned excellent and insightful piece, The UN: The World’s Greatest Trade Association, that he wrote for Tech Central Station. Acccording to Andrew
The United Nations is the trade association for the world’s executive branches — the place where executive branches come together to promote their individual interests to one another, and to promote the expansion of executive authority in general….The trade association extends professional courtesy to its members — its cardinal rule is not to step on the toes of another executive. Saddam Hussein violated this rule by invading Kuwait and displacing another executive. Hussein paid for this mistake; the UN stepped in to enforce discipline amongst its members.
Conversely, so long as an executive maintains power within a country the UN will stay out of the internal politics of that country. Call it a sort of professional courtesy among fellow rulers. I would add that the misunderstood concept of sovereignty lay behind the UN’s non-interventionist political theory. This misconception, purposeful or not, has enabled the UN and other political entities to provide excuses for their lack of action in places like Venezuala and Zimbabwe. In the eyes of the UN, any who hold power in a region is a legitimate executive, thus sovereign, and thus a legitimate “state,” subject to all the rights and priveleges of the International Community. This conflation of the concepts of executive power, whether legitimate or not, and legitimate sovereignty, has allowed the UN to call for diplomatic process, including sanctions, over substantive action.
Carlin Romano at the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote an illuminating article on the concept, and misconceptions, of sovereignty. In it, he mentioned the work of Alan Cranston (1914-2000), a four-term Democratic senator from California, who wrote an essay, The Sovereignty Revolution, that began
“It is worshiped like a god, and as little understood. It is the cause of untold strife and bloodshed. Genocide is perpetrated in its sacred name. It is at once a source of power and of power’s abuse, of order and of anarchy. It can be noble and it can be shameful. It is sovereignty.”
In the essay, Cranston laid out various definitions of sovereignty. The best definition, the one held by most in the United States, was that sovereignty was “the right of people to determine their own destinies.”
The other definition is both more cynical and less humanitarian. In short, it is the belief that sovereignty is the “absolute power of a government over its own territory and citizens.” As such, sovereignty acts as “a shield against the intervention of other governments, nongovernmental organizations, and outside powers…a defense against outside intervention to stop extraordinarily unacceptable behavior by a government against its people…” Romano also cited the work of Dan Philpott, a Notre Dame political scientist who wrote that many believe “that simple presence within a geographical area presumptively places someone under a particular sovereignty.” This seems to be the definition to which the United Nation ascribes.
To combine the two explantions (Andrew’s and Romano’s), the UN has conflated strong executive power with the idea of sovereignty. As such, according to the UN, any strong executive automatically holds sovereign power, which implies that said ruler wields such power legitimately. As such, so long as Saddam Hussein or Robert Mugabe commit murder within their sovereign borders, the UN is unable, conveniently, to do anything for fear of violating the sovereignty of a nation. As a result, the UN imposes toothless sanctions that it eventually subverts, to the monetary benefit of its member states. Of this, the UN Oil-for-Food program is the best example.
[Open full post]In a story by Howard Fineman, Mitch McConnell casts the current political “divisiveness” in its proper historical context:
“It’s naive to assume there would be one collection of views widely held by everyone,” he said. “I’m amazed at all this hand-wringing over the level of discourse and partisanship. It leads me to believe nobody has read any history. The level of divisiveness now is really quite mild when it’s compared with numerous periods in our history.”
Indeed, our history is replete with political brawls that would appear unseemly to those with more milder political sensibilities. The accusation Thomas Jefferson had a liaison with a slave was first brought up during his presidential campaign. Andrew Jackson was accused of bigamy because his wife had never technically divorced from her first husband before marrying Ol’ Hickory. Of course, the greatest period of political divisiveness was the period leading up to the Civil War. How soon we forget. However, according to Democrat Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson, “It may not actually be worse but TV can make it feel worse.” He has a point.
In this instantaneous mass media age, most any story can be picked up by television, radio or the internet and spread worldwide within a matter of minutes. As such, upon first hearing an initial report of some event, it is human nature to take a position on that event, usually based upon an ideological worldview. It is also human nature that, once we have formed an opinion, we change our minds only when the evidence arrayed against our original position is well nigh overwhelming. We Americans like to stick to our guns. As such, our unprecedented near-instantaneous access to mountains of information has increased and amplified the ideological polarization in our country. However, despite the heated rhetoric generated by those on the poles, there is a mass of people, the majority in fact, who are in the political “cool middle” and are not caught up in the ideology wars. They are the self-described “moderates,” voters who ostensibly desire nothing more than “bipartisanship.” They are the same people who claim to be political “independents” often stating, not disingenuously, that they “like to look at both sides and make up their own mind.” If this is indeed so, it is incumbent upon the ideologues, positively defined, to plea their cases to this mass of undecideds every election cycle.
In the 2004 Presidential election, Rhode Island voters who described themselves as political “independents” accounted for 26% of the vote, and split 48/49 for Bush/Kerry. (source). (Registered Republicans and Democrats were evenly divided at 37% and split 93/6 and 11/89, respectively for Bush/Kerry). This would seem to indicate that neither Republican nor Democrats were able to persuade a statistically significant majority of Independents. However, more useful statistics are found in the ideological breakdown of the Rhode Island electorate (source). In Democrat-dominated Rhode Island, only 21% of voters identify themselves as Liberal, while 34% identify themselves as Conservative. (It is safe to assume that mose Liberals are Democrats and most Conservatives are Republicans, though I’m sure there is some party/ideology cross-pollinization). Putting these two polar groups aside, leaves the largest voting group in Rhode Island, those who call themselves “Moderate.” In Rhode Island, they comprise 45% of the electorate and broke 54/45 for Kerry.
Generally speaking, it is accepted that a moderate is liberal on social issues, conservative on fiscal, and all over the map on international issues, though they usually are enamored with the hazy concept of “diplomacy” (witness our own Senator Lincoln Chafee). It is also a safe assumption that most moderates are also those who most often call for bipartisanship. According to Senator McConnell, now that Republicans dominate Washington, the definition of bipartisanship is about to change:
For decades… “bipartisan” meant only a “center-left” coalition of Democrats and a smattering of Republicans. “The key now…will be whether there are a group of Democrats willing to join with most Republicans in a coalition of the center-right.”
In Rhode Island, we have Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee, who is properly viewed by his Republican counterparts as essentially a moderate Democrat. In this, I suspect Senator Chafee reflects the ideological make-up of his own constituency: Moderates who can be described as “center-left.” For most, Senator Chafee and his late father John Chafee are probably the only Republicans for whom they’ve ever voted. As such, I don’t foresee such a change as predicted by McConnell in Rhode Island. Indeed, the field of Rhode Island moderates may not be the most fertile for planting conservative ideas. I do believe that there are moderates who are really conservatives, they just don’t think of themselves as such. It is much more pleasant to view oneself as a “moderate” person, after all.
In reality, many, if not most, Rhode Island Democrats and Independents are traditional FDR/JFK Democrats who simply can’t bring themselves to vote Republican. Unfortunately, this means they vote in a way disconnected from their own beliefs, as they assign their traditional Democrat ideals onto today’s Democrats who are far more liberal than they. We few conservatives in Rhode Island are trying to convince the average Rhode Islander that their traditional beliefs are, for the most part, not reflective of those held by the 21st century Democrat party. It is a difficult task, especially when they still believe the notion that Republicans, and conservatives by extension, are intolerant, beholden to the wealthy, and don’t care about “the little guy.” Despite this pre-existing condition, however, there is evidence that conservative arguments may be taking hold.
According to the same exit polls cited above, as a percent of the electorate, those describing themselves as Conservatives rose 3% from the Presidential election of 2000, and those describing themselves as Moderate rose 1%. Self-described Liberals remained unchanged. My guess is that the 1% rise in Moderates is directly attributable to Liberals re-defining themselves as Moderates. As for the 3% rise in Conservatives, perhaps minds are being changed. It could be that the Independent Man atop our State House, to whom so many Rhode Islanders point a representative of their own views, may be glancing to his right. Perhaps, just perhaps, he sees the Anchor beginning to Rise on the Rhode Island ship of state. Perhaps there is “Hope” after all.
[Open full post]If you would like to understand why the United Nations is not nearly as ineffective as you first might think, check out my latest article over at TechCentralStation.
[Open full post]Having read “Hendricken administrator arrested on indecent solicitation charge” in the Providence Journal, I think I’d have written the headline somewhat differently. This sounds most newsworthy as a success story. The relevant information comes in paragraphs seven through ten of the fourteen-paragraph piece:
Sheldon had been placed on paid administrative leave from the school last month because of allegations of a “breach of professional conduct,” Brother Thomas R. Leto, school president, said at that time.
The action was taken, Brother Leto said then, after he had been made aware that Sheldon may have taken some inappropriate actions on the Internet.
Brother Leto said that he and the school principal were directed to a Web site, where they saw Sheldon’s picture. They decided to immediately place him on leave.
School officials then contacted the Diocese of Providence, who referred the matter to the state police. Bishop Hendricken High School, an all-male Catholic school run by the Christian Brothers, is affiliated with the diocese.
Look, on a human level, people who incline a certain way will be drawn toward environments that stoke their inclinations. On a spiritual level, evil will be relentless in its attempted infiltration of that which points toward the divine. The important question, on either level, is whether the institution manages to stop potential threats before they manifest.
We must be wary of the opposing tendency, however, which is to trample over justice and charity toward those whom we suspect in our rush to be safe. In this instance, it looks as if the balance was properly struck.
This posting is the second part of a discussion that began with an earlier posting and is related to two previous postings about liberal fundamentalism and the American Founding.
Richard John Neuhaus wrote a book entitled The Naked Public Square: Religion & Democracy in America. First published in 1984, it addressed societal trends and the philosophical issues underlying the religion/democracy debate in America. Here are some excerpts where he describes the problem:
Politics and religion are different enterprises…But they are constantly coupling and getting quite mixed up with one another. There is nothing new about this. What is relatively new is the naked public square. The naked public square is the result of political doctrine and practice that would exclude religion and religiously grounded values from the conduct of public business…
When religion in any traditional or recognizable form is excluded from the public square, it does not mean that the public square is in fact naked…
The truly naked public square is at best a transitional phenomenon. It is a vacuum begging to be filled. When the democratically affirmed institutions that generate and transmit values are excluded, the vacuum will be filled by the agent left in control of the public square, the state. In this manner, a perverse notion of the disestablishment of religion leads to the establishment of the state as church…
Our problems, then, stem in large part from the philosophical and legal effort to isolate and exclude the religious dimension of culture…only the state can…”lay claim to compulsive authority.”…of all the institutions in societies, only religion can invoke against the state a transcendent authority and have its invocation seconded by “the people” to whom a democratic state is presumably accountable. For the state to be secured from such challenge, religion must be redefined as a private, emphatically not public, phenomenon. In addition, because truly value-less existence is impossible for persons or societies, the state must displace religion as the generator and bearer of values…
[T]he notion of the secular state can become the prelude to totalitarianism. That is, once religion is reduced to nothing more than privatized conscience, the public square has only two actors in it – the state and the individual. Religion as a mediating structure…is no longer available as a countervailing force to the ambitions of the state…
If law and polity are divorced from moral judgment…all things are permitted and…all things will be done…When in our public life no legal prohibition can be articulated with the force of transcendent authority, then there are no rules rooted in ultimacies that can protect the poor, the powerless and the marginal…
Politics is an inescapably moral enterprise. Those who participate in it are…moral actors. The word “moral” here…means only that the questions engaged [in politics] are questions that have to do with what is right or wrong, good or evil. Whatever moral dignity politics may possess depends upon its being a process of contention and compromise among moral actors, not simply a process of accomodation among individuals in pursuit of their interests. The conflict in American public life today, then, is not a conflict between morality and secularism. It is a conflict of moralities in which one moral system calls itself secular and insists that the other do likewise as the price of admission to the public arena. That insistence is in fact a demand that the other side capitulate…
The founding fathers of the American experiment declared certain truths to be self-evident and moved on from that premise. It is a measure of our decline into what may be the new dark ages that today we are compelled to produce evidence for the self-evident.
It is sobering to consider how rapid the decline in America has been, happening during our lifetime. For example, contrast today’s status quo with this 1952 opinion by William O. Douglas who, as a not particularly religious man, wrote the following in a U.S. Supreme Court case entitled Zorach v. Clauson:
We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. We guarantee the freedom to worship as one chooses. We make room for a variety of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man deem necessary. We sponsor an attitude on the part of government that shows no partiality to any one group and lets each flourish according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma. When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows in the best of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accomodates the public service to their spiritual needs. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.
Finally, here are some additional thoughts from Neuhaus where he offers some guidance on how to understand and fix the problem:
One enters the public square, then, not as an anonymous citizen but as a person shaped by “other sources” that are neither defined by nor subservient to the public square. The public square is not a secular and morally sterilized space but a space for conversation, contention, and compromise among moral actors…compromise is an exercise of moral responsibility by persons who accept responsibility for sustaining the exercise that is called democracy…
One enters the democratic arena, then, as a moral actor. This must be insisted upon against those who view compromise as the antithesis of moral behavior. It must also be insisted upon against those who claim that moral judgment must be set aside before entering the public square…In this [latter] view, the assertion that a moral claim is an intrusion…an “imposition” upon a presumably value-free process. Morally serious people, however, cannot divide themselves so neatly…We do not have here an instance of moral judgment versus value-free secular reason. We have rather an instance of moralities in conflict. The notion of moralities in conflict is utterly essential to remedying the problems posed by the naked public square. Those who want to bring religiously based value to bear in public discourse have an obligation to “translate” those values into terms that are as accessible as possible to those who do not share the same religious grounding. They also have the obligation, however, to expose the myth of value-neutrality…
Neuhaus is now a Roman Catholic priest, a man known for publicly stating his deeply held religious beliefs. Yet, it is instructive to note how, through the use of reason that reaches out to all Americans, he carefully describes the issues we face here. In that way, he is being true to the principles of our Founding.
Americans who believe in liberty and self-government need to take responsibility for changing the course of our country’s debate on this important issue. We need to approach this issue with greater clarity.
As we prepare for another new year, it is a worthy endeavor to contemplate how each of us can make our own individual contribution in 2005 to helping the land we love.
