Replies

Respectfully, I don’t see most of what you wrote here within the body of Thomas’s article. What’s RBKA? Thomas does not mention it. You outline a strategy here that makes sense to you and involves “taking the relgious issues off the table”—but it seems to be your strategy, not Thomas’s.

I was responding to Thomas. He does seem to be arguing for a withdrawal that I think is inappropriate.

You have a different agenda from Thomas. It needs to be dealt with on it’s own merits. You seem to think that “concrete” = “secular” and that being secular and concrete rather than religious will work politically. Sorry, but the religious issues are on the agenda because the Left put them there by attacking them.

You cannot have any politics devoid of religious issues because culture is a tissue of religious, language, history, sociology etc. Secularism of the right will not work. The religiously naked public square was forced on by the Left but we cannot win space in the public square simply by offering a conservative secular public square.

But even that’s beside the point. The single most conflicted issue, even among conservatives (libertarians versus social-religious conservatives) is abortion and IT IS NOT A RELIGIOUS ISSUE but rather a justice issue. If the unborn are innocent human individuals, then killing them is unjust.

From that perspective, framing the debate as a question whether “religious issues” should be “taken off the table” already gets us off on the wrong foot.

And that’s where I would also fault Thomas. “The Religious Right” is a label forced on that movement by its enemies. Thomas should not even be framing the issue as “religious.” Because what launched the so-called “religious right” in the 1970s was Roe V. Wade, which was not about religion but about plain justice. True, it was primarily religious people who rose up against the plain injustice of RvW, but that does not mean it was a religious issue. Framing the debate as a religious issue was the first great victory of the pro-aborts.

Abortion is a religious/philosophical issue, just like the death penalty and war. Many people (and some organized religions) are flat out opposed to war under any circumstances, since innocent people inevitably end up getting killed — they believe that the big-picture benefits of war can never justify the killing of innocent people. Tough. Since this is a religious/philosophical issue, it simply has to be dealt with on a “majority rules” basis. Same goes for abortion. Just as we don’t force people (any more) who are opposed to war to directly participate in them, we mustn’t force anyone who is opposed to abortion to have or directly participate in one.

The insistence of a large segment of conservative voters on trying to use government to force their minority view on people who don’t agree with them on abortion, is resulting in much more serious political issues being lost to socialism, quite possibly irretrievably. Property rights, taxation into government dependency, and RKBA are all falling by the wayside, to the degree where if “pro-lifers” ever got their way, every child that is born would be born into absolute subjugation to government — mandatory government schooling, mandatory government-only health care, well over half the fruits of their lifelong labors confiscated by government to perpetuate the subjugation program, removal by the government from parents who try to teach them that all this is wrong, and no means to fight back.

And you’d better look up “RKBA”. It’s our most important constitutional right, the one upon which all the others ultimately depend, and many US citizens are already being deprived of it.