It's just not right

Now, it will get worse, much worse. How do you respond to what you cannot understand? I have few words, or maybe too many words. I cannot express how disappointed I am or how worried I am for my future and my children's future. This has already been one of the worst years of my life for a variety of reasons, but the Democrats losing not just the presidency, but losing just about everything, truly tops it off. I have not posted until now because I just was overwhelmed and feeling at a loss for words. So here I am trying to make sense out of all of this.

At first I was thinking that I would write up all that I thought might happen in the next four years, the dire predictions that I think are truly possible in the wake of the Evangelical Right being in control of this country. (I don't know how people don't look at George Bush and Dick Chaney and not hear the Darth Vader theme.) Reading around I saw that a friend of mine had done that for me, check out The Republic of Heaven. Some other blogs I read called upon people to keep up the good fight. Volunteer, organize, act. Don't give up. If you don't like the way the country is going, do something about it, don't just sit on your ass and complain. This is an admirable point of view and I don't disagree with it. Certainly we shouldn't lay down and die. In years to come there will be other elections and thanks to term limits Bush will out of office in 2008. I'm holding out for an Edwards/Obama ticket. In four years both of my children will be in school full time and I will have time to actually volunteer in a campaign. I am looking forward to it.

But I think to simply stop there is to ignore what turned out to be the deciding issue in this campaign: moral values. Now let's be clear here because it seems that what "moral values" really means is that you're against abortion and gay marriage. (Let me as an aside here say that I totally do not get the gay marriage thing. For the life of me I cannot understand how two gay people getting married somehow undermines my family or jeopardizes my marriage. If you truly believe in committed relationships than why wouldn't you think gay marriage is a good thing. If anyone wants to commit to another person for the rest of their life, they should get kudos for that no matter who they are. You want a moral issue? Why is divorce so easy to get? Why do we take marriage like a trial run instead of a major commitment for the rest of your life. But I digress.) There are apparently no other more important issues in our society than those two.

I am not sure how to deal with this or fight against it. The only thing I can say is that I think the left needs to get its hands dirty in the moral debate. Let's talk about morals. Let's talk about the morality of children living homeless or in poverty, without enough food to eat while men who make billions of dollars get tax cuts. Let's talk about the morality of millions of people who have to make terrible health care choices because they have no insurance or their health insurance doesn't cover the treatments they need. Let's argue the morality of a family where two people work full time but still don't make enough money to live in decent housing and send their children to decent schools. Speaking of schools let's talk about how immoral it is to make our children into little testing robots while taking away their lunch time, recess, art, physical education, and music. Let's invoke God and talk about how this earth was given to us and our responsibility is to be good stewards of it, not to mine, drill, cut and destroy until there is nothing left. Let's talk about the morality of a policy that won't allow science to find answers to questions about stem cells because certainly we must make sure living people suffer and die so that we can save five day old embryos.

(The embryonic stem cell debate drives me nuts. When I went through in-vitro fertilization I ended up freezing 9 fertilized embryos. I would gladly give them to science to figure out to to help any number of people. I will not be using them again so they will just get thrown away. If you truly believe that we cannot kill any embryos then you must also stand up against fertility treatments that create such embryos. But of course Bush wouldn't do that. It would risk alienating all the people who need them, a good 20% of those trying to have children by some accounts.)

I will not cede my God, my vision of Jesus, to this idea that God is a angry vengeful God who only cares if pregnancies get carried to term no matter what the cost and if gay people want to get married. The religious left must begin to stand up and say God is not this small. But I have visited many religious left churches and I tell you truly, they are not even close to up to the challenge. They are so afraid of looking like they actually believe in something, that they end up being more like social clubs than houses of worship. I believe that if Jesus were to show up tomorrow he would have to say that he is appalled at what is done in his name. But I digress again. (Told you I was having trouble getting my thoughts together.)

To simply say we must organize and continue to fight is not enough because the right has taken over the language and the debate. We must somehow take it back and to start that we must become more comfortable with the language of faith and of morality. We have moral issues that we must stand up for. We have faith that we must speak of. We have deeply held beliefs that we must not give away. Don't give up blue america but please spend some time thinking about your moral issues and how you can start voting and acting with them in mind.