I think it’s time to applaud the amazing summer for the magnificent Campaign Obama. David Axelrod, David Plouffe and company have succeeded in bringing home their central campaign theme, campaigning fiercely and boldly so that America knows exactly what Obama stands for:

“I am not a terrorist sympathizer.”

“I am not a closet Muslim, a black nationalist radical.”

“I am not single-handedly responsible for the rise in gas prices.”

“I’m against drilling for oil, but not so much that I would stop it.”

“I am not going to let people question my patriotism.”

“I am not going to let people say I’m going to raise taxes on Americans making $42,000 a year.”

“I don’t disrespect our wounded veterans overseas.”

“I am not an empty-headed celebrity like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.”

“My supporters are not foolish, Kool Aid drinking, Dungeons and Dragons playing imbeciles.”

“Taking a stand on the beginning of life is above my pay grade.”

Notwithstanding Obama’s consistent, often-repeated message about John McCain…

“John McCain, let’s face it, he’s got a compelling biography.”

“John McCain is a man who is a genuine American hero and has served his country with distinction.”

All of which is succinctly summed up in the campaign’s new tag-line:

“I am not the Messiah.”

And last week’s winning theme:

“I may be a multimillionaire, but I’m not as rich and successful as John McCain.”

With such a strong and unmistakable message, it’s positively dumbfounding how Obama could possibly be lagging in the polls. It must be that many Americans are just too bitter to appreciate his message.

(cross-posted at TPMCafe)

Technorati Tags: Obama, politics

It’s Bizarro day on Fivethirtyeight.com, so I just had to let my true political feelings be known…

As an avid John McCain supporter, I must say that all this vice presidential nonsense is distracting us from the truly important issues facing the next American president. And that is, whether the next Leader of the Free World will be a genuine war hero or a junior Senator who recently visited Pearl Harbor in order to buy a snow cone (which he prefers to call “shave ice”). His colors of choice? Lime green, guava orange, and communist red!

Naturally, I am in no ways questioning Mr. Obama’s patriotism; however, I have always felt that is the responsibility of the leading candidates for the presidency of this country ensure that the great red, white, and blue are always given their proper respect. I have no doubt that John McCain would have purchased a snowcone with cherry-pie red, vanilla white, and blueberry blue flavors.

Americans deserve an American President who will not disrespect the veterans and POWs (did I mention that John McCain is a POW?) who died for our country with their choice of anti-American snow cone flavorings.

Technorati Tags: humor, McCain, Obama, politics

Blogging in the TPMCafe, Theda Skocpol gives the best assessment of the challenges facing camp Obama that I’ve read so far. Here’s part of her analysis:

For weeks, Obama has ignored or wheedled when McCain and Lieberman attacked his patriotism and judgement. He has repeatedly begged them to stop because, supposedly, they are more honorable than that. He has asked them to discuss the issues dispassionately. What an insipid approach! McCain has NOT been honorable or honest, and Obama and his surrogates need to hammer on that incessantly. Use words like “lying” and “losing himself” or ” (better) “forgetting what he is supposed to stand for.” Stop focusing on decades ago in the POW camp. Talk about now, about the last years and months. Make the really obvious point that no candidate for President at this time can really be putting country first if he runs a dirty, lying campaign of false smears. That betrays the public trust. Tell it like it is, Obama!

Politics is not just about issues, it is a metaphorical test of strength. If a man will not get immediately — if quietly — angry and fight back when his patriotism is attacked, why should we trust him to defend the country? And if he won’t punch back by explaining clearly why his approach to foreign policy is actually tougher and smarter, why McCain’s is thoughtless and reckless, why would we think he is better to be Commander in Chief?

And on issues like oil drilling, why not recognize that McCain has adopted an ACTIVE metaphor that makes emotional sense to people? He is saying we should act to tap U.S. resources, and people are not really concerned about how many years it would take to tweak pump prices. They hear action and will and resolve — and these are highly valued in a President! Obama can certainly get a hearing for other active steps, but he and the Dems should stop pretending that they can parry drilling with logic.

Obama is lucky he is not further behind already. And he is going to fade fast if he just runs a feel-good, bland convention about abstract “hope” and “change.” In addition to getting gritty and colorfully clear about his recipe for making Americans’ lives better — AND about his approach to make this nation safer and stronger in the world — Obama needs to signal all the major speakers at next week’s convention to go after McCain in a key part of each speech. We need to hear why McCain is wrong and dangerous and no longer so honest and honorable. It needs repeating with force and humor and passion.

Count me in the camp that believes this election is Obama’s to lose, and in the past several weeks he’s doing a pretty good job of it.

Here’s my greatest irritation: Barack Obama never just attacks John McCain. He always prefaces a criticism with praise, carefully saying what a great war hero John McCain is and how honorable he is … and then he begins a high-minded disagreement with the man’s policies.

Like when he said, “Most of us know John McCain’s biography and it is worthy of admiration. This is a man who is a genuine American hero and has served his country with distinction.” And that’s how he starts to ATTACK the man!

I would tell him to give it a break! He should just assume his audience is smart enough to know that John McCain was a POW and that nothing he’s saying is in any way anti-POW or anti-veteran.

I don’t think John McCain is prefacing every attack on Obama with praise for his character and appreciation for hisexperience. Enough with the McCain-is-a-genuine-hero bullshit. Everyone knows that’s a part of McCain’s biography, but what’s more relevant is who McCain has become: just another unprincipled politician willing to say or do anything or pander to any constituency to get elected. He’s temperamentally unfit for the presidency and is quite possibly too senile. Barack should just hit him back, and spare us the effusive praise that just helps to frame McCain based on things that happened to him forty years ago.

I swear, if I have to sit through the entire Democratic National Convention and listen to speaker after speaker softballing John McCain and telling America repeatedly what a great, honorable war hero he is, I will get angry as a green monster. You will not like me when I’m angry.

Please… please… please… Obama campaign, it’s time to take the gloves off.

Technorati Tags: McCain, Obama, politics

Although I have been too busy to post regularly on this blog (you all miss me terribly, right?), I’ve still been taking a great interest in political news and following the presidential race especially closely. So I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the overall state of the race, and give a few of my predictions.

Why Obama Will Win

I’m heartened by the fact that Barack Obama is leading in the popular vote tallies, even as the race in the battleground states appears to be tightening. But I’m not taking these polls seriously. I’ve been disappointed before when Kerry, Gore, and Dukakis led in the summer opinion polls only to see the Republican pull ahead in the fall. It’s quite possible that 2008 will have a similar dynamic.

I still expect Obama to pull off a victory, and quite possibly an electoral college landslide. If that happens, it will be for two reasons: first, the electorate is focused on domestic policy; second, Obama manages to neutralize voters’ concerns about his ability to be commander-in-chief.

My own experience of how I came to support Obama over Hillary Clinton seems instructive. Last year, I viewed both candidates as excellent overall, but each with significant flaws. It took me quite a while (more than a year, in fact) for Obama to clinch the deal and win my vote. It was only when push came to shove (the Washington state primary loomed) that I decided.

I know that most American voters pay far less attention to politics than I do, so I don’t expect them to warm up to a newcomer overnight. John McCain enjoys an advantage right now because he’s more familiar and has far more experience on the national scene.

Obama’s biggest electability problem has been well-known even before Clinton made “ready on day one” her mantra. Obama is a junior Senator who ran for the presidency with only a couple of years in the Senate. The media hype, fawning fans, and celebrity testimonials have contributed to the feeling (however unjustified) that he’s more style than substance.

My decision to support Obama over the more seasoned Clinton was agonizing. I felt that Clinton, for all her inauthenticity and her poorly managed campaign, was more than acceptable. She was the “safer” choice, and I deeply resented Obama’s decision to run for president in 2008 (instead of paying his dues and running in 2012 or 2016). How could he ask me to roll the dice and have faith that he could succeed at the most difficult job in the world? Luckily, I changed my heart and turned out not to be too cynical.

Now the opinion polls tell us that voters feel that McCain is “safer”, Obama is “riskier”. By nearly a 2:1 margin they feel McCain would be the stronger commander-in-chief. Basically Obama has yet to seal the deal.

But this isn’t such bad news when you consider that many voters won’t really be tuning on the campaign until the fall. By then, Obama will be a much more familiar face and images of him looking very presidential on his overseas tour will have changed many perceptions. Obama has a big job to do, but every day he continues to justify our faith in his superb competence and skills. He’s got plenty of time to succeed, even if the race gets even closer.

Why McCain Will Lose

Like most Americans, I have residual warm feelings about the John McCain who ran for president in 2000. He seemed the authentic maverick, a rare Republican who put his own ideals above party interest and often spoke uncomfortable truths (even if this image was partially manufactured by unduly biased media coverage). Now it seems this McCain is missing in action.

What an enormous disappointment his campaign has been! He has proven to be an underwhelming manager of a terrible campaign, bankrupting it twice and turning over its management team faster than a McDonald’s restaurant changes employees. He has repeatedly made alarmingly intemperate statements that paint his opponents and all who dare challenge him as unpatriotic traitors. He has flip-flopped on many issues in order to appeal to the right wing of his party. His reputation for “straight talk” is indelibly damaged.

Finally, he has made serious gaffes so often that I’ve become genuinely worried that he is not in sufficient command of his faculties to be qualified for the presidency. To put it bluntly, he’s past his prime. The more Americans see of him, the more they will conclude he’s too old for the job. I’m not being ageist. Maybe there’s a vigorous 71-year-old who’s up for it, but McCain’s not the one.

Perhaps McCain’s greatest failure has been his unwillingness to spell out his “vision thing”. Surely he will try to remedy this by urging some kind of Renew America’s Greatness theme at the Republican convention. I’m betting this effort won’t be enough for McCain to turn his campaign around. But who knows? If McCain’s surrogates and “shadow campaign” succeed in painting Obama as untrustworthy and therefore too risky, then he may yet pull off an upset.

Who Obama Will Choose as V-P

The most important decision Obama must make between now and November will be whether or not to select a vice presidential nominee who will be perceived to “beef up” the ticket’s foreign policy credentials. If he selects Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel, Sam Nunn, or Wesley Clark, there will be no doubt that Obama is trying to cover his weakness on foreign affairs. This might soothe the fears of swing voters and neutralize McCain’s strong suit, but it also might shift public attention away from domestic affairs onto foreign affairs. If Obama plays the game on McCain’s favored territory, he’ll be sorry.

I think the ideal candidate for Obama is one who is immediately perceived as a credible commander-in-chief, but who is not primarily known for his or her foreign policy strengths. Joe Biden could almost meet this hurdle, but he is so strongly identified with foreign affairs expertise that the media spotlight would probably turn too much away from domestic policy. Who could help Obama overcome his perceived “experience” deficit while still accenting his domestic policy strengths?

Among all the major names floated for vice president, I see only two candidates who can fit this bill: Hillary Clinton and Evan Bayh. Tough-as-nails Clinton is widely seen as possessing the knowledgeability and cool temperament to be commander-in-chief, but her passion is undoubtedly domestic affairs. Bayh, the two-term Indiana Governor, has impeccable executive experience. And he has a moderate reputation (former Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council) and years of experience on the Armed Services and Intelligence committees.

If Obama’s decision comes down to Clinton or Bayh, the smart better should go with Bayh. Clinton’s many negatives are well-known (most importantly, her unpopularity with swing voters). But Bayh seems to have all the right mix of attributes: he’s telegenic, he has a national reputation, he has experience winning votes in red states, he hails from the Midwest and could help in Ohio and Michigan (even if Indiana is a lost cause), and he actually seems to want the job of vice president.

Bayh’s most important asset: he’s boring. When he’s partnered with a rock star presidential nominee, his blandness would help to give the ticket just the right temperament. Obama is the quintessential fiery Leo. Bayh is the quintessential earthy Capricorn. An earth sign veep grounds fire in a good way. Hey, if the astrology symbolism seems to fit, I’ll roll with it.

Who McCain Will Choose as V-P

I’m sorry, but I just can’t get excited about this question. If you can picture McCain as the GOP’s Snow White … (see, that wasn’t so hard, was it?) … guess who Pawlenty, Huckabee, Romney, Lieberman, Ridge, Palin, and Jindal are?

If I were a gambler, I wouldn’t place a bet. But what the hell, I’ll guess McCain goes with Florida Governor Charlie Crist. Crist has fans across the political spectrum, he hails from a swing state that McCain badly needs to win, his age and executive experience nicely complement McCain’s, and he seems to genuinely want the job.

I also imagine that McCain places a tremendous value on rewarding loyalty. Because loyalty is honorable and noble, of course, just the qualities McCain thinks of himself possessing. McCain owes his Florida victory to Crist’s timely endorsement, and he owes his primary victory largely to his campaign’s momentum coming out of the Florida contest. In the end, he’ll reward his “king-maker”.

Crist may seal McCain’s Florida vote, but he is unlikely to be a game changer. I can’t see that he’ll cost McCain any votes, though, unless some unflattering news comes prancing “out of the closet”, if you get my drift.

Postscript

I’m from Seattle. Locally, there are two very important concerns on the ballot for November that I know of; however, there hasn’t been much to watch closely yet.

The first issue is the Governor’s race, which is going to be a squeaker. In 2004, Christine Gregoire beat Dino Rossi by only 192 votes. Recent polls show the race tied (again) between the incumbent Democrat and the Republican nominee. Anti-Dino ads have been running nonstop for weeks. I think Gregoire will probably lose a very close race, a victim of the strong anti-incumbent mood in the state. But that’s no reason not to work for her election!

The second local issue is Sound Transit 2, a proposal that will expand the light rail system to the suburbs by raising the state sales tax from 6.5 to 7.0 percent. It looks like the smartest transit proposal that King County has seen in the last few years (since voters killed the monorail boondoggle), but I would bet the measure fails. Last year’s transit package got voted down, and voters are unlikely to raise sales taxes when they’re already concerned about the economy.

P.P.S.

I’m very frustrated that my blog’s home page has decided (on its own, I assure you) that it wants to be virtually all italics. There’s no code in my blog posts, css, or WordPress templates that should be causing it, so far as I can tell. Damn gremlins. Sorry about the hard-to-read italics. I hope eventually to find a fix.

The first draft of this post was published on TPM Cafe.

Technorati Tags: McCain, Obama, politics

“Kids don’t think about race.
Think like your kids for once.
Think the way they think.” — Chris Matthews

Hat tip to Daily Kos.

Technorati Tags: Matthews, Obama

“Gosh I’m tired of divisive exchange,
And I got one or two things
to say about change
Like the change we must change
To the change we hold dear
I really like change
Have I made myself clear?”

Technorati Tags: humor, McCain, Obama, politics

I don’t have a particular beef with Howard Fineman. At least I didn’t, until today. But a sentence in his Newsweek op-ed “Gaffe Alert!” just makes my skin crawl.

His piece opens with a few lines detailing what a wonderful week it was shaping out to be for John McCain: a “nicely staged” campaign event in Denver, a “tightly focused message” on the economy, the fresh energy of a “re-launched campaign”, and a renewed McCain “back in the game”. Then, oops! Phil Gramm makes a gaffe.

Okay… Big Bad Gramm put his foot in his mouth. Asinine. He should keep his mouth shut. Fine.

Fortunately, Fineman says, John McCain is above all that, untouchable even in a moment of distress. Fineman writes:

Senator McCain, cringing, immediately distanced himself from Gramm and his comments.

There’s just one little problem with this sentence. It’s a bald face lie. As has been widely reported on the Web, the McCain campaign initially backed up it’s guy Gramm. The Huffington Post writes:

But in an initial statement published by Politico and then, seemingly, removed from its site, a McCain campaign aide actually stood by Gramm’s remarks, saying the interview as a whole was merely meant as a preview of the Senator’s economic agenda.

“Mr. Gramm was simply saying that we are laying out the economic plan this week,” the piece quoted a “McCain official” as saying. “The plan is comprehensive, providing immediate near-term relief for Americans hurting today as well as longer-term solutions to get our economy back on track, secure our energy future and deliver jobs, prosperity and opportunity for the next generation. We’re laying out that plan this week with an emphasis on the critical importance of job creation, and it’s been a great success so far.”

What’s more, this isn’t the first time McCain or his surrogates have said that the nation’s economic woes are “psychological”. Barack Obama, citing McCain’s claim that his gas tax holiday would have mainly “psychological” benefits, even said we don’t need another Dr. Phil.

But to Fineman, McCain is far too noble to have such asinine sentiments about the economy. Fineman knows McCain’s true motives, and since they must be pure, surely McCain must be imagined as having “cringed” upon hearing his advisor’s gaffe. I don’t suppose anyone actually saw John McCain cringe. Not necessary! Fineman knows how McCain would certainly have responded.

And even if McCain’s campaign flip-flopped on whether or not to stand by Phil Gramm, surely McCain himself is such a fast gunning, straight talking maverick that he should be imagined as responding “immediately” to such goofs. It all depends on the meaning of “immediately”. As “immediately: reluctantly, after backtracking, changing your mind, being cornered into covering your ass by throwing your own Economic Oracle under the bus”.  

So Howard Fineman, why are you dissembling about something so incontrovertible and documented as McCain’s response to Gramm?

cross-posted at TPM Cafe.

Technorati Tags: Fineman, McCain, media, Obama, politics

New York Times columnist Gail Collins pours cold water over the left’s disappointment with Barack Obama:

Think back. Why, exactly, did you prefer Obama over Hillary Clinton in the first place? Their policies were almost identical — except his health care proposal was more conservative. You liked Barack because you thought he could get us past the old brain-dead politics, right? He talked — and talked and talked — about how there were going to be no more red states and blue states, how he was going to bring Americans together, including Republicans and Democrats.

Exactly where did everybody think this gathering was going to take place? Left field?

When an extremely intelligent politician tells you over and over and over that he is tired of the take-no-prisoners politics of the last several decades, that he is going to get things done and build a “new consensus,” he is trying to explain that he is all about compromise. Even if he says it in that great Baracky way.

Of course, not all of us who preferred Obama to Clinton did so under the delusion that he was some sort of left-wing Reagan, an ideologically pure politician who would fight for every pet cause of the left. We did so perfectly well knowing that he was pretty non-ideological, supporting policies that are mainstream Democratic priorities (ending the Bush tax cuts, ending the Iraq war, achieving universal healthcare, appointing non-wingnut judges to the Supreme Court, etc.) We regarded his ability to appeal to independents and non-ideological Republicans as a strong asset.

But I think talk of the “Obama’s move to the center” narrative is probably necessary, a positive development in the campaign. Thanks to the National Journal’s rating of Obama as the Senate’s most liberal (a claim that always seemed overblown to those of us who have read his books and followed his career), and a relentless effort by every Republican to paint Obama as an extremist, Obama was fast getting pigeonholed very unfairly. His recent reminders of his basically moderate-left, compromising, practical attitude are needed to undo some of the damage that has been done.

Technorati Tags: left, Obama, politics, right

Andrew Sullivan sums up his argument with the Social Gospel variety of Christianity — which he equates with a cooptation of Christianity by socialism and redistributionism, a position towards which Obama leans, he claims – in this way:

[I]t isn’t about encouraging charity; it is about the enforcement of “charity” by the strong hand of the state. And in so far as it forcibly takes people’s property from them, it also diminishes their capacity for real charity.

Now, saints are very rare.

And the kind of voluntary communism of which Merton speaks likely only in monasteries and religious orders. In the world as it is, there should be some mandatory public provision for the poor, the sick and the indigent. But it should be a safety-net to avoid specific social evils, not a system of redistribution to construct some notion of “social justice” (see Chapter 6 in “The Conservative Soul”). In the end, the social Gospel can make Christianity less, rather than more, likely. The state cannot experience faith; and it cannot express charity. Only individuals can. One by one. (emphasis mine)

Is it really so self-evident that only individuals, and not collective entities, are capable of “experiencing faith” or “expressing charity”? And that Christianity is essentially a religion concerned only with the individual soul, the I-Thou relationship between One Supreme God and The Individual Soul? Andrew Sullivan, like many Christians, thinks so. But this assumption has been fundamentally questioned by many Christian theologians at least since the late 19th century (including the early but not the later Reinhold Niebuhr), and is explicitly disavowed by liberation theology, arguably the most significant paradigm shift in theology in the past 40 years. Today, many Christians believe that groups as well as individuals embody the Spirit and have a role in salvation (Matthew 18: “For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.”)

It may be literally true that a collective cannot “experience faith” or “express charity”, but can’t a collective embody greater or lesser degrees of cohesion, integration, and self-awareness? In fact, social scientists since Jean Gebser have argued that societies progress from archaic to magical to mythical to mental to integral stages of consciousness. Political structures, too, seem to range from those which enfold low to high degrees of consciousness (anarchic to tribal to authoritarian to democratic to social-democratic). One needn’t be an orthodox Hegelian–believing in the inevitable triumph of Absolute Spirit–to observe that some societies appear to experience and express greater complexity, harmony, and humanity than others. When a liberation theologian says that God is the force of expanding freedom and goodness in history, or when an integral theologian says that some social arrangements “enfold” more consciousness than others, they recognize God (or consciousness) as present in the empowering group, the virtuous neighborhood, the charitable organization, and–yes–the good state.

Christian Individualists will never look for God anywhere other than an individual’s own “personal” soul, and so they will never see God’s presence in and beyond individuals. More transpersonal thinkers–shifting from instrumental reasoning (orange) to vision-logic reasoning (green to turquoise)–know that God is neither strictly individual nor collective. We see that salvation is irreducibly relational and therefore Christian virtue expresses itself necessarily in individuals and groups. Government is, therefore, not an enemy of the soul, but a partner in the arising of the Christian vision of a “shining city on a hill” and “new heavens and new earth”.

Andrew Sullivan’s version of Christian Individualism says that the virtue of groups is likely in monasteries and religious orders, not civic institutions, and certainly not the dreaded federal government! His greatest fear, it seems, is Christianism–the ideology of wielding the Christian religion as a political force, conflating church and state. His criticism really only stings when it’s applied to pre-rational (amber or lower) ideologies: the Christian right, or Islamism, for example. Andrew thinks his critique of Christianism is damning also for the political left–Social Gospel Christians, Barack Obama, and so forth–but this misses the importance of the distinction between prerational and transrational religion. In its transrational forms, religion grasps the necessity to separate church and state by assuring an individual’s freedom of religion. But the spiritual left also sees that individual rights are best protected when they are legitimized and grounded in a theology of a liberating God (or a philosophy of evolving consciousness/Spirit). The spiritual left doesn’t want to impose its religion on everyone else. It respects religious freedom because it sees the arising of individual liberty itself as a reflection of the divine.

Christian Individualists will have none of that. They malign efforts to create a more virtuous government or a just society as somehow getting in the way. If government makes health care affordable, this is bad because it denies good people the ability to cultivate their individual virtue by giving charity to the less fortunate. If government does anything to address the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” nature of human existence, then this is bad because it makes faith in an otherworldly God and an otherworldly salvation less pressing. As Andrew says, “in the end”, Christianity becomes “less likely”. Or something like that.

Will solving America’s health care crisis really make Christianity less likely? Will making our taxation progressive? Will regulating carbon emissions? Will protecting children from toxins and overseeing food safety? Will enacting Barack Obama’s progressive agenda? I guess if any of these things will actually make Christianity less likely (and I see no real evidence), then that’s a price this Christian is willing to pay. Because in the end, a Christianity that is rendered unnecessary by an evolving social consciousness is no form of the religion worth keeping around.

Technorati Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Christianity, integral, liberation theology, Obama, politics, religious right, social evolution, Social Gospel, social justice, spiritual left

Now, I know there are some who bristle at the notion that faith has a place in the public square. But the fact is, leaders in both parties have recognized the value of a partnership between the White House and faith-based groups…. Now, make no mistake, as someone who used to teach constitutional law, I believe deeply in the separation of church and state, but I don’t believe this partnership will endanger that idea – so long as we follow a few basic principles. First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them – or against the people you hire – on the basis of their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs. And we’ll also ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work. — Barack Obama

Barack Obama’s recent speech on faith-based initiatives deserves more attention than I have time to write about just now (at a cybercafe), but I want to make a salient point. That point is: Obama’s defense of faith-based initiatives, particularly his intention to require that taxpayer dollars don’t go to groups that proselytize or discriminate, is a terrific example of an Integrally-minded political policy at work. Traditional religious institutions are supported, even strengthened, with government assistance, but only to the extent that they meet the minimal requirement that they are good citizens in a diverse country. In Obama country, amber wins, but only if it resists creating a “dominance holarchy” wherein its intolerance and exclusivism (proselytization and discrimination) trump the values of orange’s egalitarianism and green’s pluralism. Since amber obviously has lots of problems avoiding a “dominance holarchy”, government helps the country move along its evolutionary path, with the more flexible and responsive elements of religion (orange and green) benefiting disproportionately over the recalcitrant traditionalists. Progress happens.

Of course, this phenomenon is scary as hell to conservative religionists. Rod Dreher writes:

But here’s something worth considering. Obama has recently declared himself opposed to the attempt to amend California’s constitution, or the U.S. Constitution, to ban same-sex marriage. He says that each state should make up its own mind, but that’s entirely disingenuous, because what he really means is that each state Supreme Court should make up its mind. If he were really in favor of the state making up its mind, he wouldn’t oppose this ballot initiative. Anyway, here’s the thing. If gay marriage gets read by SCOTUS into the US Constitution as a fundamental civil right, as Obama no doubt wishes, I’m pretty sure that no religious organization that adheres to the traditional Christian/Jewish/Muslim teaching about same-sex marriage will be eligible to receive taxpayer funds as part of any faith-based initiative. So his proclamation today that he will support and expand federal funding for faith-based initiatives would, in that case, mean that he would in effect support federal funding for liberal faith-based groups only. The only churches, synagogues, etc., that would be eligible to receive federal funds would be those that have abandoned traditional teaching on homosexuality. Right?

Well, that’s a bit paranoid. But surely there’s a sound point here: traditionalists will not be big winners of faith-based initiative contracts if they insist on continuing to discriminate. Government should not be telling religious people what to believe, and it certainly wouldn’t under an Obama presidency. But as for special benefits, there’s no guaranteed right to those. And when government grants religious groups those benefits, it stands to reason that religions that don’t play well with others will need to let those opportunities pass them by. In an Integral politics, as I see it, religious groups which discriminate should be free to do as they will, but government should not become party to the evil that they do. Sorry, no government subsidies for hate.

Technorati Tags: Dreher, faith-based initiatives, Obama, politics, religion