Say this for Maureen Dowd — she gets right to the point. Reflecting on the fact that moral values outranked everything else for the largest percentage of voters (22%) on election day, Dowd snarled that George W. Bush “got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule.”
Speaking as someone whom this distinguished member of the New York Times's stable of spokespersons for the over-the-edge Left would consider a publicist for fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule, I offer hearty thanks to Ms. Dowd for reminding us that, election or no election, the United States is locked in a culture war.
But Maureen Dowd is far from alone in doing that. My thanks also to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights for assembling a mini-anthology of rabid after-election quotes from other unblushing secularists outraged at how things turned out. They sound like nothing so much as lords of the manor blowing their stack at some uppity serfs.
The moral values issues that figured in this election — abortion, same-sex marriage, destructive stem-cell research involving human embryos, the integrity of family life, pornography, and the rest — are taken seriously by secular elitists only inasmuch as they welcome deviations from traditional norms of morality in such matters as praiseworthy expressions of libertarian “choice.”
George W. Bush and Karl Rove rather clearly got that point; John F. Kerry rather clearly did not. Instead, Kerry managed the doubtfully helpful feat of pulling down 77% of the gay, lesbian, and bisexual vote. So now Maureen Dowd is stamping her foot and screaming in rage at moral conservatives. Maureen, why blame us?
Catholics have no special grounds for complacency here. It is true that the Catholic vote as a whole and, especially, the votes of Catholics who attend weekly Mass swung strongly to Bush. Nor is there any reason to doubt that moral values had a great deal to do with that. Still, 47% of the Catholics overall — and 44% of even the weekly Mass-attenders, it appears — cast their ballots for Kerry.
I do not mean to say no serious Catholic, having consulted his or her conscience at length in light of the moral teaching of the Church, could possibly have voted for Kerry. In some cases fear and loathing regarding the war in Iraq might, rightly or wrongly, have been enough to account for that.
But I do mean to say that, in other cases, Catholics voted for Kerry without giving a lot of attention to either conscience or the teaching of the Church. Instead, they voted as they did because they essentially share Kerry's ethic of choice and his pick-and-choose approach to Catholicism.
As Gertrude Himmelfarb pointed out in her book One Nation, Two Cultures (and others, of course, have made the same point), there really are two cultures in the United States, religious and secularist, and the chances of reconciliation between them are utterly nil. In the long run, one culture will win and the other will lose. And although the recent election hardly settled the result, it's safe to think history will judge it a major engagement in this still unresolved contest.
Himmelfarb says the moral revolution of the last half-century has bequeathed to Americans “a society fragmented and polarized, not only along the familiar lines of class, race, ethnicity, religion, and gender, but along moral and cultural lines that cut across the others.” If her book has a new edition, that should be footnoted with a reference to the election of 2004.
Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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