Susan Jacoby is a real-life card carrying Secular Humanist. She is program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City, a rationalist think tank, and a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America.
In her most recent post for the Washington Post’s On Faith blog she decries the efforts of conservative evangelicals to inform their congregants of the issues in the coming mid-term elections. Some of the activities she laments include:
* Planning, advertising and conducting non-partisan voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives.
* Educating the congregation regarding biblical teaching on civil government, the responsibility for culture engagement, and the importance of being informed by biblical principles when considering current issues, candidates’ positions, etc.
* Mobilizing members of the congregation to vote their values.
Oh, and let the church not forget to provide transportation to the polls for those who need it.
Horrors. People actually voting their values and other people actually driving them to the polls to do it. What is this country coming to?!
Her piece is a rallying cry to her secularist compatriots who seem to be slumbering under the impression that the Religious Right is dead. She informs them that quite to the contrary:
No secular organization is capable of mounting anything like an organized, church-funded campaign to recruit new voters. Churches reach deep into the daily lives of their most devout members in a way that no secular group can (or, for that matter, would want to do).
One wonders if Susan Jacoby has never heard of unions, which for decades have been mobilizing (intimidating?) their memberships to support a most extreme liberal agenda through the election of Democrat candidates.
Obama has publicly come down on both sides on gay “marriage”. Draw your own conclusions, but don’t select only the facts you want, and then accuse Paul of “lying’
And would Obama dare instruct his (In)justice Dept not to appeal a judge’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” ruling weeks before an election? And get your facts right: the ruling was about gays in the military, not gay “marriage”.
And, to paraphrase the 1962 Winston cigarette ad, “It’s what’s in the brief that counts.” Don’t expect any serious argument from Thug Holder.
Let’s take just one of your claims.
Obama has stated over and over again that he is not in favor of a “re-definition of marriage”. His administration appealed a recent pro-gay-marriage ruling.
Why do you lie about what Obama wants? I thought lying was considered a sin by Christians.
Interesting, Jeffrey, that you accuse me of routinely censoring comments when, so far as I can ascertain, you have commented here now three times and all three times your comments have posted to the blog.
President Obama. Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid clearly support an extreme liberal agenda. They support a re-definition of marriage, infanticide, and an expansion of the Federal governement. Clearly most ordinary rank and file Democrats do not, which is why the Democrat Party is facing a blood-bath in November.
As for your point that “many union members aren’t liberals,” who said anything about union *members*? I clearly said *unions* which any thinking person knows refers to the leadership, not the rank and file. I made it easy for you to see the distinction when I said that unions “have been mobilizing their memberships,” a clear distinction between the union leadership and union members.
It would be helpful if you could actually grasp the substance of a post before you respond to it. You make it very clear you aren’t interested in responding, but merely pontificating.
I did address the substance of your post – what little substance there was – but you ignored it. You routinely censor comments, so it is a bit rich to complain when comments don’t address what you want.
Here it is in more detail.
You think the Democrats promote an “extreme liberal agenda” because you’re so far to the right, you think Republicans are centrist.
Most current Democrats, including Obama, aren’t liberals. The American Democratic party would be centrist or even right of center in most of the world. Obama’s administration, which is currently supporting DADT in court and opposing gay marriage, is centrist in many respects and right-of-center in others (for example, his disregard of civil liberties).
As for unions, many union members aren’t liberals either, by any reasonable definition of the word. 40% of union members voted for McCain.
I doubt you know many liberals or union members personally, and I doubt you know what they believe.
You have to love liberals who troll conservative blogs to leave drive-by comments which do not (because they cannot) address the substance of the post.
The grammar is a typo. Thanks for so graciously pointing it out. The rest of your comment, Jeffrey, is a mere statement in the wind without any substantiation.
Anybody who thinks unions promote “an most extreme liberal agenda” clearly knows nothing about liberals, unions, or grammar.