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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. Left or right Which values are truly American? By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 800 words Publication date: March 26, 2006 Ok, I admit it. I’m a liberal. I’m in favor of universal health care, gun control, same-sex marriage, legalized abortion and separation of church and state. Never mind that in my native Europe these positions place me in the centre of the political spectrum, to many Americans I’m as nutty as Al Sharpton and Michael Moore. But while I support all these causes, I’m not in a rush to label myself or others as left- or right-wing. My reticence stems partly from the fact that the words liberal and conservative have strayed so far from their roots as to be meaningless. After all, in many ways I am a conservative. I want to conserve people’s lives and the environment we live in. And I want to conserve my – and the government’s – money by keeping myself and the country out of debt. I also avoid labelling because it encourages partisanship. It focuses on divisions in society rather than communalities. And in the mouths and writings of extremists – Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh come to mind – it makes fellow-Americans enemies rather than friends. (Yes, I’ve only mentioned right-wing offenders. Perhaps I’m not paying attention, but I couldn’t think of any well-known left-wing commentators who imply that their opponents are traitors. If I’m wrong, please correct me.) This week, however, let me take a break from faux neutrality to promote liberal values – which I believe reflect the spirit of America much better than most strands of conservatism. Start with the word itself. It is no coincidence that “liberal” means “free”. Liberals should be the standard-bearers of freedom, but they have allowed conservatives to hijack the word and pervert its meaning. Freedom is much more than a nation’s liberation from a tyrant or foreign control. Health and happiness cannot be guaranteed, but all men, women and children should, wherever possible, be free from the shackles of poverty, fear, ignorance and discrimination. Few conservatives are honest enough to say so, but Americans’ freedom is not served by laws which criminalize abortion or prohibit gay marriage. Nor is it served by tax cuts for the wealthy, torture in any circumstances or the destruction of the environment. Conservative efforts to promote freedom abroad are both hypocritical and doomed to fail if America does not guarantee true freedom for its own citizens first. As liberals have abandoned freedom, they have failed to stand up for government. For several decades conservatives have repeat the mantra that government should get off people’s backs. This attitude has pervaded public discourse to the extent that too many Americans see government, particularly Washington DC, as alien. A minority even call it the enemy. This is, of course, hogwash. Government is essential in every human society. A healthy, effective government, elected by the people and representing the people, is no more alien to the people than the heart is to the head – the one cannot survive without the other. If people are alienated, it is not because government has failed, it is because the people’s representatives have failed. Yet while conservative rhetoric purports to reduce the power of government, conservative reality is to misuse government at presidential, federal, state and local level. Conservatism as expressed by the White House and most Republicans who achieve national office is concerned less with enabling greater freedom within the country’s borders than with imposing a vision of society that most Americans do not share. The administration’s response to terrorism has made the world less safe and more hostile to American interests. The Republican party’s fiscal policies have turned a national surplus into the worst deficit in the country’s history. Their social policies have failed to reduce poverty or to improve education and have encouraged ignorance, division and discrimination. Republican policies, which are motivated by a narrow and ultimately catastrophic self-interest, should not surprise us. But we should be disappointed by the failure of Democrats to espouse both the rhetoric and policies of freedom. It is high time for the Democratic party to return to the principles upon which the nation was founded. Only liberals can honestly promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans. What has politics to do with faith and atheism? Many believers are convinced that God’s love for humanity is best expressed in liberal values. Others see God as imposing conservative attitudes on people’s minds and behavior. Atheism, meanwhile, recognizes that our life is most valuable posssesion and freedom, in its widest sense, the greatest gift that society can bestow. From that perspective we cannot help but be liberal. But we are also true conservatives, for we see no greater goal than the welfare of all human beings and the planet that we live on. One day, perhaps other conservatives will prove themselves worthy of the name.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist.
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