The big news from Washington, D.C., last week was that David Kuo, former leader within the Bush White House, wrote a book alleging that one of Bush’s top advisers, Karl Rove, regularly ridicules members of the religious right behind closed doors while embracing them in public forums.
Indeed, Kuo writes, “National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control’ and just plain ‘goofy.'”
The knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss Kuo as being purely politically-motivated. After all, he did agree to release the book one month before the mid-term elections in what is shaping up to be a tight race in many states.
Kuo may actually be a Republican that has high-tailed it into the big tent of the Democratic Party. Whether he is or not does not make much of a difference to me if he has a valid point, and I believe that he is speaking the truth when he says that the GOP is regularly exploiting the evangelical Christian population of America.
The Grand Old Party has never been very convincing to me as a great place for Christians to place their trust and cast their votes. In fact, I think that history will bear me out on this, as we consider the things that Republican elected officials claim to stand against and the things they actually fall for.
In September, Congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla.) resigned after being exposed as a sexual predator. Foley, 52, resigned after the public learned that he has a history of engaging in inappropriate behavior with underage pages on Capitol Hill.
Since his resignation, Foley has revealed that he is an alcoholic and was molested by a member of the clergy as a teen but does not offer any of these things as excuses for his behavior. I can respect that; everyone makes mistakes.
However, I think that leaders of the party made a terrible decision in allowing Foley to continue serving as chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. After all, House leaders knew about Foley’s behavior for many months before it was made public, yet continued to allow him to be in charge of the committee that drafts legislation specifically targeting sexual predators.
Certainly sexual exploitation is nothing new to Hill bigwigs, and neither of the two major parties is immune from the sort of scandals that these things tend to generate. But, then again, the Democrats are not building their political successes on the values and morals of the religious right. I would hope that facts like these disturb more than just a few of my readers, but perhaps many people have been deceived by the lies that politicians tell.
Self-applied labels are nice but usually not very useful. The truth is obvious: at any given moment politicians will say or do whatever they think will get them the most votes at election time.
We see this in the case of former representative of Virginia Ed Shrock. Shrock sponsored several pieces of anti-gay legislation before he was identified as a patron of a homosexual phone-sex business and quickly aborted his campaign for a third term after this bit of irony was revealed.
Again, inconsistencies like this are not all too uncommon for either side, but the Democrats are not pulling the ole bait-and-switch on the majority of their voting base either.
To the Republicans’ credit, if your sun rises and sets with the anti-abortion campaign issue, then you have found a party that will most-likely represent your stance (at least superficially). However, if you have more than a singular concern with the laws of this great nation, then you should consider doing more research into what each party says that it stands for.
Sidenote to the anti-abortion crusaders: despite the fact that Republicans have controlled the White House and the House of Representatives for six years and the Senate for four, abortion laws have not undergone any major reform in that time. Could this be another case of politicians saying whatever it takes to boost themselves into positions of power? Quite possibly, as it would seem.
The bottom line is that it’s more than likely that neither party will represent anyone’s concerns perfectly, so each person must be flexible in choosing the closest match (or the “lesser of two evils” as some would say). This basic concept still applies to every person who might be referred to as a member of the moral majority (officially or unofficially).
These three things will get you to where you need to be:
1. Research your options carefully, i.e. don’t rely solely on mud-slinging political ads for your info.
2. Do not discount the Democrats as unrepresentative of your values without full consideration.
3. Vote responsibly while bearing in mind that politicians often lie to get what they want.
Maybe Kuo is doing a bit of political posturing, or maybe he isn’t. That I do not know. What I do know is that where there is smoke, there is usually fire, and it seems to me that Kuo is simply fanning the flames.