PrintThe Religious Left
Dennis Praeger writes a superb column in the Los Angeles Times on the double standard for the religious left and the religious right:
As far as the news media are concerned, there is no religious left, only the religious right and "mainstream" denominations — and, of course, the religious right is regularly described as bigoted, narrow—minded and intolerant, not to mention a threat to the separation of church and state. [....]
First, religious individuals and groups have as much right to attempt to influence society and state as secular individuals and groups do. Second, the religious left is at least as active in attempting to influence governmental policies as the religious right. Perhaps more so. [....]
It is true that the Christian right largely believes that one must believe in Jesus Christ in order to attain salvation. But "saved" is hardly the same as "moral." Christian leaders acknowledge that there are moral non—Christians.
What we have here is left—wing projection: It is the left that believes that if you do not adhere to its values and politics, you cannot be a moral person. Howard Dean recently said that Democrats care if children go to bed hungry at night and Republicans don't.
He also takes up the disgraceful outcome of the meeting of Reform Jews in Houston, covered by Richard Baehr here. As Praeger notes:
History will record that a month after the Islamic Republic of Iran called for the annihilation of the Jewish state, 5,000 Reform Jews passed resolutions calling for District of Columbia voting rights and "workers' rights" but none about a call for what would amount to another Holocaust or about Islamic anti—Semitism generally, the greatest eruption of Jew—hatred since Nazism. History will likewise also note that two years after the United States made war on a bloodthirsty tyrant who paid the families of murderers of Jews $25,000 each, Reform Judaism passed a resolution condemning that war.
Well—done.
Hat tip: Ed Lasky
Thoams Lifson 12 11 05
