Many voters told pollsters they went for George Bush Tuesday because of his "moral values." An email correspondent tells me that the lesson of the election is that "morality matters," that the people "saw the consistency and moral clarity of George W. Bush." Another writes, "The Democratic Party no longer stands for the values of its proud history."
All of this sounds like nonsense to me. Those who read the Bible know the cautionary injunction "By their fruits ye shall know them," and Bush's fruits are rotten to the core. Are the directives that caused Abu Ghraib moral? Are the policies that caused 5 million people to lose healthcare protection moral? Are the lies that led to the deaths of a thousand Americans and a hundred thousand Iraqis moral?
Clearly, we're speaking different languages. So what do those Bush voters mean when they talk about moral values? They must mean the usual hot-button sexual issues. As Amy Sullivan (whose antennae are especially sensitive to religious nuance) puts it so well:
It doesn't help much when exit polls and sloppy reporting use terms like "moral values" and "moral issues" as shorthand for very narrow, divisive issues like abortion and gay marriage, feeding into twenty years of Republican rhetoric. Opposition to the war in Iraq is a moral issue. The alleviation of poverty is a moral issue.…
"Religious" does not mean Republican. And "moral" does not mean conservative.
Let's think specifically about gay marriage. It seems to me a clear matter of equity, of justice; and since equity and justice are moral values, the weight of morality is all on the side of legalizing gay marriage, as I wrote a few months ago, tracing the slow expansion of rights to include African Americans and women: "There has dawned, over the years, an increasing understanding that freedom is indivisible, that inequality for one implies inequality for all. Gay and lesbian citizens, however, are not treated equally."
Obviously, the majority of voters in 11 states disagree with me, since they outlawed justice for gays and lesbians at the polls on Tuesday. But that retrograde mentality is not the worst of it. Bush and Cheney used this discriminatory hot-button issue to increase enraged turnout for people who would vote for them, despite strong indications that they don't care a whit about the issue as morality but only as politics.
Bush says he wants a constitutional amendment, then he says he disagrees with the Republican Party platform (flip-flop!). Cheney lauds Bush's morality, then he speaks movingly about his openly lesbian daughter's rights. That is the most craven kind of hypocrisy. Mark Schmitt noticed the same disjunction when the flap about Mary Cheney was in the news:
Andrew Sullivan had a nice phrase at the time to describe Bush and Cheney: They are "closet tolerants," he wrote. "They have no problem with gay people personally; but they use hostility to gay people for political purposes, even if it means attacking members of their own families. What they are currently objecting to is the fact that their hypocrisy has been exposed." I'm not sure they're all that tolerant, but you know they wouldn't give two hoots about gay marriage if Karl Rove didn't tell them that it was the tactic by which they would retain power.
I think "hypocrisy" is too forgiving a word for it. It actually raises one of the most interesting moral puzzles in modern politics, what I sometimes call the George Wallace question. If George Wallace wasn't really much of a racist as a personal matter (and there's every reason to believe he wasn't), but manipulated racism and stoked it in order to further his political career ("I'll never be out-ni-----d again," he said after his first loss) is he morally better than someone who in his heart really is a racist?…
In my moral code, it's pretty clear to me that, whatever is in your heart, there's nothing more contemptible than to increase or exacerbate the level of hate and intolerance in the world, and to do it willfully for personal gain is despicable. I'd be a lot quicker to forgive someone who had been deeply racist "in his heart," because of how he'd been brought up or whatever, than someone who merely used racism. I think that [people] like Wallace, Karl Rove, Bush and the Cheneys, as pure as their hearts may be and as much as they may love their gay family and friends, are the more morally contemptible for the willfullness by which they choose to stoke the hostility and intolerance of others.
Yes, let's talk about morality. Let's talk about values. Let's talk about justice. All are matters that most Americans care about very deeply. This year Bush and his fellow Pharisees have been able to frame these issues narrowly, manipulating voters' genuine moral concerns to produce immoral political outcomes. They must not be allowed to do so again. Decoding their hidden meanings and exposing their hypocrisy constitute a good beginning. The next step is to make clear the moral component of progressive policies.
There was an earlier Republican president who appealed to "the better angels of our nature," the same one who assured us that you can't deceive "all the people all the time." A hopeful note, Mr Lincoln.
