Ideological fighting over what is "conservative" and what is "liberal" is intense today. Much of it is directed at trying to hold ground the liberals believe they have won in past years and are fearful will be removed from the law or from society if the conservatives have their way. Nothing I might say - if I am honest - is going to reassure those who see freedom to end an unborn child's life as a good thing, or those who seek freedom to redefine marriage to ignore the gender of partners. Some things that the liberal movements in this country have brought into existence are morally wrong in God's sight and are already causing Him to withhold blessings we once took for granted in this country. I could write an entire additional post to this blog on the subject of recognizing the ways that God says in the Bible that he can express His dissatisfaction with a country or a nation and send warnings to it. I have. To some extent, I can't undo being born in 1956 and exposed to "the Sixties" from age 4 to 14. Some things that conservatives - including Christian conservatives - chose to oppose vigorously don't strike me as bad in themselves. That includes treating all people decently as human beings regardless of what color they are or what language they speak. That includes restraining job discrimination based on age, race, religion, or national origin. (I put limits on that. If a job seeker says he or she is a Scientologist and an employer is concerned that that is a cult with irrational beliefs that might cause problems in the workplace, I'm not going to castigate that employer as bigoted. The original aim of opposing discrimination because of being Jewish or not being Protestant or Catholic - depending upon your boss - I endorse.) I do not endorse taking a rigid position that total conservative Christian loyalty demands me to say everything that conservative Christians - at least, those who said they were - have supported politically is completely right and that everything liberals have aligned with is always irredeemably wrong. This may sound too colloquial or too informal or not intellectual: People, we are where we are. Yes, mistakes have been made. Some enormous ones. I evaluate things based on God's Word, the Bible, and some of my views will still get me called bigoted, hateful, et cetera, because I count some hotly promoted liberal causes like same-sex marriage and abortion-at-will among those big errors. There have been some mistakes by conservatives, too. For example, If it hadn't been for intransigent segregationalists like Strom Thurmond doing all too well at persuading black Americans and the white liberals who supported them that ending segregation through Congress would never work in their lifetime and perhaps not at all, we might not have seen the door opened through "Brown vs. Board of Education" to forcing change upon America through court judgments. To some degree, I just have to understand that Strom Thurmond was probably Swedish or Scandinavian in general. I'm not saying this made him prejudiced, but I'm sure that it made him stubborn. I'm almost all Scandinavian myself. We are doomed to a dogfight of epic proportions and duration if we commit ourselves to undoing everything ever supported by liberals or preventing anything being proposed by conservatives, whatever our passionate rhetoric about past actions. Yet that is where battles being conducted in the media seem to be going these days. We have got to recognize that we have got quite a mixed bag of situations handed to us by preceding generations. We have to have a commitment to doing things in a way that will accomplish the goals set forth in the Constitution, including, "to create a more perfect union." Representative government was meant to enable us to iron out differences without stamping out our opponents. So far it has served that purpose. If we don't maintain a commitment to that, the political entity called the "United States" may still continue to exist, but it may no longer be the America it was intended to be.
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