A remarkable new poll has revealed interesting dynamics about our polarized nation. Poor people tend to vote democratic which isn’t a surprise, but the maps below show that the rich are broken into two camps. Even before Obama came onto the seen rich conservatives in Mississippi voted very differently than the rich in Massachusetts.
The so-called culture war between red and blue America is concentrated in the upper half of the income distribution, and voting patterns reflect this.
The insight isn’t not new, but this information should help shape the conversation. While the poor tend to focus on issues that mean survival for them, the rich are free to consider how the world might be different. In the words of one researcher:
Why does this happen? Our research on opinion poll data from earlier elections finds that lower-income Americans tend to vote based on economic issues, while richer voters consider social issues as well as economics in their voting decisions. This is sometimes called post-materialism: the idea that, as individuals or groups become more comfortable, they can afford to think beyond their immediate needs.
This study implies that the real “swing vote” may be a rift among people of comfort. The ancients knew that without leisure it is very difficult to contemplate the virtues. When one lives hand to mouth there usually isn’t time or energy to dream of how the world could be. So, it maybe very difficult for Republicans to lure the poor to policies that would mean misery for them. There seems to be an epic struggle between two worldviews held by people of comfort. Leisure time, for some, means dreams of a fair playing field, for others it means self-indulgence and dreams of stronger enforcement of the current pecking order.
Marx may have been correct. The future of our species may depend on a struggle between two worldviews: one view derives its most basic values from property rights, the other from human rights.
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/red-versus-blue-in-a-new-light/
The horrors of what can happen when there is no wall separating church and state is becoming horribly visible in Uganda. Christian leaders there are calling for imprisonment and even the death penalty for homosexuals in that nation. The pressure from the Ugandan church is so intense that the anti-homosexuality bill is expected to pass soon. Some Christian leaders in Uganda have asked lawmakers to pass the bill in time to be “a Christmas gift” to the Ugandan people.
American evangelicals have appealed to the Ugandan church to show mercy, but Christian leaders there have rejected American appeals as “cultural imperialism.”
“You see there’s a kind of imperialism and a kind of relativism from the West,” said one Ugandan Christian leader. “They don’t understand our ethics in the country of Uganda and they are trying to impose what they believe.”
According to USA Today:
Uganda’s penal code criminalizes homosexuality, but in 2009 a lawmaker with the ruling party said a stronger law was needed to protect Uganda’s children from homosexuals. Parliamentarian David Bahati charged at the time that wealthy homosexuals from the West were “recruiting” poor children into gay lifestyles with promises of money and a better life. Bahati believes his bill is sufficiently popular among lawmakers to pass without difficulty.
There are lessons for us back in the states. First, whenever anyone calls us to make this a “Christian nation,” we must recognize such calls as the beginnings of barbarism. Such calls almost always begin in the mouths of demagogues who see in the church as a sea of noncritical thinkers easily duped into crusades and inquisitions. After the the church’s complicity in the nightmare of Nazi Germany, many Protestant churches adopted the Barmen Declaration, which affirmed that no state can be called the instrument of divine purposes.
Second, while it is nice that American Evangelicals have renounced the new law, they must take full responsibility for their role in this monstrosity. It was they, who as missionaries, painted the target on these peoples’ backs. When Christians say we “hate the sin but loves the sinner” it is an act of psychic numbing. We cannot teach that homosexuality is a sin worthy of death and then call ourselves innocent when someone acts upon our teaching. When we, as Christians, dehumanize other persons and make them cultural scapegoats, we should not be surprised when our disciples move beyond our duplicity and finish the job we started.
Thanks to Church Jarvis for the topic
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/11/12/uganda-gay/1699065/
“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? -Stephen Hawking
God is not a word I use for an invisible friend to which I pray. God is not a word I use as an explanation for how the world came to be, or to defend untestable claims on matters about which no human being can truly know. God is not a word I use to justify the cause of my own sect or nation.
God is a word I use for the fire in the equations. I use the word God to hint at the restlessness within the rock to become life, and the restlessness of life to become thought. I use the word God to remember that infinity beyond my vastest imagining, that spark that leaps between my clearest polarities, and that abyss that throbs primordially beneath my deepest profundity.
Does anyone else think it strange that our nation reacts more when generals have an affair than when they bomb civilians?
I began my sermon Sunday with the words, “Nothing in the history of the church has done as much damage as the idea that Jesus is the only way to salvation. No one can count the people we have tortured as heretics, no one can recon the families torn apart because one family member thought another would be tortured eternally if he or she did not convert. No one can calculate the minorities oppressed because they believed differently than the Christian majority.”
A visitor was waiting after church, visibly upset. He said I was leading people astray when I said that Jesus was wrong. I told him that I wasn’t saying Jesus is wrong, I was saying that people are wrong when they make God no bigger than their own understanding. The poor man was reduced to parroting phrases he had heard in his own church. Eventually he just left.
I grieve the damage done by the church to simple honest souls like this. I grieve at minds that greet each new idea with fear. The church does the world no favors when we say that God has only spoken to us, and that we must reject other ideas of the sacred. I cannot imagine a blasphemy more monstrous than that one group has defined the infinite and that their creed is the only correct way.
My sermon was on John 14:6 “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Heavenly Parent except through me.” I wanted to show that the Greek text reads very differently than the English.
In the passage, Jesus has just told the disciples he is going to die. He tells them not to be afraid because they know the way to where he is going. Thomas asks how they can know the way, and Jesus responds that, he himself is the way. It is critically important to realize that the “I am” Jesus uses in that sentence is not regular Greek. “I am” is the divine name that Moses heard at the burning bush. Jesus says in verse 10 that he is not speaking about himself. So Jesus makes it clear he is not saying that you must be a Christian to be saved, but something more profound.
I believe Jesus was reassuring the bewildered disciples by pointing out that he had embodied the way, the truth the life for them. He wanted them to know they were not being left behind. He symbolized the profound unity he felt by calling himself the vine and them the branches. His words are not to be understood literally as a sectarian religious leader, but mystically as Love itself. I believe he was saying to the grieving disciples that he was not leaving them as orphans. He was reassuring them that when they loved each other as he had loved them, they would be where he is.
He wasn’t saying “Only Jesus,” but “Only Love”
It hasn’t been an easy week to be a Republican. But, I predict that last week’s defeat at the polls will be the best thing that has happened to Republicans in our lifetime. I say that because every day we hear another sane voice emerging from the ranks of the party calling for moderation. Those voices have always been there, but they have been drowned out for the last few decades by the religious right and the power brokers of Wall Street.
Bill Kristol is the latest example of a Republican breaking ranks. He said yesterday that the Republican party should accept new ideas.
“It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It really won’t, I don’t think. I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer.”
“Really? The Republican Party is going to fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires, half of whom voted Democratic and half of whom live in Hollywood and are hostile?” he (Kristol) asked.
According to most polls, rank and file Republicans have much more complex views than is expressed by the leadership of their party. Most Republicans believe in raising taxes on the rich, in protecting a woman’s right to choose, and most believe that, at least some of our nation’s recent wars, have been a mistake.
Mitt Romney may be the last Republican nominee asked to push the lie that we can lower taxes and increase the military. He may be the last Republican Presidential candidate to mock the poor, to demean immigrants or imply that single women who want birth control are morally suspect.
It is not an easy week to be a Republican, so when one of them stands up like Bill Kristol or George Will, or like so many Republicans have done this week to distance themselves from the bullies in their party, be sure to say “thank you” for their courage.
To read more of Kristol’s statement, click here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/11/bill-kristol-taxes-millionaires_n_2113671.html
While dodging taxes is a time honored practice by businesses in the U.S., companies that do so in England are understood a little differently. The group UK Uncut is attempting to make a connection between social services cuts and the businesses that do not pay their fair share of taxes.
Starbucks has been accused in the House of Commons of paying no taxes for the last three years. It has been estimated that England lost something like 32 billion pounds last year from unpayed business taxes. UK Uncut is a direct action political group that wants England to think of those businesses when funding is cut from women’s shelters and agencies that help the homeless.
Amazon, Facebook, Google, Ikea and eBay are also guilty of dodging taxes in England, but Starbucks makes an easy target.
“Starbucks is a really great target because it is on every high street across the country and that’s what UK Uncut finds really important: people can take action in their local areas,” she said. “We’re really hoping that women who are impacted by the cuts, who are seeing their Sure Start centres where their kids go being reduced in services, and people who use refuges, [will] be involved.” -UK Uncut
The campaign seems to be working. An organization which rates the popularity of businesses reports that Starbucks’ public image has fallen to near record lows. It may seem petty to take on a coffee company, but UK Uncut hopes it is a first step by the English people to take back control over their own lives. Perhaps, if people in the US could make the connection between the misery of the poor and the apathy of the rich, there could be hope over here as well.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/nov/12/starbucks-tax-avoidance-controversy
Many of us use the word “God” as a sacred poem. It expresses our reverence. We do not use that word to replace evolution as an explanation of human origins. We do not use that word to refer to an invisible person who stands as a surrogate to actual human beings. It does not make our decisions, it expresses our awe.
“God” is a symbol of whatever it is that patterns our world, understood emotionally. “God” is a symbol of whatever source we emerge out of. That is why we speak of it as our “parent.” When we say humans are created in the image of God, we do not mean that our source looks like us, for God is also the “parent” of every animal, plant and star. Our symbol has a human face only to remind us that we are the offspring of that fountainhead and so belong here in the universe.
“Love” is a word almost as inscrutable as the word “God.” The word “love” is a symbol for that experience where we can feel our interconnectedness with another. We usually use the word “love” as a verb, and so when we say that God is a verb, we are delivered from our childish images of a large invisible human parent. When we say “God is love” we are no longer talking about a person, but instead about the personal nature of our relationships to all that is.
The word “love” is like the small lens in a telescope, the word “God” like the large. Holding them together takes our personal affections and expands them to a sense of interconnectedness with all that is. Again, the words “God” and “love” are poems. And like all poems, they belong in the heart, not in the head.
Underneath the rubble of last week’s election lies a casualty not much discussed- the religious right.
The Religious right went all out in this election. After years of picturing Obama as anti-Christian, gay-marriage as anti-family, and reproductive rights as anti-life, the right was soundly defeated in almost every possible way.
Instead of the promised victories, the religious right encountered defeat at almost every turn. Not only did Obama win convincingly, but Democrats held onto the Senate – and the power to confirm judges – and Wisconsin elected the nation’s first openly gay senator, Tammy Baldwin. –Religious News Service (RNS)
Anti-abortion champions Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock lost what should have been easy races. Same-sex marriage was passed in two states. Romney made it a race only after he dropped the religious right’s key issues like marriage and abortion, and focused on the economy.
As Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist who backed Romney, wrote Wednesday in The Washington Post, “the issue of gay marriage is a generational one, a battle that social conservatives have lost … The American people have changed their minds on the issue and fighting this one is political flat-earthism.” -RNS
This defeat could be the best thing that has happened to conservatives if they learn its real lessons. Two of the most strident voices of the right seem to have:
“No party can win if it is seen as heartless. No party can win if it appeals only to white and older Americans. No party can win if it looks more like the way to the past than the way to the future.” -R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
“My message really today is we have more work to do to become more diverse, but the party has to start building bridges and practicing the politics of addition to bring more people in,” Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition
There is room in our political process for religious as well as secular voices. We need a strong right wing as well as a strong left. America said “no” to the religious right not because it has nothing important to say, but because it was threatening to take away the voices of others. Right wing Christians are valued members of our community, but so are immigrants, the poor, gay and lesbian people, feminists, Jews, Muslims and atheists.
Eric Hartsburg/Facebook