pet topics
my view of the democratic party is that we stand for the underdog and for public service, that the country isn’t better until everyone is doing better, not just you, not just me. we stand against corporate interests and for environmentally-friendly policies and for equality in the eyes of the law. we stand for the under-educated (so, no, we shouldn’t just write off people in the mid-west and mining towns as rednecks and be done with it; whether they know it or not, we stand for them too), the abused, the jobless, the homeless. we stand for a society were people can make informed decisions to improve their lives, where people can go to school if they work hard. i hate that the republicans have pushed us into a place where we largely have to position things in an “us versus them” mentality. “they” can’t see that “we” are working for them too, that when we improve things for “us”, that it’s not just the supporters of the democratic party that win, but everyone.
it seems simple enough to understand. sigh.
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christians, even evangelical christians, do NOT equal Republican/Bush supporters. white christians, yes. black christians, no. asian christians, no. i think also latino christians, no, but i’m not too sure (i know support has waned, at the very least). let’s not unfairly stick them under the same umbrella, because it’s not fair to, say, the black ministers that organized their congregations to march for civil rights to classify them in the same way as the people who used the bible against them to claim that blacks were inferior beings. some use religion as an excuse for bigotry, but some learn the right lessons of tolerance and non-judgment.
when you don’t have government representation, you look to community leaders, and many communities center around church activities. minority communities, which are heavily democratic and underrepresented, often have this type of leadership. let’s not alienate the people in the fight with us against this administration.
i should look up stats to support my assertion about minority christian groups.
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someone brought into work an atari system and three games. heh. i used to think “atari” was “artari”. i think i still accidentally say that a lot of the time.
It looks like I don’t have to look up stats; myDD did the work for me: http://www.mydd.com/story/2004/11/5/154845/775.
nice article. i liked:
“Republicans are not that much more religious than Democrats, they are just way more white and Protestant.”
sigh.
well, my mom is White and Protestant, at least she voted for Kerry…
-m
I wondered about this about a week before the election. I don’t understand how black evangelical christians could support Bush when he doesn’t support what they stand for socially (not necessarily morally). I heard from a number of people that there are a lot of conflicting feelings in the AA community regarding Bush and that it gets quite heated.
From my own personal experience, my stepmom and dad (stepmom is latina) are right-wing evangelical christians who are … simply put … bad people. When I hear them spouting their ideology, I have a hard time not lumping them in with the asshats of the country.
Yeah, it’s hard to not generalize.
I know I sometimes make the (insensitive/simplistic/etc.) mistake of saying something like “what were all those religious christians thinking?” or “what were all those texans thinking?”
I think it’s easy to make the mistake that because percentagewise, evangelical christians are more likely to support Bush, to assume that individual evangelical christians at least partly support him.
50% of people liking bush 90% is not the same as 90% of people liking bush 50%. uh, or something. hm, that didn’t come out as clever and simple as i intended.
Even in Texas, I noticed that bush only got about 65% of the vote. So there were many millions of Texans who voted for Kerry, 1 out of every 3.
Another reason I hate the electoral college, it promotes generalizing about states as either “red” or “blue”, as if a 99% Bush-supporting state and a 52% Bush-supporting state were the same thing.
rambling,
-m