Time To Follow Our ‘Better Angels’

To the Editor:

Liz Sortino is right that disrespect for other people’s beliefs is un-American. Though it’s bizarre that college students who once chanted, “My body, my choice!” now demand, “Your money!”  – totally free contraception and abortifacient pills, while the elderly often must choose between prescriptions and food, and while Alzheimer’s and cancer bankrupt middle-class families – still, the remarks of that blowhard Rush Limbaugh were despicable. I would add Bill Maher and Rose O’Donnell, who both routinely attack people of faith with deliberate distortions about what they believe and name-calling (“Christian Taliban”), without fear of being fired or even having to apologize.

Why is this incivility on the rise? I have lived through 11 administrations, including the polarization of the Vietnam era, and have never seen a president as divisive as this one. Reagan was castigated for calling the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire,” and Bush for calling countries that supported Al-Qaeda the “axis of evil.”  But I have never seen a president attack his own citizens the way this one has.

I understand that politics requires an “Other,” an enemy, against which to foment the hatred of one’s base. Both parties are guilty of this. But it’s been many decades since anyone tried to inflame that rage against other people’s religions. One shock of World War II was that people of different faiths who lived together in peaceful neighborliness for years in Germany and France were suddenly agitated into hatred.

Most people see right through the “contraception/abortion pill” mandate during an election year (when the poor get these services for free, and drugstores and Planned Parenthood sell them for very little) as yet another attempt to provoke rage against Catholics for political expediency (otherwise, why the exemptions for the Amish and others? And Catholics don’t issue Fatwas, so are a safe target).  It is especially odd since Democrats like Ted Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan always strongly supported freedom of conscience. The media has joined in, publishing deliberate lies (Catholics are trying to outlaw all contraception; Catholics – whose hospitals and clinics around the world are the number one source, even above governments, of women’s care – want to deny women health care, etc.).

[If I may digress, Martin Luther King is an ally not just for civility but for conscience. The man who said, “An unjust law is no law at all,” would be the first to add, “An unjust mandate by an unelected political appointees is not binding on a free conscience.” Totalitarian Statists – who say that whatever the State mandates is not only “moral” but must be obeyed without question, for nothing stands outside the State – will disagree vehemently with Dr King. But “I was told to follow orders; neither religion nor conscience is an excuse!” is what got people condemned at Nuremberg].

Abraham Lincoln appealed to “the better angels of our natures.” Would that this administration would take a 180 degree turn and do the same, instead of appealing to people’s malice. Then, perhaps, others would follow.

Mary Taylor

31 Jeremiah Road, Sandy Hook                                  March 18, 2012