Dobson Doesn’t Get It
Conservative evangelical James Dobson is not very good at making a point.
Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. What do I mean by this? It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons . . . but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I can’t simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
What the senator is saying there, in essence, is that I can’t seek to pass legislation . . . that bans partial-birth abortion because there are people in the culture who don’t see that as a moral issue. And if I can’t get everyone to agree with me, it is undemocratic to try to pass legislation that I find offensive to the Scripture. Now, that is a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution. This is why we have elections—to support what we believe to be wise and moral. We don’t have to go to the lowest common denominator or morality, which is what he is suggesting.
First, where exactly is Obama interpreting the Constitution? He’s setting forth a principle that ought to be obvious, which is that public discourse is best served by arguments and proposals that are grounded on reasons and arguments that are accessible to everyone, without regard to their religious beliefs. That has nothing to do with the Constitution.
Second, the first two sentences of Dobson’s response reproduced above are not really responsive to what Obama said because they critically misrepresent it. If you want to respond to something effectively, you need to make sure that you’re responding to something your opponent actually said.
Obama did not say that people like Dobson “can’t seek to pass legislation” because they are motivated by their own religious beliefs. They can seek to pass it all the want. But if they want to live in a society that is not fractured by the impassable rift that people like Dobson work so hard to maintain, then, regardless of their religious motivations, they need to present their arguments and reasons in such a way that people who do not share their religious convictions can at least evaluate those arguments and reasons on grounds other than simply rejecting them out of hand because they come from right-wing religious people like Dobson.
In other words, Obama was telling people like Dobson how to succeed: talk to the rest of us in terms we can understand without first swallowing all of your beliefs. If you can’t do that, then you can’t expect us to listen to you without just rejecting you out of hand because we think your beliefs are wacky.
If you find something “offensive to the Scripture,” that’s fine. But don’t just waltz into the halls of the legislature, waive your scripture around, and expect everyone else to go along with you. Then, when they don’t go along with you, don’t just pull back and start expressing your disdain for “the culture” and blaming everything you don’t like on the vague and nebulous forces of immorality.
Why can’t you do what Obama—and lots of the rest of us—would understand and respect? Why can’t you present your arguments in universal terms that are amenable to reason, without recourse to your scriptures?
When you either cannot or will not present arguments amenable to reason—or especially if you are just offended that someone even expects you to—then the lurking implication is that your position really is not amenable to reason. Of course, if your position is based on what is “offensive to the Scripture” and it’s not amenable to reason, that sort of also implies that your scripture, or your reading of it, is not amenable to reason, either. So I suppose there are sufficient grounds at least for Dobson’s motivation, if not the substance of his remarks.
As someone who considers themselves an evangelical Christian, I would have to agree with you on this one. Unfortunately the “spokesmen” are generally the people chosen by the media because they give outrageous sound bites, rather than someone who actually presents an argument most evangelical Christians would agree with.
Why don’t they ever pick someone from organizations like Stand to Reason where they even instruct other Christians that the arguments made on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion must be arguments that stand alone in the public discussion without being based on Biblical arguments? I suspect it’s because those arguments don’t make good news stories.
For reference, here are a few web pages they have regarding same-sex marriage that don’t rely on biblical arguments: http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7937
I don’t think people in the media really picked out Dobson and decided to go after him as representative of evangelical Christians. From what I can tell of the coverage on this issue, Dobson sought out some attention on this matter by making attack-type statements on an enormously popular candidate. This should not be surprising because his long career as head of Focus on the Family has typically involved actions designed to grab media attention with the hopes of steering a political campaign toward an outcome he prefers.
If people from Stand to Reason went public with statements criticizing Barack Obama for his position on specific issues, based on non-religious perspectives, I suspect they would get media attention, too.
Thanks for the link regarding same-sex marriage. I briefly skimmed each of the arguments there. I don’t expect any of them would persuade me in the least, but I certainly appreciate the attempt to formulate arguments that do not require acceptance, from the outset, of a particular religious view.
I didn’t expect them to persuade you.
Most people on both sides of issues like abortion and same-sex marriage are set in their ways and don’t care what arguments the other side makes.
I added your rss feed a while back because I appreciate the fact that you are much more logical and clear-thinking in your approach to the issues than most people on either side.
And good luck on your bar.