CONFESSIONS OF A CONSERVATIVE PART II :MORALITY, CIVIL LIBERTIES AND FOREIGN POLICY
Secy. Of State Hillary Clinton wants to make tolerance, equality and protection under the law for gay and lesbian persons in the more than 70 countries that criminalize being gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or trans-gendered, a standard for aid and assistance as well as cordial relations with the US. There should be no conservative objection to this and in fact it should be robustly supported by people within the conservative movement.
As I have opined previously, these are about rights for all individual where no one is exempted. This should also not become an opportunity to disingenuously bash conservatives who are looking for fidelity to the Constitution as the bottom line in the conduct of our foreign policy. Gov. Rick Perry allegedly said that this policy Secy. Clinton outlined, constitutes “ a war with people of faith in this country”. If that statement is true and in context, then Gov. Perry is both politically, morally and spiritually wrong in my opinion. Since the latter two are areas where the essence of debate centers on questions of interpretation of dogma and thereby in the realm of opinion or faith, I will focus on the secular realm of politics.
Human rights for all individuals should be at the center of all American Foreign Policy. If it is not, than we are a fraud and not the exceptional nation we claim to be. Unfortunately we see all too frequently that the sanctity of human life expressed in freedom from tyranny, is more of an imperative with some countries than with others. The plight of women and girls in some “friendly” Islamic countries as well as Christian minorities throughout the greater Muslim world comes to mind .
In point of fact we pick and choose who we want to lecture about human rights abuses and excuse those who we do not want to offend for a variety of pragmatic reason usually associated with military and/or economic necessity. Often piety about the rights of certain oppressed groups satisfy domestic political agendas more than they actualize real foreign policy goals or even bedrock statements of principles.
This has been the reality of foreign policy for a very long time for many, if not all countries of the world. But we are not just any country and as enticing or practical the specter of watching what we do and not what we say may be, at the end of the day we have always paid dearly for being “outed” as not being sincere when we sacrifice our principles for expediency. We have gotten in bed, far too often with people that run the gamut from nasty but harmless to malignant and demonic… all in the name of the best interests of this nation. When the inevitable “other shoe drops’ we almost always find ourselves worse off than before.
The rights we champion are who we are. They define us in their practice better than any words can. If we use them as mere enticements or bait for suffering people who think we mean what we say then all we are doing is a kind of diplomatic carnival sideshow. If our real objectives entails ending the absence of freedom and human rights as merely a side effect,fringe benefit or ploy than we damn ourselves by our lack of integrity even while we believe we are playing the historic game of nations brilliantly.
Making human rights for all individuals a center of our foreign policy is not and cannot be construed to be an act of naviete. We must reject this notion because implicit in it, is the belief that we cannot define who we are and determine our own destiny.
Our enemies believe us to be weak because we kowtow to criticism or disarm ourselves unilaterally in the notion that all leaders of all countries will become enchanted by the power of our good intentions and the seduction of our words. None of that has ever worked in a world that has always been a dangerous place. The truest of all axioms in the world of foreign relations and diplomacy if that if you want peace then you should prepare for war. To this truism should be added “and stand always by your ideals without deviation”.
So if we are adding the rights and dignity of LGBT persons as part of the expression of what American freedom means as opposed to freedom elsewhere, than we should be prepared as part of keeping our homeland free, to fight for it elsewhere with every means at our disposal because a world that resembles us in the rights afforded its citizens, is a safer world, a more prosperous world and one where real hope replaces cynicism .
Conservatives should never feel threatened by the fact of any individual simply asking for their natural human rights. We don’t have to agree with or be silent about lifestyle, policy, legislation,, speech or public behavior that we may find privately abhorrent, but we do have to let the world know that even clamorous disagreement doesn’t mean that in our rowdy democracy, it will inevitably end in the denial of human rights or worse.
ERLANDSSON
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
CONFESSIONS OF A CONSERVATIVE PART ONE
CONFESSIONS OF A CONSERVATIVE. CIVIL LIBERTIES AND HUMAN RIGHTS
The persistent accusation that conservatives are not sympathetic to and are even hateful towards individual civil and human rights for all individuals who live within broadly acceptable norms of lawful behavior is I believe, either not true or overstated for emotional or political reasons.
Some in the LGBT community for example, are currently making that charge due to certain campaign ads by Gov. Rick Perry in Iowa. Others cite the reactions to the efforts of Secy. of State Clinton to protect the civil and human rights of such persons via economic, political and diplomatic sanctions by the US, within the over 70 nations that now criminalize gay and lesbian people.
While it is ironic that Secy. Clinton makes this effort while addressing the inappropriately named UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, her efforts are important nonetheless, and should be supported by all people who believe in the basic natural rights of all individuals. Many if not most conservatives, don't like addressing rights on a group basis. Yet history has an unpleasant way of reminding us that the most prevalent way of demonizing individuals is by demonizing the "group" they either identify with or are associated with by others. Hence the struggle for equality and at times survival often must begin with group identity but should always end with individual liberty.
Hitler began the Holocaust by exterminating people with disabilities. They did not fit into his stereotype of what Aryans should look like and they had, in his opinion, no utilitarian value to the Reich. So they were murdered as a prelude to a larger horror in much the same way that a play goes into rehearsals in order to work out the kinks. Later in the second, and third acts would come homosexuals, Gypsies, Christians and finally the Jews This was done by men and women so ordinary that Hanna Arendt would later describe one of them, Adolph Eichmann, as being an example of the "banality of evil". This should be a reminder to all that true evil sometimes comes not with fangs but with a pleasing smile, making the good guys and the bad guys all the more difficult to sort out.
Because of this I believe we must look to the consequences of what is done in the context of what is said. Denial of civil and human rights to any person who is simply trying to exercise their inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is evil from a civic, moral and spiritual perspective. The advocacy of violence and hatred towards any innocent person alone or in combination with others is not acceptable at any level of human response. Human history is replete with the fear of the "different" as alien and strange leading to the attempted or actual destruction of the " different" while innocent and harmless.
Conservatives believe the Constitution by it's very nature forces us to respect one another on the civic plain. Conservatives who are persons of faith have the Golden Rule to guide them in their treatment of their fellow souls and that guidance is clear and unambiguous. So where does the perception of Conservative indifference or animosity toward persons in groups ranging from the poor to the gay to the non-white emanate from?
I believe that a good portion of that belief flows from the national arguments over identity and discrimination that we as a people have been having since 1776. The timeless struggle to make the Constitution applicable to all, insists on both reason, tension and passion. How could any thing as important as human freedom not be intense and passionate. Ask almost any immigrant and they will tell you how unique and precious are the liberties of this nation in comparison to others.
But these arguments can be intentionally and unintentionally misinterpreted as bias, prejudice, callousness, and hatred due to the reaction to the tactics and strategies employed by all sides. Far too often the "means" become the "ends" with faux objectives eclipsing real goals.
I as a citizen may fight explicit sex education in the public schools for a host of valid moral and parental reasons even when the purpose of that education is the expressed desire to protect young sexually active teens from disease and pregnancy. I as a citizen must also however protect and defend the promoters of that which I may detest from physical and economic harm for the very advocacy that is making me angry. In order to make America work as it was intended to work I cannot and must not let my passion destroy my reason or my reason dilute my passion and prevent me from protecting in reality, that which represents one vital and indispensable right clothed in two adversarial points of view.
Many, if not most conservatives I know, do not support "Gay Marriage". For many their opposition is based on religious grounds. Others see the expansion of civil marriage as a "slippery slope" leading to the destruction of one of histories most fundamental human institutions. Still others believe that the efforts for same sex marriage are nothing more than a plot to erode and degrade the time tested norms of Western and certain non-western civilizations. Yet we must address all of this anxiety and suspicion in the context of what the pursuit of happiness means to individuals who have rights that are inalienable. Issues such as these exemplify the tension we cannot escape that are innate within the great American experiment . Again our struggle with this tension should always be guided by reason, passion, fidelity to the Constitution and harmonious with the tenets of our faith and sense of public and personal virtue.
For me the "Conservative" approach to the civil liberties and human rights of any individual ends with the supremacy of that individual's natural rights and the protections that our laws give them. They should never be victims seeking protections solely for themselves due to the originality of their condition. They only must merely be human.
All of us in this treacherous time need to possess enough humility to always question our beliefs for evidence of error, so that we may maximize "knowing what we do not know". For me this is a path to hopefully obtaining a modicum of wisdom and thereby exhibiting some evidence that I did not spend 68 years on earth wasting my time.
ERLANDSSON
The persistent accusation that conservatives are not sympathetic to and are even hateful towards individual civil and human rights for all individuals who live within broadly acceptable norms of lawful behavior is I believe, either not true or overstated for emotional or political reasons.
Some in the LGBT community for example, are currently making that charge due to certain campaign ads by Gov. Rick Perry in Iowa. Others cite the reactions to the efforts of Secy. of State Clinton to protect the civil and human rights of such persons via economic, political and diplomatic sanctions by the US, within the over 70 nations that now criminalize gay and lesbian people.
While it is ironic that Secy. Clinton makes this effort while addressing the inappropriately named UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, her efforts are important nonetheless, and should be supported by all people who believe in the basic natural rights of all individuals. Many if not most conservatives, don't like addressing rights on a group basis. Yet history has an unpleasant way of reminding us that the most prevalent way of demonizing individuals is by demonizing the "group" they either identify with or are associated with by others. Hence the struggle for equality and at times survival often must begin with group identity but should always end with individual liberty.
Hitler began the Holocaust by exterminating people with disabilities. They did not fit into his stereotype of what Aryans should look like and they had, in his opinion, no utilitarian value to the Reich. So they were murdered as a prelude to a larger horror in much the same way that a play goes into rehearsals in order to work out the kinks. Later in the second, and third acts would come homosexuals, Gypsies, Christians and finally the Jews This was done by men and women so ordinary that Hanna Arendt would later describe one of them, Adolph Eichmann, as being an example of the "banality of evil". This should be a reminder to all that true evil sometimes comes not with fangs but with a pleasing smile, making the good guys and the bad guys all the more difficult to sort out.
Because of this I believe we must look to the consequences of what is done in the context of what is said. Denial of civil and human rights to any person who is simply trying to exercise their inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is evil from a civic, moral and spiritual perspective. The advocacy of violence and hatred towards any innocent person alone or in combination with others is not acceptable at any level of human response. Human history is replete with the fear of the "different" as alien and strange leading to the attempted or actual destruction of the " different" while innocent and harmless.
Conservatives believe the Constitution by it's very nature forces us to respect one another on the civic plain. Conservatives who are persons of faith have the Golden Rule to guide them in their treatment of their fellow souls and that guidance is clear and unambiguous. So where does the perception of Conservative indifference or animosity toward persons in groups ranging from the poor to the gay to the non-white emanate from?
I believe that a good portion of that belief flows from the national arguments over identity and discrimination that we as a people have been having since 1776. The timeless struggle to make the Constitution applicable to all, insists on both reason, tension and passion. How could any thing as important as human freedom not be intense and passionate. Ask almost any immigrant and they will tell you how unique and precious are the liberties of this nation in comparison to others.
But these arguments can be intentionally and unintentionally misinterpreted as bias, prejudice, callousness, and hatred due to the reaction to the tactics and strategies employed by all sides. Far too often the "means" become the "ends" with faux objectives eclipsing real goals.
I as a citizen may fight explicit sex education in the public schools for a host of valid moral and parental reasons even when the purpose of that education is the expressed desire to protect young sexually active teens from disease and pregnancy. I as a citizen must also however protect and defend the promoters of that which I may detest from physical and economic harm for the very advocacy that is making me angry. In order to make America work as it was intended to work I cannot and must not let my passion destroy my reason or my reason dilute my passion and prevent me from protecting in reality, that which represents one vital and indispensable right clothed in two adversarial points of view.
Many, if not most conservatives I know, do not support "Gay Marriage". For many their opposition is based on religious grounds. Others see the expansion of civil marriage as a "slippery slope" leading to the destruction of one of histories most fundamental human institutions. Still others believe that the efforts for same sex marriage are nothing more than a plot to erode and degrade the time tested norms of Western and certain non-western civilizations. Yet we must address all of this anxiety and suspicion in the context of what the pursuit of happiness means to individuals who have rights that are inalienable. Issues such as these exemplify the tension we cannot escape that are innate within the great American experiment . Again our struggle with this tension should always be guided by reason, passion, fidelity to the Constitution and harmonious with the tenets of our faith and sense of public and personal virtue.
For me the "Conservative" approach to the civil liberties and human rights of any individual ends with the supremacy of that individual's natural rights and the protections that our laws give them. They should never be victims seeking protections solely for themselves due to the originality of their condition. They only must merely be human.
All of us in this treacherous time need to possess enough humility to always question our beliefs for evidence of error, so that we may maximize "knowing what we do not know". For me this is a path to hopefully obtaining a modicum of wisdom and thereby exhibiting some evidence that I did not spend 68 years on earth wasting my time.
ERLANDSSON
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