I really like Leonard Pitts; he is one of my favorite journalists. I liked his column so much today that I am moved to place his words here:
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Posted on Mon, Nov. 08, 2004
LEONARD PITTS JR.
AT-LARGE
Where's the morality in Bush's policy?
I have to thank Jimmy Carter for saving my sanity.
Granted, his was not a presidency one looks back
to with fondness. Gas lines stretched forever, Iran
took our people hostage, and there was disco, besides.
But Carter's ex-presidency has been a model of that
unofficial institution. He has built homes for the poor,
mediated wars, helped feed the hungry in Africa, fought
disease in Latin America. In so doing, Carter, a deacon
of Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga., has obeyed
a directive that Jesus issued one of his disciples.
Do you love me? He asked Simon Peter.
Peter said Yes.
Feed my sheep, said Jesus.
Remembering Carter's example, his very public embrace
of that command, is what has gotten me through the last
week without a facial tic. Or to put it another way:
If one more person tells me that ''morality'' guided
their decision to vote for President Bush, my head's
going to pop like a balloon.
Beg your pardon, but one is hard pressed to find much
evidence of morality in Bush's ineptly prosecuted war,
his erosion of civil rights, and the loss of international
credibility that his policies have caused. Unless, of
course, one has been quaking in one's boots at the
prospect of same-sex couples making a commitment that
straight couples have avoided like SARS. In that case,
the vote probably reflects one's morality just fine.
More's the pity.
No political tactician am I, but I think Democrats made
a fundamental mistake when the Christian right rose as
a political force: They watched it happen, ceded God to
the GOP without resistance, without so much as a beg your
pardon. Democrats, fearful of unsettling the secular West
and Northeast, only shrugged as the Almighty was packed
up and shipped South, where He is to this day routinely
trotted out to endorse various would-be governors,
senators and school-board members.
Small wonder faith has come to seem inextricable from
voting the straight Republican ticket.
And if you are, as I am, a Christian who remembers what
Jesus told Simon Peter, it is galling to see Him reduced
to a GOP shill, wrapped in a flag and used as a prop to
advance a conservative agenda -- which, by the way, stands
the Bible on its head.
After all, the Book says that Jesus consorted with lepers
and prostitutes. It says He talked with women -- which was
beneath a man of His time and place -- and washed the feet
of his followers.
And it tells us He said things that seemed to make no
logical sense: If someone takes your shirt, let him have
your cloak as well. If someone hits you on the right cheek,
offer him the left. Love your enemies. This was crazy talk.
There was nothing conservative about this man.
So I look at the success that conservatives on the so-called
Christian right have had in claiming Him as their exclusive
property, and I wonder, where in the heck is the Christian
left? Where are the people who preach -- and live -- the
biblical values of inclusion, service, humility and sacrifice,
and why haven't they coalesced into an alternative political
force?
Instead of a movement like that, we have an old peanut farmer
building houses for the poor.
You wish there were more. You wish there were Christian people
shouting from the rooftops that these other people, with their
small minds and niggardly spirits, do not represent all of us.
And that the faith exemplified by the politics of exclusion is
not the faith that the rest of us celebrate, not the faith that
lifts us and settles us and makes us whole.
But nobody's shouting these things. It occurs to me that maybe
they're all too busy building houses for poor people. And that
maybe I should be as well.
God bless you, Jimmy Carter, wherever you are.
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