Since good and responsible people know that they should never compromise with evil, they end up entering the polling place with a battle mentality. But such an approach only makes sense when Satan is running for president ”” and despite what you might hear in the darkest recesses of the online world, Satan is not running in 2012. It would be much better for us, as individuals and as a nation, if we saved our righteous anger for the devils that will inevitably appear again as external threats to our nation. Not that foreign foes are a guarantee of domestic tranquility. The McCarthy hearings and Red Scare of the 1950s caused American politics to go off-road and get nasty, even though we had a common enemy. And we always need to keep in mind that the enemies of one generation can morph into the allies of the next.
Better for us to put time, energy and money into fighting the evils that are afflicting us internally, whether we choose to focus on battling substance abuse, racism, sexual addiction, domestic violence or the disintegration of the American family. As always, these threats are harder for us to face, because the demons are inside.
I agree with the author for the most part, but he’s part of the problem.
Do a word count and count how much of the references and allusions are to Republican rhetoric, and how much to Democrat.
Second, the American experiment arguably works by some groups being stirred by a moral vision of good and evil and others forging a politically workable compromise. The former is no less valid and unAmerican than the latter, and which approach dominants varies from period to period.
If the slavery question or the civil rights movement took this approach, blacks would still be slaves in parts of the country and in others would need to sit at the back of the bus. Some things really *are* about right and wrong, even though lots are more about wisdom.
The one-sidedness of the article in the direction of the party that seems to be favored by the paper in question, plus a lack of recognition that there are times when ‘good and evil’ is the right frame to issues internal to the U.S. makes me think that this guy is just repeating Jed Bartlett’s reelection debate speech on the topic from the relevant season of West Wing – i.e., he’s just running a progressive perspective, rather than genuinely acting as a ‘third way’.
He’s completely wrong. Satan is always running for office. Every office, in one way or another. As someone once said, paraphrasing, “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
For Christians, this is an especially perilous time, when the government, just as an example, is attempting to control who can serve as ministers in the churches (fortunately just rebuffed by the U.S. Supreme Court), and in many places in the country doing everything it can to shut down the Christian message, and to force Christians and churches to accept beliefs directly against the Word of God. There are groups out there, well entrenched in government and politics, that want to take away worship spaces for churches, to ban Christians from all speech in the public square, and to force Christians to accept abortion, gay marriage, pornography, and a host of other things.
Fortunately, certain folks like the Catholic bishops are waking up to how serious the threat is. But the rest of us continue to think, “this is America, it will never happen.” But it is happening.
This is just one story, posted today on Midwest Conservative Journal:
“Atty Says School Threatened, Punished Boy Who Opposed Gay Adoption” http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/atty-says-school-threatened-punished-boy-who-opposed-gay-adoption.html