Monday, October 22, 2007

Reclaiming the Values Vote

You probably know that this weekend the far right organization, the Family Research Council, held its so called Values Voters summit in Washington, D.C. Each of the Republican hopefuls came to woo the crowd, with Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney emerging as the straw poll favorites.



Colleagues at Faith in Public Life and Faithful Democrats blogged throughout the conference. It's worth reading their reports.



For any of my colleagues who hope to change the dialog on values from as Laurie Goodstein reported in the New York Times on Thursday "the hot button issues of abortion and homosexuality", this weekend's speeches will demonstrate dramatically why we must continue to speak out about OUR VALUES about sexual justice. (And please, could we all stop labeling these as "hot button" as if other issues like Iraq, gun control, the environment, and so on, are not controversial as well?)



My hat is off to Rudy Guiliani who spoke at the summit, but refused to back away from his commitment to women and gay persons. One can only hope for as much from his Democratic opponents.

1 comment:

Bill Baar said...

Sexual Justice is just such a strange way to frame an issue.

It raises more questions than it answers.

We want to talk about a sexual ethics. And we want to talk about what role the Government should have in advancing or enforcing such an ethics (Ron Paul joined it nicely in last nights debate: why should Government license marriage at all?); especially when there is very much a Libertarian Consensus on sexual ethics.

Giuliani I thought handled the issues well in a plain spoken way.

But sexual justice just seems an odd frame to lay on it.

The phrase conveys nothing and I think would just elicit perplexed looks from people otherwise sympathetic to many of your stands.