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No Compelling Moral Vision

You know, I might have been a liberal, if a few things had gone differently when I was younger. One reason why I don't get angry about the GOP lapses from Catholic Social Teaching is that very few even know what it is. It's still pretty new to me.

And abortion is that thing for me that blows all that liberal righteousness away. You wanna talk to me about food stamps, and you're not even sure a baby is a baby! I like moralistic crusading zealots, but they'd better be right. (This is why Mark Shea is intolerable, God bless him. He's joining in their chorus against student loans today; sorry guys, your moral credibility died in 1973.)

I'm pretty sure I'm not against a national heath care system, at least in theory. Naturally, it's just going to be a means to enrich certain lawyers and doctors at the expense of everyone else, on top of implicating all of us in killing more defenseless children. Please tell me more about how the GOP hates poor people. Whatever our failures to address poverty as an issue of justice, we're not killing them.

The very engine of progressivism at its best was Christianity; your "Christian" president is attempting to purge any real faith from public life, and suing nuns for being faithful to the gospel. Please tell me more about the immorality of George W. Bush. (Actually, you can say plenty, and I wouldn't stop you, but you'd better be right.)

There's some snark here, and some real anger, but it's the bitter taste of betrayal. The party of William Jennings Bryan is now the party of death and birth control pills.
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