As I look at the current activity in the two parties, I believe that all progressives, whether Democrat or Republican, need to have grave concern for the future of the republic. There is a real possibility that we can end up with a president who advocates turning the country into a “Theocracy”.
The scenario begins with the outcome of the Democratic Convention:
Either Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama will be the party’s nominee. The candidate with the greatest chance of winning a general election, John Edwards, has dropped out.
If Hillary is nominated, her chances of winning are slim because there are so many Americans who appear to have a visceral dislike for her. When asked, most people with that attitude that I have spoken to cannot express why they feel that way. They just do! Unfortunately, there appear to be an awful lot of them. There may be enough to kill Ms. Clinton’s chances if the Republicans nominate a semi-moderate candidate.
If Obama is nominated it would show that the country has grown-up in the last 50 years. Unfortunately, I am afraid it has not grown up enough to elect him. Although there are few Americans who would state outright that they would not vote for a Black Man, in the privacy of the voting booth there are many who are just not ready to pull that lever for a minority candidate. If the Republicans nominate a semi-moderate candidate the dislike of the current administration may not be sufficient to overcome the deep seeded prejudice of many Americans.
Moving the Republicans, it looks as if John McCain, a semi-moderate, will get the party’s nomination. However, the party’s right wing believes him to be too far to the left. In order to gain the support of the conservative core McCain will have to accept Huckabee as his Vice-Presidential running mate. McCain is 72 years old and has had some health problems. The presidency, for someone who doesn’t delegate everything al la Reagan, is a psychological and physical pressure cooker. As a result there is a good chance that McCain may not survive his first term. This would leave us with President Huckabee.
Huckabee has already expressed his desire to change the constitution so that it reflects the teaching of the Bible. A constitution that expresses a particular religious viewpoint is the definition of a theocracy and is no better than the Iranian constitution that place Sharia as the guiding principle for laws. His stance doesn’t take into account that there are many different translations of the bible and they do not necessarily agree with each other. In addition, there are many non-Christians in the USA. Are we going to ignore them? Also, the bible is contradictory in many of its laws. Making the bible a part of the constitution would require that a particular sectarian approach would need to be adopted and forced upon everyone else. When this happens, American will no longer be the beacon of liberty and diversity that is the standard that the world has looked to.
No comments:
Post a Comment