Moral Values? Let's Examine...

Ah, Christian tolerance. "Do unto others" and all that. What a sight to behold.

A lot of people out there are praising President Bush's victory as a triumph for "moral values," which exit polls listed as the number one issue at the ballot box. There's only one thing. Those people talking about "moral values" aren't all that moral.

The FBI has noted that southern states (or "Bushistan") have the highest murder rates in the country. They also have the highest divorce rates. By contrast, "Taxachusetts" has the lowest divorce rates. Not that there's anything wrong with divorce, by the way, but it's the hypocrisy of the moral values crowd I'm trying to show.

What are these values? Do they include yet another in a long series of sex scandals in the Catholic Church? Do they include the Reverend Fred Phelps? Do they include these lovely thoughts from the Free Republic (good conservative Christians all, I assume) upon learning about Elizabeth Edwards' breast cancer?

Elizabutt has breast cancer

If I were a doctor, I'd be frightened to treat the wife of a guy who sues doctors for a living.

a pity for sure, but good luck finding a doctor to treat the wife of the most vicious medical malpractice attorney in the nation...what goes around comes around I guess.

she could always go to canada or cuber to get the very best treatment possible.

I want her well, but NOT treated here.

any doctor here who treats her should have his head examined.

It's also a shame because, if it wasn't for her bottom-feeding trial lawyer husband, doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies probably would have found a cure for breast cancer by now...

would you bet YOUR house, your kids college on Edwards wife?

Send her to cuber. Libs say their system is better than ours.

....revenge is mine sayeth the LORD!!!!!!!!!

God is not mocked, you reap what you sow. I'm sorry folks but we all have to learn that you cannot go around spewing hatred and leave the door wide open to satan.

"God dont like ugly" (behavior)

This "moral values" thing is a sham. People like to think of themselves in an idyllic way, as "good Christians" who just mind their own business. They are apparently oblivious to the teen pregnancy, child neglect, domestic abuse, pornographic hero-worship, etc. going on in their own backyards. Tell you what, before you lecture me on moralism, take a look at yourself. It's not for nothing that every single evangelist for "Christian values" in the media, every single commentator that clucks smugly "You liberal elitists don't know what's going on in the heartland," doesn't live within 300 miles of said heartland.

And it's a sham on another level. Because, as the great Thomas Frank book What's the Matter With Kansas makes plain, the actual Republican leadership uses the values argument to push forward their economic agenda. The Heartland votes on "values," and then in Bush's first press conference, he lists at the top of his agenda Social Security privatization and a national flat tax. The poorest counties in America are often in the Heartland, the poorest states in the Union (almost all in the South and Plains) take billions in corporate welfare from the government, and its citizens continue to vote to undercut their own economic interests. Why? Because of the values they like to think they have, but don't.

If George W. Bush were a Democrat, he would've been seen as an amoral carpetbagging elitist who went to Andover and Yale, who's "claiming he's Christian" even though he doesn't belong to any church, and who doesn't represent "heartland" values. Hell, that's how, in many respects, he lost his first election, for Congress in 1978.