The American Spectator

Reader Mail

The Real Democrats

2.20.07 @ 12:01AM

CULTURE WARS
Re: Megan Basham's Blogging With Bile:

I'd like to try to explain to Megan Basham why people like me and my family and friends react so emotionally to conservative Christians. The reason is that they are trying to force their religious views on my and my family and friends. I am not trying to force my views on them, but they want to force my daughters and granddaughters to continue pregnancies against their will -- my daughters who have brought me seven grandchildren quite vigorously agree with me on this issue. We don't care if they want to force their daughters, so why can't they leave my family alone?

Why do they want to force me to pledge allegiance to a god I don't believe in? I am a patriot and I have a desire to declare my allegiance, but they want to force me into a lie.

Why won't they allow my gay and lesbian friends to lead the same normal lives as everyone else? I'm not insisting that Christians admit them into their religious services, though I think it would be a great thing to do because my gay and lesbian friends are the most spiritual people I know. We're not asking Christians to honor gay and lesbian marriages in their churches, just let them form the same kind of state recognized relationships that my wife of 42 years and I have had.

Religion should be about family and home. Christians should leave their religion at home and not try to force it on me. Jews aren't forcing their religious views on me. If Christians would leave us alone and stop forcing their religious views on us, we would leave them alone.
-- Ron Schoenberg
Seattle, Washington

I am writing to register my dismay at seeing The American Spectator publish blogs such as that of Megan Basham in her article.

She certainly has the right to be dismayed that someone disparages her beliefs. However, her dismay does not give her the right to deceitfully imply that the views of a single blogger, writing in a private blog unrelated to the Edwards campaign, are part of a vast conspiracy against view similar to hers. Amanda Marcotte made the statements that Ms. Basham dislikes in a private blog that she had been writing before being hired by the Edwards campaign. To claim in a public forum that such a private communication is evidence of a near conspiracy against Christianity is inane and dishonest.

Ms. Basham, connecting dots, leaps quickly from attacking Ms. Marcotte to attacking education and the entire secular culture. University professors (the "ivory tower elite on both the left and right," in her words) do not sponsor discussions about the Christ for the obvious reason that they are teaching classes in non-religious subjects. They also do not sponsor discussions of Allah or Buddha for the same reason, unless in theology classes. Her apparent objection is not just to satires of given beliefs but to the entire secular world. She is unambiguously arguing for a suppression of both satire of religion and speech that does not express religious views. (I am not interpreting, here. She is straightforwardly arguing for exactly that. Did you read her blog?)

On a more personal note, I also object to her fey tone. I don't really believe she is as unaware as she pretends that millions of people in the world do not share her beliefs. And she writes well enough to suggest that her leap from an attack on one person's personal blog to an attack on anyone who is not a Christian is not just the ranting of a televangelist, but instead a cynical, well-wrought attempt to rally troops around a flag she seems to think everyone supports -- the flag of imposing her religious views on the entire culture.

More worrisome is that The American Spectator publishes such hotheaded propaganda. Had this blog been on a religious website, I would not have been surprised. But for you to publish it suggests that you too want a specific set of religious beliefs to influence government policy, and support her view that secular institutions should promote religion. Let's please keep above this fray. The arguments and ill-feelings between people of a given faith and those who do not believe have gone on for centuries. When they are inflated, leading to inaccurate, sweeping claims about one's opponents and more ill-feelings, they cast the host of their forum into as dark a shadow as the intended target.

Ms. Basham is not a responsible voice of reason.
-- unsigned

Megan is right on as to what liberals believe. They hate religion. They don't realize that liberalism is a religion. The Breck girl, Edwards, is a lefty who doesn't see anything wrong with the liberal bloggers that he fired and rehired and refired whom are man-hating, lesbian, God-hating, socialist women who have a very dark view of America. I am very aware of liberals who have a very dark view of everything. They are very depressed, 1960s control freaks.

I can't bear being around a liberal. They are so smug, so right, so entitled to what they believe. I won't let them tell me what is okay to say. If I want to say Third Worlders, I will say it. I will not be censored by liberals.

I love men and who men are.

Can we ask liberals to move to the Netherlands? They would fit in. Can we talk about socialism?
-- Myrna, a recovering liberal

Letter to the Editor

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