More Commandments

First off, sorry for the lack of posts, I've been away from my internet connection. Obviously, there's a lot more to be said about the ten commandments issue raised below. I think Ezra's written the best follow-up/criticism to my post, making the point that leaders of the Democratic Party have never been leaders on the secularist side of the sort of symbolic issues I'm talking about. Instead, outside groups or, oftentimes, eccentric individuals file lawsuits or otherwise make a big stink. There's nothing Bill Clinton or Harry Reid or whomever else can do to prevent someone who really, really, really doesn't like the idea of the phrase "under God" being in the pledge of allegiance from suing.

There's a bit of a real dilemma here. In the specific case of the pledge, of course, Democrats did try hard to distance themselves from the 9th Circuit's decision, joining with Republicans in a big pledge-reciting on the steps of the Capitol. This wound up being one of those things that don't really help you very much, because I don't think it came across as being sincere. It seemed like there were some conservative politicians genuinely outraged by what the court had done, and some liberal politicians who were willing to give way to political necessity. Now the obvious solution here would be that if more Democratic Senators were, in fact, the sort of people who were genuinely outraged by that kind of thing, but otherwise held to progressive views, then we'd be out of the woods. You would have seen some genuine outrage. In consequence, many liberals would have been genuinely miffed. But liberals would get over it -- nobody on the left thinks these are the really crucial issues. Then, come election day, you've got a few more voters open to progressive ideas on economics, and insofar as Democrats are losing votes on cultural issues they're at least losing votes over issues of genuine consequence.