Divisiveness in the Eye of the Beholder

Ramesh Ponnuru's National Review piece makes an astute observation of how the Left views Christian participation in the public square as he examines John Danforth's objection to "divisiveness:"

Are Christian conservatives guilty of divisiveness for campaigning to get Roe v. Wade overturned? Or are they responding legitimately to liberals' divisive campaign to get the courts to impose an extreme version of the abortion policy they favor? Danforth tends to divide the American political world into "Christian conservatives" and "moderates" (liberals barely appear in his book), with the former portrayed as divisive and the latter as reconcilers. But that set of categories is itself divisive, as categories tend to be.

This is a common, historical-revisionist claim from the Left these days. When people work to maintain or restore traditional values in South Dakota or the U.S., the Left charges we are being "divisive." Actually, it is they who are being divisive, as they are trying to subvert the moral foundations of our great country, trying to change what has worked well and made us a great civilization in exchange for some crazy new Marxist social engineering scheme.

Danforth's own policy views put him in a quandary. He was an anti-abortion senator, and he remains opposed to same-sex marriage. But he favors research that kills human embryos, opposes a constitutional amendment to protect traditional marriage, and disdains public displays of religion. He wants to cast the people to his right as theocratic.

Another position of the Left is that, if you must have these primitive religious convictions in the first place, at least keep them to yourself so that they are completely irrelevant to real life. Their position is that religious values should have no bearing on what we do in the "real world." And if you should happen to proffer both faith-based rationale AND "real-world" scientific reasons for a particular position, well, anything scientific you might have to say is automatically invalidated because you're a "Bible thumper." In other words, the Left advocates that only the end of your nose should guide you in public.