“More About Morality in the Election”

I'm seeing a lot of comments around the web about the morality issue in the election. Most of the comments are from Democrats... which is not really a surprise, since I'm seeing the comments on the web. ;-)

What's bothering me about some of these comments is the idea that the Republicans used fear and proclamations of good and evil to convince the electorate that they were the more moral choice.

Consider Brent's comments:

Now, I voted for Kerry for moral reasons as well as practical. Freedom and civil rights are moral issues. The differences between Kerry’s and Bush’s foreign and economic policies are, in many cases, moral differences.

(And I think that winning an election by scaring people with gays is immoral. It’s cynical, manipulative, pandering—and it’s highly effective.)

Brent considers freedom, civil rights, and Federal fiscal policy to be moral issues. Generally, though, I think people consider those to be, well, civil issues.

Lots of people still believe in the "old fashioned" sense of right and wrong. Bad fiscal policy is stupid, but it's not "sinful." The Patriot Act is disturbing and restrictive and overarching, but it's not shameful or scandalous.

This knee-jerk reaction that the Republicans only got the "morality vote" because they scared people is just plain wrong, and is preventing people from seeing what may have actually happened here. That is, the "left" and the "right" seem to have developed entirely different senses of right and wrong.

Years ago we had a long discussion about right and wrong, morality, and atheism. The current issue goes right back to what I was trying to understand (and the point I was trying to make) back then: what is your source of morality? What is your moral compass?

On one side of this election, the compass was apparently one's own sense of what does or does not harm another (humanism, generally, and I only use that term because that's what others have used). On the other side of the election, the compass seems to be based more on a learned morality, mostly from the Bible but probably also from a shared sense of what it says (especially as there is no way that all those voters are actually "religious").

Perhaps it would be better to try to understand why Bush would win the moral vote, why people might see him as the more moral of the two, without chalking it up to stupidyt, fear, or intimidation, and without attempting to psycho-analyze millions of people.

(Please note that I didn't vote, and I was bound to be disappointed no matter who won. I personally don't think either choice was a particularly moral character. This post is about understanding what happened, not promoting either viewpoint.)