Brain Fertilizer

Serena Lu Chang has said she can't figure out why I go by her blog. She's obviously liberal, and I'm obviously conservative and/or Republican. Well, simply put, she makes me laugh. Not at her, but with her.

She talks about her distress in this piece. If I hear about anyone giving her crap, I'll ban you from my site. Even if we have opposite political views and have never actually talked together, I like her. So leave her alone.

Here's the thing. I think she doesn't understand President Bush, and has believed too easily that Bush is simplisticly waging a war against evil. I admit his "Axis of Evil" speech makes it easy to assume that. Heck, I hated that terminology myself because it seemed to me to deny the fact that evil tendencies exist in all of us. Yes, even Barbara Streisand.

So here's what she says:

In my opinion, George Bush's worldview is that the world is divided into two absolute categories: good and evil. For him, there is little to nothing in between. This basic belief motivates his behavior. Invading a country is clearly justified if its leader is evil. Taking away certain civil liberties with the Patriot Act is justified if you believe it will help to catch people who are evil. Banning gay marriage is justified if any marriage between anyone besides a man and a woman is evil. Because evil is bad. Absolutely. And therefore, anything you do to eradicate evil is good: the ends justify the means. A thousand dead American soldiers are unfortunate, but they are justified because their deaths contributed to the removal of an evil man from government.

And that's where I disagree. As I said in her comments, the only simplistic aspect to Bush's Global War on Terror is that large numbers of American citizens dying in horrifying and terrifying ways is worth using military force to attempt to stop.

In my opinion, absolute good and evil do not exist. The world is gray. It is scary and uncertain and full of many complicated layers which swirl around in a stew of ambiguity and make you want to pull the covers over your head.

And that's exactly why President Bush authorized the invasion of Iraq. Because the world is gray, and it's hard to separate the evil of Selma, Alabama from the evil of Tian An Men Square from the evil of feeding people into plastic shredders from the evil of govt-funded abortion on demand from the evil of allowing children to starve from the evil of "rape as punishment" from the evil of playing with the lives and futures of colonies in some European "Great Game". It's even more difficult to assign blame in all those cases...from the person who orders it to the people who don't rise up to depose those responsible to the support systems like the UN that make it possible.

So the one thing we can do is make the world a little safer, reduce the number of places that lack Rule of Law or an understanding of basic freedoms and equality. Remove sources of chaos, one by one. Make the world a little less dark. That's what the GWOT is all about.

Serena assumes that President Bush wants to stop Homosexual Marriage because he deems it evil. That's as silly as if I assumed she supports Homosexual Marriage because she deems it a more pure form of love. The thing is, behaviors have consequences. A govt can try and mitigate consequences, and a govt can attempt to encourage or discourage certain behaviors, but at this time, all evidence indicates that it is good for the stability of a society to promote heterosexual families as a source of repopulation, stability of childhood development, and the teaching of the moralities that maintain societal harmony and peaceful co-existence, but that there is no compelling evidence that SSM would promote the same aspects enough to be worth the destabilizing effect. Maybe someday that evidence will become clear, but at this point, it's not there. The lessons of Pandora's Box should not be so easily dismissed, because the troubles never go back into the box. And one unfortunate aspect of human nature is to push the envelope, and to take "legal" as "license" to the point of ignoring common sense limits.

There are ways to argue against the Global War on Terror and for Homosexual Marriage rights without automatically assuming your opponent is a stupid idiot who can't understand the complexity of the complicated world. Especially when your opponent is someone who has successfully overcome a drug and alcohol addiction, raised a family, lived on the planet for nearly 6 decades, held two of the most important executive positions in the most powerful nation on the planet, and outfoxed both Democrat strategists and the UN. Karl Rove wasn't around for all of that, so you can't say Bush is merely a puppet.

I don't know. Serena, your post touched me more than most people on the left. You seem genuinely perplexed, rather than sputteringly angry that President Bush "stole another election" or whatever passes for talking points among the Moonbats right now. I hope that you can accept this post as a reasonable explanation rather than a rebuke or insult.