Seeing Through the Miasmic Remains of Strawmen
Clark has considered the recent rounds of writer bashing and the resultant straw colored cloud cover, in light of the Family Research Council's annual Values Voters Summit, which was recently held in Washington, DC.
I just want to point out again that the Family Research Council is not a clever parody devised by liberals looking for a strawman to attack. And the Values Voter Summit was not organized by liberal writers from Religion Dispatches and Talk2Action in order to set a crafty trap to lure fringe figures of the religious right into making a spectacle.
The Values Voter Summit likes to portray itself as representative of all of American evangelicalism. Seeing through the miasmas is going to be an ongoing struggle, as politically and religiously motivated actors on all sides hack away at strawmen in keeping with what seems to be the current fashion in public discourse in this area. I think Rev. Katherine Ragsdale (then the executive director of Political Research Associates; currently President of Episcopal Divinity School) got it right in her essay in Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America:
"Perhaps one of the most fundamental outrages of all is the erosion of honest public discourse. When, instead of disagreeing honestly, the Right (or any of us) practice to deceive and to cut off debate with spurious claims ... we are left unable to know what to believe, how to speak in order to he heard, how to struggle together to discern the truth. By all means, let us put our values and convictions on the table, with the facts, and then lets disagree about the moral and public policy implications of that data. Let us disagree passionately - an indicator of how seriously we take it all. But let's disagree honestly."
Seeing Through the Miasmic Remains of Strawmen | 3 comments (3 topical, 0 hidden)
Seeing Through the Miasmic Remains of Strawmen | 3 comments (3 topical, 0 hidden)
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