Tuesday
Because I'm right
Dobson reserved some of his harshest criticism for Obama's argument that the religiously motivated must frame debates over issues like abortion not just in their own religion's terms but in arguments accessible to all people.I was going to try to explain why Dobson is completely wrong here with reference to the Rawlsian doctrine of Overlapping Consensus, but it turns out I'm confusing my Rawls and I wanted to refer to the concept of Public Justification. Anyway, in short, while different people can support policies for different reasons internal to their “comprehensive doctrine” (which might be a religious belief, but also might be any other kind of belief system) they should also be able to argue for that policy based upon a public justification which doesn't presume all of the premises of their comprehensive doctrine. That way people of different comprehensive doctrines can agree on the legitimacy of a policy. I think I might be getting the level of abstraction at which Rawls applies these ideas totally wrong, but oh well. Dobson's position seems to be that he'll just persuade the people who already agree with him, and shouldn't be required to convince anyone else of anything.He said Obama, who supports abortion rights, is trying to govern by the "lowest common denominator of morality," labeling it "a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution."
"Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?" Dobson said. "What he's trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe."
Bonus stupid things people are saying while bashing Obama: “But what is far less forgivable is the socialist realism language he used to rationalize his decision.” It is my position that Richard Cohen does not know how to write in English and does not have an editor. While socialist realism is a style of art, the phrase “socialist realism language” does not refer to anything. For a more substantive criticism of the same Cohen column, which in short says that despite the fact that John McCain has changed his views on almost everything, we know where he stands, apparently, but not where Obama does because he didn't follow through on his pledge to “aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a public ally financed general election,” see Publius.
