A Letter to My Fundie Nephew-in Law – How Do You Talk to a Bush Voter?

Time for change

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Thu Aug-31-06 06:01 PM
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A Letter to My Fundie Nephew-in Law – How Do You Talk to a Bush Voter?

A few months ago my wife and I and our two adult children went to Florida for our niece’s wedding. My wife’s brother and his wife have three now-married daughters, the youngest one whose wedding we attended when we went to Florida. We have been very close to this family ever since I met my wife 35 years ago, and they are all about as important to my wife as anything in her life.

Our sister-in-law is a devout Christian who has transmitted her Christian beliefs to her three daughters. This would not be of any concern to us, except that this has resulted in a family of Bush voters. To look at it another way, if our sister-in-law’s church had told its members to vote for Al Gore instead of George Bush in 2000, our country and our world would probably be much more peaceful and civilized places to live than they currently are. So I have to say that this is a sore spot, though something that is never talked about with our family.

Anyhow, our middle niece’s husband’s two favorite heroes, as far as I can tell, are Jesus and Ronald Reagan, which personifies the great paradox that I have posted about in the past. Nevertheless, we like him, and he has never in our experience been the least bit obnoxious about any of his political beliefs, though he has discussed them with me.

I was talking with him during our recent Florida vacation when, as best as I can recall, I may have said something insulting (as politely as I could) about the Bush administration. He responded by politely telling me about a book that his “dear friend” had written, which purported to expose the hypocrisy of several well known liberals, including Barbara Streisand, George Soros, Al Franken, and Ted Kennedy. He related several examples to me (politely), and since I didn't have any familiarity with those examples, the only response I could think of was to ask him if I could see the book. He told me that he would send me an autographed copy.

The book, which I received from him a few days ago, is titled “Do as I Say, Not as I Do - Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy”, by Peter Schweizer. This is truly one of the most God-awful books I’ve ever read (I only read about 1% of it, and believe me, that’s enough). This was my reaction to it:
:mad: :puke: :rant: :mad: :puke: :rant: :mad: :puke: :rant: :mad: :puke: :rant:

All you really need to know about the book in order to have a thorough understanding of its contents is the last paragraph of the book’s inside jacket: “Schweizer’s conclusion is simple: liberalism in the end forces its adherents to become hypocrites. They adopt one pose in public, but when it comes to what matters most in their own lives … they jettison their liberal principles and embrace conservative ones. Schweizer thus exposes the contradiction at the core of liberalism: if these ideas don’t work for the very individuals who promote them, how can they work for the rest of us?”

So, I decided to write my nephew-in-law a letter in response to the book. My goal is to knock some sense into him in order to get him to reconsider his views, or at least to start a dialogue leading to that. I want to do this in a respectful manner because I don’t want to disrupt my wife’s (or my) relationship with our family, because being rude isn’t likely to facilitate receptiveness to a change of mind, and because I don’t like to be rude anyhow. But neither do I want to be so polite as to preclude me from making the appropriate points. It’s a very fine line. Anyhow, here’s my draft:

Dear XXX,

With regard to Peter Schweizer’s book, it’s hard for me to express in words how upsetting that kind of writing is to me. I do appreciate you giving me the book, so I hope you don’t think that it is rude of me to tell you my opinion of it. However, I just can’t let this pass – and you did initiate the conversation. Not that I object to your doing that. I welcome the opportunity to discuss these things. But since you initiated it I feel that I have the right to respond to it.

I have three things to say about Peter’s book:

First, I have no idea how much of what he says in the book is true (although I could make a good guess) because I couldn’t locate any of the references, though I tried to locate several of them with Google. This appears to be one of the sloppiest researched books I’ve ever read.

Secondly, if I wanted to play his game I would ask you to take a look at this website that lists roughly a hundred high profile Republican sex offenders who profess to live by “conservative values”. Then I would say, “If conservative ideas don’t work for the very individuals who promote them, how can they work for the rest of us?”. In other words, I would conclude, using Peter Schweizer’s brand of logic, that conservative values do not work.

But I won’t play that game because it’s stupid. There are a lot of conservative values that I and other liberals don’t care for, but I honestly don’t recall any liberals making the ridiculous argument that they can prove that conservative values don’t work just because they can identify conservatives who are hypocrites and/or sex offenders. I would hope that you would agree that that would be stupid. And I’m sure that Peter knows it’s stupid as well. So why anyone would write a book like that is beyond my comprehension.

Which brings me to my third and last point. If someone intends to argue about certain values it seems to me that the appropriate way for an adult to do that would be to talk directly about the values themselves.

Let’s just take one. Peter maintains that Barbra Streisand is being hypocritical because she “complains about suspected terrorists detained in Guantanamo Bay.” He says that’s hypocritical of her because she once called the police about a man she thought was stalking her, and the man was arrested, and the police violated his civil rights (another one of the many references I couldn’t find.) Actually, I have no idea what led Barbra to call the police in that circumstance (and I doubt that Peter does either), but in general I don’t criticize women for calling the police if they think that someone is threatening them. And if it is true that the police violated that man’s civil rights, then the police were at fault, not the person who called them because she felt threatened.

Anyhow, back to Guantanamo Bay: What Barbra is trying to say when she complains about that is that she thinks it is wrong for people who are arrested on suspicion of a crime to be held indefinitely with no charges being brought against them, no opportunity to defend themselves, no access to a lawyer, no opportunity to see their families, and to be repeatedly tortured over a period of several years. That is what Guantanamo Bay under the George Bush administration is all about. And after all these years, out of the hundreds of prisoners (including many children) whom they’ve held there under inhuman conditions, resulting in the deaths of untold numbers of them, they’ve only been able to bring charges against five.

Here is one article that I’ve written about this despicable situation. This article is linked to real and substantive references (as opposed to anecdotal and hearsay references) which detail a small portion of the horrors that have gone on at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

I have one question for you after you’ve read the article. I know that you’re a good Christian, so I’ll address the question from a Christian point of view: Do you think that this is something that Jesus would approve of?

And then, if you answer no to that, which I sincerely believe you will, tell me what on earth Peter was trying to prove about this in his book. If you take him literally, what he is saying is that since Barbra Streisand complained about what goes on at Guantanamo Bay, and since she called the police on someone she thought was stalking her and the police violated that man’s civil rights, that proves that Barbra is a hypocrite, and therefore what goes on at Guantanamo Bay must be ok. And if he could find out something bad about me as well, that would double prove his point.

My point is, if he thinks that what happens at Guantanamo Bay is fine, and that liberals are wrong to criticize it, then he should simply explain why he thinks that – not use the logic of a five year old to make his point.

So, that’s all I have to say about this. Sorry if I sound angry, but I’ve just lost all patience with moronic logic of the type found in Peter Schweizer’s book. This is simply way too serious of a matter for that kind of nonsense.

Dale

Well, I think this letter succeeds in making my points, but I’m not sure that it succeeds in not being rude. I told my wife that I wouldn’t send this unless and until she okays it (She’s out of town right now), because I don’t want to be responsible for any damage this might cause. But I don’t think that will be a problem, since I talked with her about it over the phone, and her response (referring either to the book or to our nephew-in-law or both) was, “How can anyone have such a fucking warped mind?”

Which brings me to the last point I wanted to make: One of my main goals in life (seriously) is to understand how an otherwise decent person could belong to today’s Republican Party or vote for George Bush. You may not understand why I feel that to be such an important goal, or you may think that it’s unattainable. Perhaps it’s not attainable, but I feel that it’s worth the effort because the answer may hold the key to how to win back our country.

In order to achieve that goal I need to talk to some of these people, but I haven’t yet found a way to do that in a productive manner. This letter is one attempt to do that.