Glengoyne
11-09-2004, 08:19 PM
I just came away from the Washinton Post editorial page. I hadn't had much chance to read any editorials since the election, and I wanted to see if some of the columnists had gone off on simliar anti-conservative or at least anti Bush-supporter rants like a few of the folks here. I actually was surprised to read what E.J. Dionne and Richard Cohen said.
They both had a couple of messages for those in their midst who had been doing the Bush supporter bashing. Neither of them, are saying glowing things about those who voted for Bush, Cohen pretty well lays it out that us Bush voters are selfish and have our priorities wrong but even that is a pleasant change from being called an ignorant bigot.
After I started this thread I also read and appreciated Donna Britt's piece entitled "Gay Unions put Kerry Campaign Asunder" so I linked it too. Among the articles singling out religious conservatism as the primary reason behind Bush's reelection, I found this one the most reasonable. She also points out that those who demonize the opposition are part of the problem not the solution.
Oh linkage
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35436-2004Nov8.html
Dupes and Dopes Of Campaign '04<!--plsfield:stop-->
<!--plsfield:byline-->By Richard Cohen
<!--plsfield:disp_date-->Tuesday, November 9, 2004; Page A27
<!--plsfield:description--><NITF>A phrase from a press release struck me: "In voting for George Bush, religious Americans were duped into voting against their best interests." The operative word is "duped," and it explains, almost by itself, why the Democratic Party is in the pits and John Kerry is not the next president of the United States. Only a dope thinks these voters were duped.</NITF>
<NITF>The press release comes from an organization called "Retro vs. Metro America," which -- par for the course nowadays -- is also a book and a Web site and soon, probably, a breakfast cereal. It is Democratic, and consists of some pretty impressive people, including the pollster Celinda Lake. And while a press release is, after all, just a press release, the one from Retro vs. Metro does represent the fairly common view that cultural conservatives have no idea what they are doing. For a little piece of heaven, they will sacrifice a better standard of living, health insurance and a chance to live their retirement in splendor.</NITF>
<NITF>In some theoretical way, this may be the case. But in the real world, as they say, you tell me what Democratic program would have improved the economic well-being of your average family so that, even for a moment, it would have to weigh trading off a cultural conviction. Is there a single American out there who really thought that Kerry's program to end or limit or whatever the outsourcing of jobs overseas was going to amount to anything? If so, that person should have been deprived of the right to vote on the grounds of insanity.</NITF>
<NITF>And tell me, is there anyone out there who thought you could narrow the deficit and fund all sorts of programs merely by eliminating the tax breaks President Bush gave the very rich -- people who make more than $200,000 a year? I voted for Kerry, but I didn't believe that for a second.</NITF>
<NITF>So just how, precisely, were all these cultural conservatives duped? It seems to me that they saw through the promises for what they were -- empty -- and voted on what mattered most to them. They knew, just as we all know, that nothing in the Democrats' oh-so-moderate program was going to make much difference to them -- or, even if it did, it was not worth what they would have had to give up in exchange.</NITF>
<NITF>Sometimes a voter may actually decide to vote against his or her economic self-interest. In an Oct. 26 column I cited Jewish voters as an example. As a definable group, they are among the wealthiest in the country, and yet time and again they vote overwhelmingly Democratic. In the 2004 election, Bush got only about 20 percent of the Jewish vote. In that column, I cited the power of culture, which is not simply inherited, like hair color, but can be the product of thought as much as tradition.</NITF>
<NITF>Most Jews are not voting Democratic out of mere habit. They are making a conscious decision to forgo an economic benefit for something that matters more -- a cultural imperative for social justice. They believe in social welfare programs. They believe in redistributing wealth (some of it, anyway), and they believe firmly in civil rights and civil liberties. What are these rights worth? Anything you can name, because history teaches that without them even the pursuit of happiness is futile.</NITF>
<NITF>It behooves Democrats to understand that Christian conservatives can make the same, hard choices. Of course, real economic privation can change the equation -- would you rather have a job or stop gay marriage? -- but barring that sort of choice, culture wins out. </NITF>
<NITF>That does not mean that liberals have to feign agreement or abandon their values. When it comes to gays, for instance, the Republican Party has engaged in unconscionable demagoguery -- and the president knows it. In the short run, gay rights may be a losing issue, but this is a matter of human rights, not to be traded away. With all due respect to the voters of most of the states, on certain issues, I'd rather be right than red.</NITF>
<NITF>Still, what matters most is attitude, a mind-set that does not convey the message that people who vote the "wrong" way are dupes. These people know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. It is the people who insist otherwise who are the true dupes in this case -- not of some political candidate, but of their own wishful thinking.</NITF>
and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35437-2004Nov8.html
Moderates, Not Moralists<!--plsfield:stop-->
<!--plsfield:byline-->By E. J. Dionne Jr.
<!--plsfield:disp_date-->Tuesday, November 9, 2004; Page A27
<!--plsfield:description--><NITF>John Kerry was not defeated by the religious right. He was beaten by moderates who went -- reluctantly in many cases -- for President Bush. This will be hard for many Democrats to take. It's easier to salve those wounds by demonizing religious conservatives. But in the 2004 election, Democrats left votes on the table that could have created a Kerry majority.</NITF>
<NITF>Consider these findings from the network exit polls: About 38 percent of those who thought abortion should be legal in most cases went to Bush. Bush got 22 percent from voters who favored gay marriage and 52 percent among those who favor civil unions. Bush even managed 16 percent among voters who thought the president paid more attention to the interests of large corporations than to those of "ordinary Americans." A third of the voters who favored a government more active in solving problems went to Bush.</NITF>
<TABLE id=contentColumn cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0><TBODY><TR><TD><!--START CONTENT COLUMN--><!--<TABLE ALIGN="right" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" BORDER="0"> <TR> <TD WIDTH="17"><SPACER TYPE="block" WIDTH="17" HEIGHT="1"></TD> <TD ALIGN="center">--></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>True, 22 percent of the voters said that "moral values" were decisive in their choices. But 71 percent picked some other issue. All this means that Bush won not because there is a right-wing majority in the United States but because the president persuaded just enough of the nonconservative majority to go his way. Even with their increased numbers, conservatives still constitute only 34 percent of the electorate. The largest share of the American electorate (45 percent) calls itself moderate. The moderates went 54 to 45 percent for Kerry, good but not enough. And 21 percent of this year's voters -- bless them -- called themselves liberal.</NITF>
<NITF>These numbers do not lend themselves to a facile ideological analysis of what happened. The populist left can fairly ask why so many pro-government, anti-corporate voters backed Bush. The social liberals can ask why so many socially moderate and progressive voters stuck with the president. The centrist crowd can muse over the power of the terrorism issue. The exit polls found that perhaps 10 percent of Al Gore's 2000 voters switched to Bush. Of these, more than eight in 10 thought the war in Iraq was part of the war on terrorism.</NITF>
<NITF>Everyone should notice that the Bush campaign knew it could not win without moderates. When Karl Rove went after the red-hot right-wing vote, he did so largely through person-to-person contact, mailings and conservative talk-meisters. Bush always spoke in code to this group -- he talked of a "culture of life" far more than he did about abortion -- reducing the risk of turning off the middle.</NITF>
<NITF>Democrats have an unlimited capacity to declare that their party suffers from some deep intellectual dysfunction. The insistence that Democrats need "new ideas" is especially popular among think-tankers and columnists, a band I have a personal interest in keeping employed.</NITF>
<NITF>But Rove and Bush won this election on decidedly old strategies that had nothing to do with ideas. These included the attacks on John Kerry for being weak and the claim that Bush would be tougher on the bad guys. That's familiar, Cold War-era stuff. Gay marriage was a new issue, but opposing gay marriage is an old idea. Social Security privatization and tax cuts are old ideas, too.</NITF>
<NITF>Yet the Bush campaign was innovative in its analysis of the electorate. Its effort to increase the overall Republican share of the vote by boosting turnout in the outer suburbs and rural areas was a big deal. Democrats need to chip away at those Republican margins.</NITF>
<NITF>It can be done, and Colorado offers a fascinating laboratory. Kerry lost Colorado by 52 to 47 percent, close to the national margin. But Democrat Ken Salazar won his U.S. Senate race by 51 to 47.</NITF>
<NITF>Like Kerry, Salazar swept the traditionally Democratic areas of Denver and Boulder. But in western Colorado, Salazar's work on water issues and his standing as a farmer and rancher gave him reach into normally Republican constituencies. Kerry lost Mesa County, which includes Grand Junction, by 35 percentage points. Salazar lost Mesa by only 26. Salazar also ran ahead of Kerry in other western Colorado counties.</NITF>
<NITF>Democrats cannot leave current GOP margins in rural America and the outer suburbs uncontested. While it pains me to say so, it was hard for Kerry, as a Massachusetts liberal who was painted as an elitist, to equal Salazar's feat. On the other hand, Colorado Democrats last Tuesday took both houses of the legislature for the first time in 44 years.</NITF>
<NITF>Nothing should be allowed to diminish the importance of the huge turnout efforts made in base Democratic areas. But that organizing needs to be supplemented by a campaign to reach both social moderates and populists, many of whom live in those far suburbs and small towns.</NITF>
<NITF>Ours is not a right-wing country. An alternative majority is out there, waiting to be born.
</NITF>
Finally
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26839-2004Nov4.html
Gay Unions Put Kerry Campaign Asunder<!--plsfield:stop-->
<!--plsfield:byline-->By Donna Britt
<!--plsfield:disp_date-->Friday, November 5, 2004; Page B01
<!--plsfield:description--><NITF>I had just finished speaking at a Northern Virginia church when an attractive young woman with a pixie haircut introduced herself, saying she'd just moved here from Boston.</NITF>
<NITF>"This," she said, gesturing at her female companion, "is my wife."</NITF>
<NITF>"Nice to meet you!" I said, asking how they were enjoying Washington and praying that no one could tell that inside, I was reeling.</NITF>
<NITF>But from what? Surprise, even though I knew that hundreds of such newlyweds have existed since the recent explosion of gay marriages? Confusion that such warm, likable women would be dismissed by some as hell-bound underminers of a God-fearing nation?</NITF>
<NITF>From change smacking me in the face?</NITF>
<NITF>The next night, I sat before the TV, digesting President Bush's increasingly evident win. I'd sat in the same spot in February and again in May watching footage of same-sex couples whooping with joy over finally exchanging vows in San Francisco and Massachusetts. Back then, my feelings of fascination and apprehension were overwhelmed by an internal whisper:</NITF>
<NITF>This is awful for the Kerry campaign.</NITF>
<NITF>Since Tuesday, people have convincingly cited terrorism, war in Iraq, Republican election high jinks, young, "PlayStation-beats-standingin-line" non-voters and other factors for Kerry's loss.</NITF>
<NITF>I think I called it right earlier this year. </NITF>
<NITF>In a recent column, I noted that the Bible mentions poverty more than 2,000 times. The Good Book refers to homosexuality fewer than a dozen times, often obliquely. Jesus never mentioned homosexuality; same-gender sex didn't even make God's Top Ten list of no-nos. Adultery and premarital sex, also biblically frowned-upon, abound.</NITF>
<NITF>Yet gay marriages, and the legal decisions that fueled them, sparked a firestorm that helped consume Kerry's presidential hopes.</NITF>
<NITF>In the past year, Americans endured numerous moral outrages, including mounting casualties in Iraq, fresh-faced U.S. soldiers torturing helpless prisoners and a thin but rested-looking Osama bin Laden scolding us from a TV studio. There wasn't a thing we felt we could do about it.</NITF>
<NITF>But gay newlyweds' in-your-face exuberance provided a "Fear Factor" moment many Americans didn't have to sit still for.</NITF>
<NITF>On Tuesday, strong majorities voted for 11 state ballot initiatives rejecting same-sex marriage. In swing states, the Bush campaign successfully capitalized on the president's call in February for a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to the union of men and women.
Republican opponents of same-sex unions feel validated and energized. Democrats -- some of whom are torn or feel similarly about the issue -- are angry and depressed. Some are mystified.</NITF>
<NITF>Not me. I'm one of millions of Americans who click off shock-jocks' radio obscenities, who was angered by Janet Jackson's crude, failed attempt to sell albums, and whose careful monitoring of my 9-year-old's entertainment often feels futile. Citizens such as I exist in every political party.</NITF>
Yet Democrats -- who tend to see themselves as hip, inclusive forward-thinkers -- let Republicans frame morality as their issue, as a selective, sex-steeped concept that ignores actions that also are morally suspect: misleading a nation into war, ignoring the deaths of thousands of civilian victims; tolerating the environment's plunder; shrugging off more than 40 million of our neighbors lacking health insurance.</NITF>
<NITF>Aren't family values as complex as the lives they enrich? </NITF>
<NITF>Bush far outdistanced Kerry among 30- to 44-year-olds, the group most likely to have impressionable kids. He received 78 percent of the vote among those who said "moral values" was their most vital issue. Voters who cited education, health care, Iraq and the economy overwhelmingly supported Kerry.</NITF>
<NITF>Although I was unsettled by gay-marriage photos -- pretending otherwise would be lying -- I can't imagine that charming couple I met as democracy's direst threat. I doubt they represent something Jesus would have his followers stamp out before deprivation, indifference and war, fear factors that create the terrorism we dread.</NITF>
<NITF>I'm reminded of another woman at church, who shifted uncomfortably as she asked, "What should loving people do when the other" -- those who demonstrate their disagreement in nasty, contemptuous ways -- "is so . . . unloving?"</NITF>
<NITF>The impossible, I suggested: "Remember the many times we've been unlovable," I told her. Love our neighbor as we try -- and often fail -- to love ourselves.</NITF>
<NITF>In a nation divided, demonizing the "other" -- whether an antiabortion Republican or a war-despising Democrat -- deepens the rift. Those who automatically judge political opponents as evil, stupid or "un-American" aren't just wrong. They're part of the problem. Those who fear strengthened Republican majorities should recognize their humanity -- and find creative, authentic ways to appeal to it. Those frustrated by the rank, often selfish fears that spurred some to vote Republican must do better at dismantling them. Confronting issues that tempt both sides' rigidity -- abortion, gay rights, the environment, the war -- we must learn to hear the "other's" heartfelt points of view.</NITF>
<NITF>We must explain, then defend our views -- not to a backward "enemy," but to fellow citizens whose humanity we can engage.</NITF>
<NITF>And we should fight, passionately, for our beliefs. Those who crow about the president winning more votes than any candidate in history fail to mention that Sen. John F. Kerry won the second-most ever. The numbers on both sides represent incredible amounts of energy and conviction that only a fool would underestimate.</NITF>
<NITF>The United States' most threatening marriage is the miserable one between its Republican and Democratic halves. Like many marriages, it's an ever-shifting union between squabbling, self-involved partners convinced of each other's misguidedness.</NITF>
<NITF>One minute, one partner is on top; the other the next. Power shifts like mercury between them.</NITF>
<NITF>What if both partners acknowledged their flaws, and their need of that exasperating "other"? What if before trying to punch, hammer and overwhelm each other with their views, they pondered a poet's wise sentiment: </NITF>
<NITF>Pieces fit. People flow together.
</NITF>
They both had a couple of messages for those in their midst who had been doing the Bush supporter bashing. Neither of them, are saying glowing things about those who voted for Bush, Cohen pretty well lays it out that us Bush voters are selfish and have our priorities wrong but even that is a pleasant change from being called an ignorant bigot.
After I started this thread I also read and appreciated Donna Britt's piece entitled "Gay Unions put Kerry Campaign Asunder" so I linked it too. Among the articles singling out religious conservatism as the primary reason behind Bush's reelection, I found this one the most reasonable. She also points out that those who demonize the opposition are part of the problem not the solution.
Oh linkage
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35436-2004Nov8.html
Dupes and Dopes Of Campaign '04<!--plsfield:stop-->
<!--plsfield:byline-->By Richard Cohen
<!--plsfield:disp_date-->Tuesday, November 9, 2004; Page A27
<!--plsfield:description--><NITF>A phrase from a press release struck me: "In voting for George Bush, religious Americans were duped into voting against their best interests." The operative word is "duped," and it explains, almost by itself, why the Democratic Party is in the pits and John Kerry is not the next president of the United States. Only a dope thinks these voters were duped.</NITF>
<NITF>The press release comes from an organization called "Retro vs. Metro America," which -- par for the course nowadays -- is also a book and a Web site and soon, probably, a breakfast cereal. It is Democratic, and consists of some pretty impressive people, including the pollster Celinda Lake. And while a press release is, after all, just a press release, the one from Retro vs. Metro does represent the fairly common view that cultural conservatives have no idea what they are doing. For a little piece of heaven, they will sacrifice a better standard of living, health insurance and a chance to live their retirement in splendor.</NITF>
<NITF>In some theoretical way, this may be the case. But in the real world, as they say, you tell me what Democratic program would have improved the economic well-being of your average family so that, even for a moment, it would have to weigh trading off a cultural conviction. Is there a single American out there who really thought that Kerry's program to end or limit or whatever the outsourcing of jobs overseas was going to amount to anything? If so, that person should have been deprived of the right to vote on the grounds of insanity.</NITF>
<NITF>And tell me, is there anyone out there who thought you could narrow the deficit and fund all sorts of programs merely by eliminating the tax breaks President Bush gave the very rich -- people who make more than $200,000 a year? I voted for Kerry, but I didn't believe that for a second.</NITF>
<NITF>So just how, precisely, were all these cultural conservatives duped? It seems to me that they saw through the promises for what they were -- empty -- and voted on what mattered most to them. They knew, just as we all know, that nothing in the Democrats' oh-so-moderate program was going to make much difference to them -- or, even if it did, it was not worth what they would have had to give up in exchange.</NITF>
<NITF>Sometimes a voter may actually decide to vote against his or her economic self-interest. In an Oct. 26 column I cited Jewish voters as an example. As a definable group, they are among the wealthiest in the country, and yet time and again they vote overwhelmingly Democratic. In the 2004 election, Bush got only about 20 percent of the Jewish vote. In that column, I cited the power of culture, which is not simply inherited, like hair color, but can be the product of thought as much as tradition.</NITF>
<NITF>Most Jews are not voting Democratic out of mere habit. They are making a conscious decision to forgo an economic benefit for something that matters more -- a cultural imperative for social justice. They believe in social welfare programs. They believe in redistributing wealth (some of it, anyway), and they believe firmly in civil rights and civil liberties. What are these rights worth? Anything you can name, because history teaches that without them even the pursuit of happiness is futile.</NITF>
<NITF>It behooves Democrats to understand that Christian conservatives can make the same, hard choices. Of course, real economic privation can change the equation -- would you rather have a job or stop gay marriage? -- but barring that sort of choice, culture wins out. </NITF>
<NITF>That does not mean that liberals have to feign agreement or abandon their values. When it comes to gays, for instance, the Republican Party has engaged in unconscionable demagoguery -- and the president knows it. In the short run, gay rights may be a losing issue, but this is a matter of human rights, not to be traded away. With all due respect to the voters of most of the states, on certain issues, I'd rather be right than red.</NITF>
<NITF>Still, what matters most is attitude, a mind-set that does not convey the message that people who vote the "wrong" way are dupes. These people know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. It is the people who insist otherwise who are the true dupes in this case -- not of some political candidate, but of their own wishful thinking.</NITF>
and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35437-2004Nov8.html
Moderates, Not Moralists<!--plsfield:stop-->
<!--plsfield:byline-->By E. J. Dionne Jr.
<!--plsfield:disp_date-->Tuesday, November 9, 2004; Page A27
<!--plsfield:description--><NITF>John Kerry was not defeated by the religious right. He was beaten by moderates who went -- reluctantly in many cases -- for President Bush. This will be hard for many Democrats to take. It's easier to salve those wounds by demonizing religious conservatives. But in the 2004 election, Democrats left votes on the table that could have created a Kerry majority.</NITF>
<NITF>Consider these findings from the network exit polls: About 38 percent of those who thought abortion should be legal in most cases went to Bush. Bush got 22 percent from voters who favored gay marriage and 52 percent among those who favor civil unions. Bush even managed 16 percent among voters who thought the president paid more attention to the interests of large corporations than to those of "ordinary Americans." A third of the voters who favored a government more active in solving problems went to Bush.</NITF>
<TABLE id=contentColumn cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0><TBODY><TR><TD><!--START CONTENT COLUMN--><!--<TABLE ALIGN="right" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" BORDER="0"> <TR> <TD WIDTH="17"><SPACER TYPE="block" WIDTH="17" HEIGHT="1"></TD> <TD ALIGN="center">--></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>True, 22 percent of the voters said that "moral values" were decisive in their choices. But 71 percent picked some other issue. All this means that Bush won not because there is a right-wing majority in the United States but because the president persuaded just enough of the nonconservative majority to go his way. Even with their increased numbers, conservatives still constitute only 34 percent of the electorate. The largest share of the American electorate (45 percent) calls itself moderate. The moderates went 54 to 45 percent for Kerry, good but not enough. And 21 percent of this year's voters -- bless them -- called themselves liberal.</NITF>
<NITF>These numbers do not lend themselves to a facile ideological analysis of what happened. The populist left can fairly ask why so many pro-government, anti-corporate voters backed Bush. The social liberals can ask why so many socially moderate and progressive voters stuck with the president. The centrist crowd can muse over the power of the terrorism issue. The exit polls found that perhaps 10 percent of Al Gore's 2000 voters switched to Bush. Of these, more than eight in 10 thought the war in Iraq was part of the war on terrorism.</NITF>
<NITF>Everyone should notice that the Bush campaign knew it could not win without moderates. When Karl Rove went after the red-hot right-wing vote, he did so largely through person-to-person contact, mailings and conservative talk-meisters. Bush always spoke in code to this group -- he talked of a "culture of life" far more than he did about abortion -- reducing the risk of turning off the middle.</NITF>
<NITF>Democrats have an unlimited capacity to declare that their party suffers from some deep intellectual dysfunction. The insistence that Democrats need "new ideas" is especially popular among think-tankers and columnists, a band I have a personal interest in keeping employed.</NITF>
<NITF>But Rove and Bush won this election on decidedly old strategies that had nothing to do with ideas. These included the attacks on John Kerry for being weak and the claim that Bush would be tougher on the bad guys. That's familiar, Cold War-era stuff. Gay marriage was a new issue, but opposing gay marriage is an old idea. Social Security privatization and tax cuts are old ideas, too.</NITF>
<NITF>Yet the Bush campaign was innovative in its analysis of the electorate. Its effort to increase the overall Republican share of the vote by boosting turnout in the outer suburbs and rural areas was a big deal. Democrats need to chip away at those Republican margins.</NITF>
<NITF>It can be done, and Colorado offers a fascinating laboratory. Kerry lost Colorado by 52 to 47 percent, close to the national margin. But Democrat Ken Salazar won his U.S. Senate race by 51 to 47.</NITF>
<NITF>Like Kerry, Salazar swept the traditionally Democratic areas of Denver and Boulder. But in western Colorado, Salazar's work on water issues and his standing as a farmer and rancher gave him reach into normally Republican constituencies. Kerry lost Mesa County, which includes Grand Junction, by 35 percentage points. Salazar lost Mesa by only 26. Salazar also ran ahead of Kerry in other western Colorado counties.</NITF>
<NITF>Democrats cannot leave current GOP margins in rural America and the outer suburbs uncontested. While it pains me to say so, it was hard for Kerry, as a Massachusetts liberal who was painted as an elitist, to equal Salazar's feat. On the other hand, Colorado Democrats last Tuesday took both houses of the legislature for the first time in 44 years.</NITF>
<NITF>Nothing should be allowed to diminish the importance of the huge turnout efforts made in base Democratic areas. But that organizing needs to be supplemented by a campaign to reach both social moderates and populists, many of whom live in those far suburbs and small towns.</NITF>
<NITF>Ours is not a right-wing country. An alternative majority is out there, waiting to be born.
</NITF>
Finally
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26839-2004Nov4.html
Gay Unions Put Kerry Campaign Asunder<!--plsfield:stop-->
<!--plsfield:byline-->By Donna Britt
<!--plsfield:disp_date-->Friday, November 5, 2004; Page B01
<!--plsfield:description--><NITF>I had just finished speaking at a Northern Virginia church when an attractive young woman with a pixie haircut introduced herself, saying she'd just moved here from Boston.</NITF>
<NITF>"This," she said, gesturing at her female companion, "is my wife."</NITF>
<NITF>"Nice to meet you!" I said, asking how they were enjoying Washington and praying that no one could tell that inside, I was reeling.</NITF>
<NITF>But from what? Surprise, even though I knew that hundreds of such newlyweds have existed since the recent explosion of gay marriages? Confusion that such warm, likable women would be dismissed by some as hell-bound underminers of a God-fearing nation?</NITF>
<NITF>From change smacking me in the face?</NITF>
<NITF>The next night, I sat before the TV, digesting President Bush's increasingly evident win. I'd sat in the same spot in February and again in May watching footage of same-sex couples whooping with joy over finally exchanging vows in San Francisco and Massachusetts. Back then, my feelings of fascination and apprehension were overwhelmed by an internal whisper:</NITF>
<NITF>This is awful for the Kerry campaign.</NITF>
<NITF>Since Tuesday, people have convincingly cited terrorism, war in Iraq, Republican election high jinks, young, "PlayStation-beats-standingin-line" non-voters and other factors for Kerry's loss.</NITF>
<NITF>I think I called it right earlier this year. </NITF>
<NITF>In a recent column, I noted that the Bible mentions poverty more than 2,000 times. The Good Book refers to homosexuality fewer than a dozen times, often obliquely. Jesus never mentioned homosexuality; same-gender sex didn't even make God's Top Ten list of no-nos. Adultery and premarital sex, also biblically frowned-upon, abound.</NITF>
<NITF>Yet gay marriages, and the legal decisions that fueled them, sparked a firestorm that helped consume Kerry's presidential hopes.</NITF>
<NITF>In the past year, Americans endured numerous moral outrages, including mounting casualties in Iraq, fresh-faced U.S. soldiers torturing helpless prisoners and a thin but rested-looking Osama bin Laden scolding us from a TV studio. There wasn't a thing we felt we could do about it.</NITF>
<NITF>But gay newlyweds' in-your-face exuberance provided a "Fear Factor" moment many Americans didn't have to sit still for.</NITF>
<NITF>On Tuesday, strong majorities voted for 11 state ballot initiatives rejecting same-sex marriage. In swing states, the Bush campaign successfully capitalized on the president's call in February for a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to the union of men and women.
Republican opponents of same-sex unions feel validated and energized. Democrats -- some of whom are torn or feel similarly about the issue -- are angry and depressed. Some are mystified.</NITF>
<NITF>Not me. I'm one of millions of Americans who click off shock-jocks' radio obscenities, who was angered by Janet Jackson's crude, failed attempt to sell albums, and whose careful monitoring of my 9-year-old's entertainment often feels futile. Citizens such as I exist in every political party.</NITF>
Yet Democrats -- who tend to see themselves as hip, inclusive forward-thinkers -- let Republicans frame morality as their issue, as a selective, sex-steeped concept that ignores actions that also are morally suspect: misleading a nation into war, ignoring the deaths of thousands of civilian victims; tolerating the environment's plunder; shrugging off more than 40 million of our neighbors lacking health insurance.</NITF>
<NITF>Aren't family values as complex as the lives they enrich? </NITF>
<NITF>Bush far outdistanced Kerry among 30- to 44-year-olds, the group most likely to have impressionable kids. He received 78 percent of the vote among those who said "moral values" was their most vital issue. Voters who cited education, health care, Iraq and the economy overwhelmingly supported Kerry.</NITF>
<NITF>Although I was unsettled by gay-marriage photos -- pretending otherwise would be lying -- I can't imagine that charming couple I met as democracy's direst threat. I doubt they represent something Jesus would have his followers stamp out before deprivation, indifference and war, fear factors that create the terrorism we dread.</NITF>
<NITF>I'm reminded of another woman at church, who shifted uncomfortably as she asked, "What should loving people do when the other" -- those who demonstrate their disagreement in nasty, contemptuous ways -- "is so . . . unloving?"</NITF>
<NITF>The impossible, I suggested: "Remember the many times we've been unlovable," I told her. Love our neighbor as we try -- and often fail -- to love ourselves.</NITF>
<NITF>In a nation divided, demonizing the "other" -- whether an antiabortion Republican or a war-despising Democrat -- deepens the rift. Those who automatically judge political opponents as evil, stupid or "un-American" aren't just wrong. They're part of the problem. Those who fear strengthened Republican majorities should recognize their humanity -- and find creative, authentic ways to appeal to it. Those frustrated by the rank, often selfish fears that spurred some to vote Republican must do better at dismantling them. Confronting issues that tempt both sides' rigidity -- abortion, gay rights, the environment, the war -- we must learn to hear the "other's" heartfelt points of view.</NITF>
<NITF>We must explain, then defend our views -- not to a backward "enemy," but to fellow citizens whose humanity we can engage.</NITF>
<NITF>And we should fight, passionately, for our beliefs. Those who crow about the president winning more votes than any candidate in history fail to mention that Sen. John F. Kerry won the second-most ever. The numbers on both sides represent incredible amounts of energy and conviction that only a fool would underestimate.</NITF>
<NITF>The United States' most threatening marriage is the miserable one between its Republican and Democratic halves. Like many marriages, it's an ever-shifting union between squabbling, self-involved partners convinced of each other's misguidedness.</NITF>
<NITF>One minute, one partner is on top; the other the next. Power shifts like mercury between them.</NITF>
<NITF>What if both partners acknowledged their flaws, and their need of that exasperating "other"? What if before trying to punch, hammer and overwhelm each other with their views, they pondered a poet's wise sentiment: </NITF>
<NITF>Pieces fit. People flow together.
</NITF>