Friday, January 30, 2009

Will President Obama End the Culture Wars?

Peter Beinart has a rather curious article on this here .

Over at the Atlantic Ross Douthat pretty much tears apart this premise and exposes what "ending the Culture Wars" means to some folks at Ending or Winning?

As Ross says:
Beinart's argument is shot through with the characteristic liberal conceit that the culture wars are a one-sided affair, in which right-wing culture warriors start fights and peace-loving liberals try to avoid them. In reality, what makes Obama promising to liberals isn't his potential to "end" culture-war battles - it's his potential ability to win them, by dressing up the policies that Planned Parenthood or the Human Rights Campaign or the ACLU or whomever would like to see in the kind of religiose language and fuzzy talk about consensus that swing voters like to hear.

There are of course many Catholics in the political square of a more progressive nature that would love for Obama to be successful . You know why do we have to focus on all these "wedge issues" and such.

I am not sure how President Obama's pledge to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act that would open the door to forced acceptance of gay marriage in all 50 States and U.S. possessions is going to end the culture wars.

Beinart says "When it comes to culture, Obama doesn’t have a public agenda; he has a public anti-agenda. He wants to remove culture from the political debate. He wants to cut our three-sided political game back down to two." Hmm how does he do that. By returning such matters to more local politics? I don't see Obama as having a Federalism view on these matters.

I am not sure one can separate "Culture" from politics. What about the new Cultural explosive issue that we shall face as the Baby boomers age that being Euthanasia?

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