Morality on Sale

Morality isn’t cheap.

The current Administration has made our morality something to be discounted. If supporting the President is the moral thing to do, that is relatively easy and inexpensive. It doesn’t require much time, thought, or money: All you need is a yellow ribbon car magnet.

Morality must happen on a higher level. Morality demands that sometimes we not offer the contract to the lowest bidder.

Sometimes, morality even demands that we not vote for the candidate offering us the lowest taxes.

I don’t want to mince words here: when a Republican says that he will tax you less than a Democrat, he’s rarely offering you something moral. He’s offering you something that is personal and appeals to your self-interest, and self-interest rarely leads to a moral choice.

Instead of lower taxes, he should be offering you a smaller, more efficient government. If he can manage to do that and still maintain the services that affect you directly, then taxes will go down. It won’t happen instantaneously, either. Morality isn’t quick.

The Republicans aren’t currently doing that though. They’re supporting a distant and expensive war. They’ve overseen the largest expansion of government in recent times through the creation of the Homeland Security department. They’ve been offering their girlfriends fifty thousand dollar raises. They were probably doing the same thing back when they controlled everything, except they probably weren’t getting caught.

What bothers me is that some people will continue to vote for the Republicans because the Republicans have entrenched themselves with the religious right. The issues of gay marriage and abortion are more powerful than the issues of feeding the poor and behaving ethically (I’ll leave the Christians to discuss which of those issues Jesus thought were so important that they became themes in the bible).

Yes, I’m sure that these people simply can’t vote for the Democrats because if they vote for a person that endorses sin in the form of abortion or homosexuality they will be cast down into hellfire and tortured eternally. However, those people should have realized by now that if they vote for the Republicans they are supporting war, poverty, lying, and corruption. What do you think Jesus will say about that? Politics is not black and white. If you believe that we’re “evil” that doesn’t make the people that disagree with us “good.”

I’m sorry that you don’t have a perfect and sinless political party. Unfortunately you have two imperfect facets of the same stone, and if you don’t want to “support sin” then you shouldn’t vote at all because democracy leads to hard choices and you will always end up supporting something that you don’t like along the way.

I understand that when I vote for a Democrat, my taxes will probably go up. The Democratic Party shouldn’t shy away from that. They should point it out and proclaim from the rooftops that they are bringing morality back to the White House. They should talk about the fiscal responsibility and the morality of doing what is ethical instead of what is quick and cheap.

Morality instead of convenience is a good thing in my book.