Why I like Barack:

These are some paragraphs from the “Faith” chapter of Obama's book, __The Audacity of Hope__. I think his argument it is the best answer to the question: "How can you be a Christian and a Moral Liberal at the same time?" This is a question I have never been able to explain to my own satisfaction despite my convictions that abortion must remain legal so that women are not forced to seek them in back alleys and that gay "marriage"/ civil unions are not an abomination before God; they are a way to extend health insurance benefits and next-of-kin privileges to important people in the lives of gay people. Anyway, this is the answer I wish I had given when having this discussion in the past.

"Surely, secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square; Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr.-- indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history-- not only were motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue their causes. To say that men and women should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public policy debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

"What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God’s will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I must explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths including those of no faith at all.

"At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing. ...God does not reveal Himself or his angels to all of us in a single moment. [We do not all hear and see the same things, true as those things may be.] So the best we can do is to act in accordance with those things that are possible for all of us to know, understanding that a part of what we know to be true-- as individuals or as communities of faith-- will be true for us alone.