Jesus is a Liberal

Right now, the vote counts show 59.4 million for Bush, 55.9 million for Kerry. That is over 15 million more voters than in 2000. When you consider the number of voters who died between 2000 and 2004, there were at least 20,000,000 first time voters.

And a really, really large proportion of those voters were white evangelicals. According to those exit polls, 13% identified themselves as such. That is realistically more like 17%. Again, those polls are mostly garbage, but it appears that at least 17 million evangelical voters came out, and voted overwhelmingly for Bush. Why?

Gay marriage and abortion. According to the exit polls, 22% claimed their primary concern was "moral values". That was higher than any other category, including the economy, Iraq, or the War on Terrorism. And they weren't talking about the morality of lying America into a war - 80% voted for Bush. When you consider the sampling issues with the exit polls, I would bet 20% of the electorate voted for Bush based on "moral values". That’s 23 million voters.

Also, according to the exit polls, 16% of voters said abortion should "always" be illegal, and another 26% said it should be "most of the time". 75% of those people voted for Bush. Again, slant those numbers towards Bush.

37% said gay unions should have no legal recognition - not even Civil Unions. Bush got 70% of those people. 29 million people.

Solution: This is a huge, huge problem. The republicans have run the most corrupt, immoral, un-Christian Administrations since Nixon. Reagan and Bush II never even went to church. They spit on the impoverished and sick. They lie shamelessly. They start wars for economic reasons. Jesus would chase them straight out of the temple, if they ever bothered to go into it. But they have fooled tens of millions of people that the greatest threat to their moral compass is the small percentage of gay people, and women getting abortions, and that anyone with higher morale priorities is in fact immoral.

We need to claim morality back where it belongs. This phrase needs to become a mantra - Jesus is a Liberal. Even if you are not religious (and I am not), we need to convince people who are. We need to speak our morality in terms Christians relate to. And Jesus is our Man for that.

This means we need the left wing equivalent of the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council, honest where those organizations are false. These hypocritical institutions were created by primitive Neocons with no interest in religion, other than the people they could influence through it. They may have many sincere people working for them. But make no mistake who founded and funded them.

We need organizations to teach why liberal = moral. We have to offer scholarships to liberal and centrist religious institutions. We have to train people how to talk about morality in the modern world, how to make the connections between the Bible and liberal values. We need to train preachers. Set up conferences, and organize churches to get out the vote.

We aren't going to win back everyone. The true Fundies define themselves by who they hate and who they are more holy than, and they aren't going to change. But we need to reach the mainstream, and hope that those we don't utterly convince, at least have enough doubts as to who the most moral is to base their election decisions on a wider spectrum of issues.

The black politicians in America already have experience with this. We need to send some white politicians to learn from them. Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic convention shows us the way.

This needs to start RIGHT NOW. The republicans literally have a 20 year jump on us. But we've got reality on our side.

Note: I know this will irritate the Agnostics and Atheists among the left. Get over it. If they are moral, they are welcome, and if they chose to believe, let them. There are much worse things to believe and base your life around (money, social darwinism, Ayn Rand-ism, Rush Limbaugh-ism, for starters).

This is not shifting the party to a more religion-in-government stance. This is helping the religious understand their morality is no different than our own. From a different origin, but going to the same places. It is to assure them Jesus would be very happy if they voted for liberals.