Did Morals Matter?

We've been hearing that Bush won the election because the Religious Right came out in droves and voted on the basis of Morality (translation: against same-sex marriage). The picture is painted of knuckle-dragging Republicans, clad in bear skins, taking time off from hunting mammoths to vote society back to the Dark Ages, the most advanced era they can tolerate.

In Thomas Sowell's book, Vision of the Anointed, he cites numerous examples of self-congratulation as a basis for framing social policy. "We on the Left are better at making social policy decisions because we're smarter than those Neanderthals on the Right."

Indeed, a message that recently appeared on a local Pagan mailing list echos this very sentiment.

The moderator had just announced that if one particular individual kept spamming the list with articles cut and pasted from Starhawk's website and similar venues, he was going to be banned from the list. One individual posted:

That's ashame[sic]....I'm interested in [name withheld]'s posts on things like that...but then I'm educated.

Now as it happens, Starhawk, and the person who spams mailing lists with her commentary, can be counted on to take the Left side of any issue. I wonder if our educated friend would be equally interested in copies of my commentary from Rite Wing TechnoPagan.

Or does this person's interest extend only to posts from others who are "educated" along similar lines?

Charles Krauthammar comments on "The Myth of the Bigoted Christian Redneck" and notes that it's based a very flawed set of exit poll questions.

The myth of moral bigotry comes from the response to one question:

The urban myth grew around the fact that ``moral values'' ranked highest in the answer to Question J: "Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?"... The way the question was set up, moral values was sure to be ranked disproportionately high. Why? Because it was a multiple-choice question and moral values cover a group of issues, while all the other choices were individual issues. Chop up the alternatives finely enough, and moral values is sure to get a bare plurality over the others. Look at the choices:

• Education, 4 percent
• Taxes, 5 percent
• Health Care, 8 percent
• Iraq, 15 percent
• Terrorism, 19 percent
• Economy and Jobs, 20 percent
• Moral Values, 22 percent

"Moral values" encompasses abortion, gay marriage, Hollywood's influence, the general coarsening of the culture, and, for some, the morality of pre-emptive war. The way to logically pit this class of issues against the others would be to pit it against other classes: "war issues" or "foreign policy issues" (Iraq plus terrorism) and "economic issues" (jobs, taxes, health care, etc). If you pit group against group, moral values comes in dead last: war issues at 34 percent, economic issues variously described at 33 percent, and moral values at 22 percent – i.e., they are at least a third less salient than the others.

Now this is odd. Presumably these polls are designed by professionals. These folks know now to word questions and build protocols to get as unbiased an answer as possible. Someone in a polling organization should have spotted the disparity in the scope of the possible responses to question J and done something to even them out.

But then again, when I was hearing about Gallup calling the Presidential race a dead heat in the run-up to the election, I heard they had made it dead even by assigning all the undecided voters to Kerry.

Now there's some dispute, but apparently history shows that in Presidential races, the undecided voters tend to break toward the incumbent. At the very least, they don't all break toward the challenger. Gallup is a professional polling agency, and presumably someone there knows this history. Why ignore it?

Krauthammer offers one suggestion:

I looked into this story line [of the Angry White Male] – and found not a scintilla of evidence to support the claim. Nonetheless, it was a necessary invention, a way for the liberal elite to delegitimize a conservative victory. And even better, a way to assuage their moral vanity: You never lose because your ideas are sclerotic or your positions retrograde, but because your opponent appealed to the baser instincts of mankind.

In other words, the anointed can't be wrong. It's the fault of the benighted who are too stupid to vote the right way.