Politics and agendas

This is one of several springboards for some thoughts about politics. One comment about the Mommy Brain post included a mention, in passing, of the Equal Rights Amendment going down to defeat. At first, the comment blamed the "overwhelmingly white, male Congress" for voting it down. After another comment corrected the first (it died when too few states had ratified it when the time expired), the original commenter stated:

But I will say that it was the white, male controlled political process that didn't support it, so it failed.

...continued in full post...

Well, yes. At the time, the political system was overwhelmingly populated by white males. It was also developed and shaped almost exclusively by white males.

Nevertheless, I'll offer Ken Hamblin's challenge, which he used as the tile of one of his books: Pick a Better Country. Or in this case, pick a better system. I'd love to see a ranking by country of the rights and the standard of living afforded to women and minorities. It'd be interesting to group these countries according type of government. I'd be willing to bet that the highest-ranked countries would have systems of government developed by "overwhelmingly white, male" bodies. In fact, I'd be willing to bet quite a lot. (And I recall a commentary piece in Newsweek some years ago, bemoaning the fact that China, which was hosting the international Women's Rights Conference that year, had such a dismal record on women's rights. It occurred to me that darn few other countries would be any better. Indeed, their right to gather and discuss women's rights pretty much depended on their citizenship in countries, run by white, male governments.)

The authors of the linked article are accused of using their religion merely to advance a political agenda.

The Reform rabbi charged that when we oppose homosexual marriage because the Bible views homosexuality as a sin, we use faith merely to advance a political agenda. That is like saying that because he quoted Scripture while fighting segregation, Reverend Martin Luther King used faith to advance a political agenda. Civil rights was not any more a “political agenda” than is protecting the traditional family. They are both deep moral values. They may not be everybody’s moral values but they are ours. Politics is nothing more than a society applying its deepest moral values in a practical way. Without politics, citizens who disagreed with one another would resort to guns and knives. However the system of politics does depend upon treating with respect, even those with whom we disagree. Your labeling us as prejudiced bigots is not respectful. You may disagree with us, but we are as entitled to our beliefs as you are to yours. America grants freedom of belief to Bible-believing Jews and Christians as well as to secular fundamentalists.

"Politics" derives from a Sumerian word meaning "city". Politics is the set of techniques that allow people to get along with each other in large groups. When you get a group of people large enough to form a city, or at least a village, you need these skills. And there are lots of ways of getting people to work together. Some work better than others.

The Equal Rights Amendment may be gone, but the lot of women in the US is much closer to complete equality than it is in most of the world. The US government was developed by whites, but it affords blacks and other non-whites more freedom and opportunity than they have in most of the rest of the world. Indeed, blacks in particular are freer here than they are in most countries where they are the majority.

That politics is "a society applying its deepest moral values in a practical way" implies that any political system can be traced back to deep moral values. The sex and color of the founders of the US government matter, in the final analysis, much less than the moral values they used as the foundation for this government. Whatever anyone may think of the history of this country, its failings with respect to human rights, and the failings of its founders, one thing remains true:

The values on which this country were founded are good ones. Martin Luther King cited the Bible in his fight against segregation, but he also cited the Declaration of Independence. Many of his speeches were challenges for Americans to live up to the lofty values enshrined in that document. If the country is as racist and unjust as it's so frequently made out, the fact that it could be shamed into living up to "all men are created equal" says a lot for the founders' moral values.