Talking Turkey To Conservative Relatives

By Cernig

American readers looking forward to Thanksgiving as the beginning of the holiday season may be not quite as cheerful about the prospect of sitting down for food and drinks with conservative relatives quaking in their boots now that The Deciderer is no longer mandated by God. It could get ugly. But have no fear, Sara Robinson has compiled a short summary of the main conservative kneejerks and appropriate dinner-table responses.

Some snippets:

Liberals hate America.

For the record: Liberals love America. In fact, what makes us liberals is that we actually read and believed all those pretty words in the Declaration of Independence about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and in the Bill of Rights about freedom of speech, religion, assembly, privacy, and all the rest of it. We're idealists that way.

Liberals Hate The Free Market.

The operative word here is "free." Liberals believe wholeheartedly in the amazing power of markets to deliver all kinds of important goods. But we've also noticed that some of the deepest human goods of all—a strong family, a caring community, a healthy environment, safe food, clean water and air, and time to enjoy them all—are assigned no economic value at all in unfettered markets. If we want to protect the value of things that money can't buy (and even conservatives will usually agree that such common goods exist, and deserve to be protected), then we need to put some restrictions on markets so they can't encroach into those areas.

Liberals Are Against Family Values.

it comes as a considerable shock to conservatives when you point out that progressive areas of the country have significantly stronger families, by almost any metric you can imagine. They have lower rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, infidelity, drug abuse, domestic violence, and juvenile delinquency than the more conservative areas do. Massachusetts—the first state to offer gay marriage—also has the lowest divorce rate in the country. They like marriage so much there they think everybody should have a shot at it.

Looking at the statistics, it's possible to conclude that the conservative obsession with "family values" may reflect the fact that families in Red America really are beset by devastating problems that aren't nearly as common in Blue America. Rather than admit that maybe we know something about creating healthy families that they don't, they'll usually try to fix the blame for their family chaos on us and our crazy anything-goes family arrangements.

Liberals Are Godless- And Therefore Amoral.

Unfortunately, many conservatives equate "secular" with "having no moral code whatsoever," since they honestly believe that nobody can possibly behave themselves unless there's some outside authority keeping a hairy eyeball on them. (It's tempting to speculate about what people who believe this might try to get away with when they think nobody's watching; personally, I think it's an incriminating admission that they can't be trusted behind closed doors.) It's not uncommon to find secular progressives who live more uncompromisingly moral lives than many overtly religious people.

Liberals Are Wimps

We're heirs to the people who fought and died to free slaves, organize unions, give the vote to women, end child labor, protect family farms, enact civil rights laws, and preserve our environment. Some of the boldest, bravest Americans in history— Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Teddy Roosevelt, Cesar Chavez, and of course Dr. King—have proudly called themselves "liberal" or "progressive." Progressivism couldn't have survived and thrived if we were half as weak and indecisive as conservatives like to think we are.

There's far more, as the say, at the link.