Margaret Liles

by Margaret Liles, EDC President

Since I attended the fiasco of Darrell Issa’s so-called town hall meeting on September 2, I have been a bit pessimistic about politics in San Diego’s North County. I had come away with the feeling that the majority of the people at that meeting, the TEA party supporters, the avid followers of FOX News, were impervious to reasoned debate. They seemed to confuse socialism, communism, fascism, as one great amalgam of evil. How do you argue with someone who doesn’t understand the difference between these “isms”, or the difference between capitalism and a command economy?

 Today, Neal Gabler had an excellent Op Ed in the Los Angeles Times, which gives more definition to my general feeling of discomfort about this current group of so-called conservatives. He points out that we liberals are not “succumbing to superior message control, or even to a superior political narrative…but up against something far more intractable and far more difficult to defeat. . .religion.” Gabler adds that “What we have in America today is a political fundamentalism, with all the characteristics of religious fundamentalism and very few of the characteristics of politics. “ Gabler points out that we Democrats would not “wage bloody crusades for banking regulation or the minimum wage or even healthcare reform.” But the political fundamentalists cannot conceive of “compromising” their views of right and wrong. They will “always be more zealous than mainstream conservatives or liberals. They will always be louder, more adamant, more aggrieved, more threatening, more willing to do anything to win…For them, every battle is a crusade—or a jihad—a matter of good and evil.”

This seems to be an era of the ascendance of religious fundamentalism, whether it be of the Christian, Jewish, or Islamic variety. Civilization has weathered such ascendancies before, and science and reason have survived and flourished. I would like to believe that the surge of religious fundamentalism in this country has peaked. Last Friday, the New York Times reported that Sen. Tom Coburn (R, Okla) had tried to negotiate with the husband of Sen. John Ensign’s (R, Nev) mistress for a lower fee for services, so to speak. Both of these Senators belonged to the Christian Fellowship Foundation, know as “The Family.” The exposure of the hypocrisy of these members of the religious right must surely begin to disillusion some of its adherents.

 We can never open a mind closed to reason, but we can continue to state the facts that support our positions. We can continue to show the irrationality of a health care system that costs almost twice as much per capita as that of any other industrialized nation, but ranks 37^th in quality of health care, because we support a highly profitable health insurance industry and pharmaceutical industry. The facts are on our side, we must continue to reiterate them. The majority of Americans will be open to those facts. The fact that 65% of Americans support a public option in health care reform supports this view.