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Is god a Republican? There are those who will agree with you.


"I get frustrated when I talk to evangelical friends or students and they ask, 'How can you be a Christian and a Democrat?'" Valerie Cooper, a religious studies professor from the University of Virginia said.
Well, dear Lord, I should hope so!  What kind of lunacy would generate a question like that?  "How can you be a Christian and a Democrat?"  It would be equally lunatic to ask how one could be a Christian and a Republican.  
Unless, of course, you had a secret passage directly to the mind of god, and god said that a woman had no right to her own body, or that no Speaker of the House should be orange.  Or maybe that White Houses should be reserved for. . . .  Oh, you know!  That white thing!
The problem is that people who think they know the mind of god have as much a right to vote as people who scarcely know what to think.  The only difference between them is that the people who have a pipeline to god believe they are absolutely right:  well, if god is on your side, what do you care what Obama, or the Democrats, or anybody else thinks?  
Reinhold (or maybe it was his brother, Richard:  we are simply appealing to authority, here) Niebuhr once explained that the best any christian could argue, on almost any issue, is that there are other christians who agree with him:  not all christians, almost certainly not most christians, but some.  Do you think abortion is an utter evil, even if the mother might die without it?  There are christians who will agree with you.  Do you thing that a woman should have a right to make her own decision about that?  There are christians who will agree with you.  For or against capital punishment?  Some agree, some don't.  Divorce?  Some, some.  There is no single christian point of view.  (There are those who will agree with me.  And those who won't.  In any case, some, some.  But certainly not everyone.)
If you are certain you know what god thinks about Democrats, or Republicans, or taxes, or health care, or circumcision, or baptism, or the Sabbath, or anything else, you will discover that there are christians who agree with you, and probably more who don't.  
All that god-talk is just a way of saying that you think you are absolutely right.  
Please!

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