http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8576268.stm

No public option, DDM. This Trojan Horse legislation was designed (or cobbled together) to specifically preclude any such thing.

I'm not even sure the Biblical model works that well...at least based on my udnerstanding of one country where social justice was farmed out to The Church...i.e., Ireland. The Irish State basically completely off-loaded social welfare onto the Catholic Church, and I'm not sure the results were all that positive. Not that I am a fan of public bureaucracies, either, but the horror stories coming out of Ireland now are not encouraging.

Now...maybe the problem is the Catholic Church itself is too centralized, but...

So forgive my ignorance, but the public option wasn't in the bill?

Annnnd...here, we, go.

It passed!!!!!

Oh my goodness, that Jon Stewart skit was amazing. I laughed 'til I cried. And then I kept crying at how sad it really was.

... but surely Glenn Beck is satire?

If there were a God, then Glenn Beck would be satire.

Glenn Beck is, sadly, not satire.

Ergo, there is no God!

Airtight. :)

... but surely Glenn Beck is satire?

Sort of tangential to this topic, did anyone else see the latest Daily Show last night with Jon Stewart doing a *brilliant* Glenn Beck satire?

"the one thing that makes me hesitate to endorse (Conservatism) is what I see as a malignant callousness that pervades both the rhetoric and the reality of modern American conservatism."

Heres a perfect, but hopefully isolated, example of this "malignant callousness." A man with Parkinsons disease is mocked, called a Communist and has money thrown at him by Teabaggers. It`s from Think Progress, an openly Liberal and pro-health reform website.

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/17/tea-party-parkinsons/

With that all restated, I do think it is easily possible to be a conservative, socially or fiscally, and be both empathetic and interested in social justice. You'd just have to not do what everyone else is doing.

I agree.

For one thing, they want to be the government. What they want to do when they get there is be government and still leave empathy up to the individual? That makes no sense to me. It should demonstrate this empathy rather than feel that government is not the place for it, and if that empathy is enacted by the government, they should be in favor of it. Just because we shouldn't count on the government to provide our basic needs doesn't mean it wouldn't be nice if they did.

One thing I've noticed in a lot of the other kinds of blogs I read is that if someone has a really sick kid and can't afford to keep up with all the series of medical procedures, someone gets the word out and all their blog circle puts up banners and tells everyone. I'm not sure how successful it is on an individual basis, and I can't surely say these are conservatives who favor this method over being able to just afford it on their own. See it on the news occasionally as well, some town holds a fundraiser for a sick child. I feel bad for these kids, but it always seems to be a child (people don't seem shy to ask for help where their children are concerned but not themselves, for example), and makes me wonder how many kids have parents who don't blog and have a lot of blog friends or live in a town where they can even get enough attention.

I don't know if the people who actually need it are getting enough money to cover their costs. Something tells me they would rather not have to beg their friends to chip in. There is no way of knowing whether anyone ever gives any money, but they all act like they are helping and feel good about themselves. And if you don't have a lot of friends, it's hard to get anyone to care about you. If you don't go to church, how will anyone in town find out about you anyway? If that's not a half-assed system, I don't know what is.

Oh, conservatism went round the bend a while ago.

And I admit (with heavy heart) that the religious right have terribly muddled a very limited version of Christianity and a very specific kind of politics. It is the worst thing to happen to Christianity within the last... I don't even know, 100 years? Strike that, the worst thing is that this style of Christianity/politics caught on.

And I hear what you're saying about empathy. My only caveat is that the empathy people feel in their day to day lives may not be accurately reflected in the empathy of their politics-- the positions people take in socially charged settings are often different than the positions they take in other contexts. It isn't even that I'm blaming peer pressure: people behave and feel differently in different contexts.

I do agree that not having a bleeding heart has become an intangible badge of honor for conservatives, and that certainly *is* a problem. So perhaps I've overstated my case.

Allow me to re- (and more moderately) state my case: While contemporary conservatism is clearly off track when it comes to social justice, and it is, I have to disagree that universal healthcare is advocated in the Bible. Biblical encouragements toward social justice are taught as individual and community duties, since bearing the responsibility for the underprivileged is meant to be one of the church's primary functions. Social justice is regarded as transformative for all parties involved, not just recipients of shelter, clothing, medicine, etc.

If there were a Biblical model for healthcare, it would certainly be widespread and far-reaching, but it would probably be at a city or neighborhood level, and it would be administrated by something vaguely resembling deacons. It would also likely be extended only to the unemployed and the unemployable: the very sick, the very old, the very young, the disabled, and the laid off.

With that all restated, I do think it is easily possible to be a conservative, socially or fiscally, and be both empathetic and interested in social justice. You'd just have to not do what everyone else is doing.

You certainly won't ruffle any ultra-conservative feathers by telling them they should empathize with people in need. Many do. A disagreement about implementation, or about what responsibilities the government should have in the first place, should not be construed as a lack of empathy.

See, I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. Normally, I wouldn't say that political affiliation was determinative of compassion or empathy, but as a conservative myself, the one thing that makes me hesitate to endorse the label is what I see as a malignant callousness that pervades both the rhetoric and the reality of modern American conservatism. It's become *much* worse over the last twenty years or so. It has become entirely acceptable on the Right to mock the very concept of empathy, to describe it as weak or socialist, to declare the desire to pick and choose who is deserving of help and who should rot, and under it all the pervasive sentiment that everyone who is worse off is so either because of their own fault or because God wills it.

The problem has become that ultra-conservatives, so-called, have taken shedding a tear and tossing a homily as sufficient to demonstrate "empathy" with the downtrodden, as they walk on by. I would buy the notion that their only issue was with government involvement, if I believed they actually understood what the government did for them and were willing to rough it without that (they generally aren't). When a TV commentator can call on people to leave churches that preach a gospel of social justice and such a call gets *traction at all* or *isn't declared by everyone immediately as literally crazy*, conservatism has gone round the bend.

The early church was encouraged to provide for the sick, the widowed, and the orphaned. However, they were encouraged to do this as a community of like-minded converts. Jesus didn't mention anything about the government's responsibility to provide healthcare for its citizenry. He actually seemed to favor the uber-conservative standby: care for the sick on a personal or community level, and don't count on the government to do it. (Of course, that *was* Rome.) Part of this is because the act of providing for others is just as important for the empathizer as it is for the empathized.

You certainly won't ruffle any ultra-conservative feathers by telling them they should empathize with people in need. Many do. A disagreement about implementation, or about what responsibilities the government should have in the first place, should not be construed as a lack of empathy.

(Now I'm sure sometimes a lack of empathy is wrongly justified by political differences, but still...)

I also would like to add that whatever your political beliefs are, Christians have no business shrieking about universal health care because that goes DIRECTLY against what Jesus taught. Jesus felt for the sick, the widowed and the orphaned. For a**holes like the right wing/ social conservative teapartiers to rant about not providing help to the sick is disgusting and disturbing.

Roger Ebert responds to Glenn Beck in an interesting way:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/03/jesus_was_a_nazi_and_sos_your.html

A la Jon Stewart

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-13-2009/glenn-beck-s-operation