Another Liberal at Church!! (Adventures in Sunday School)

We are loving our time here in Las Vegas. In addition to the abundance of In-N-Out Hamburger locations, we are very much loving our LDS congregation here in Vegas. They turned out in large numbers to unload our U-Haul. They have warmly greeted us on Sunday, stopped by our home to bring us peaches or to welcome our children, and they made us feel most welcomed and included at the Pioneer Day breakfast we attended yesterday.

As you may know, I have a certain fascination with bumper stickers (See here and here). So, on my first Sunday here two weeks ago, I was tickled to see a car in the parking lot of the Tropicana LDS Chapel with the these bumper stickers.

Now, there are also some Romney/Ryan stickers as I would expect. I have seen Obama stickers in church parking lots before…though usually on my own vehicle or the vehicle of relatives. However, this is the first time I have seen a sticker which proudly champions liberalism.

I must admit, I am not sure if I even like the definition of liberalism on the bumper sticker below, though it works…I guess. My hesitation partially comes from being a political philosopher with training in political science. Bumper stickers are a poor medium for expressing complex concepts such as liberalism. Yet, as bumper stickers go, this one does a pretty decent job. After all, it would be rather impractical to put lengthy excerpts from A Theory of Justice on a bumper sticker.

I saw this vehicle again yesterday during our Pioneer breakfast. I am not sure if it belongs to somebody in my congregation (the Hacienda Ward) or somebody in the congregation that shares our chapel (the Tropicana Ward). Again, it made me smile.

It does not matter to me what political or ideological affiliation my fellow congregants hold. In my last ward in Wyoming, one of my favorite persons was one of my opponents in the 2012 general election. He was the Constitution Party nominee for the U.S. House seat that I ran for last year. While we clashed a bit during our Wyoming Public Television debate, he and his wife were always kind and sweet to us at church.  I looked forward to those interactions at church.

However, it is always fun to find somebody with something in common…particularly when you are such a small minority within the larger group.