The Second Debate has come and gone

I watched the first half hour or so of the second debate.  That was about all I could stomach.  As Hillary begins to wonder what curtains she wants in the White House, and Bill begins to ponder being America’s first husband, I have to say I’m stoic.  I’ll pray, for our country, for the candidates, our leaders, and whoever our president (Hillary) will be.  But I will not vote for either of them.

With Hillary we will see four more years of what we have seen, more or less unchecked, for the last 25 years.   If you’re progressive, to the Left, or proudly liberal, then that probably won’t be a bad thing.  Maybe for some we aren’t as far as you’d like, but take heart.  We’ll get there.

For others who fear a loss of liberty, freedom, the right to not be progressive, and the gradual decline of the United States and eradication of the heritage of the Christian West?  Probably not promising.  Twenty years ago if you said people would be fined for not taking part in a gay wedding, most LGBT advocates would have laughed at you as some paranoid fear monger.  Thirty years ago, the issue wasn’t on the table.  If you thought people would support forcing religious institutions to violate their consciences over contraceptives, people would have snickered.  That was so far from the table it wasn’t even on the radar.  So yes, I understand the concern.

It’s a valid concern.  Even today, bathrooms and gender are being thrown upside down over something that, a mere half dozen years ago, was still considered a mental health issue.   In ten years, what new moral standard that nobody can even imagine will be mandated by the power of the Federal Government?  It’s impossible to say.  We’ve gone from issues discussed for more than half a century (contraception), to issues discussed for decades (gay marriage) to now issues barely discussed becoming mandated by the government.  Because of that, it’s impossible to say what, in five or six years, we will be forced to accept (progressives included).

I also get the frustration that comes with knowing that the ones screaming loudest about the deplorable and vulgar statements by Trump were the ones, less than 20 years ago, who insisted that when it’s all about sex, who cares?  It’s about sex.  Period.  That was the debate stopper.  Whether it was really about sexual harassment or sexual imposition suddenly fell off the map.  With help from the media and the entertainment industry, we learned that once an issue involved discussion about the regions below the waistline, nobody should care.  No values, no morals, no concern about truth.  Heck, we even learned that people probably commit perjury all the time, especially about sex, so it’s no big deal. Sex?  No big deal.  Let’s move on.

Got it.  I know how maddening it is when you’re up against a movement willing to declare X a grave evil yesterday and just as quickly dismiss X as irrelevant today.  That’s the conversational equivalent of catching a greased pig.  And as one who has tried to catch non-greased pigs in my life, I can assure you the greased version would only be slightly less difficult than battling a movement with no particular fealty to its own daily standards.

Nonetheless, it is not for us to win badly.  And that’s what a win for Trump would be.  Not that he will win at this point. But continuing to support him in the face of everything we know is to become the very thing we once condemned.  If you were alive and condemned the selling of our souls in the 90s to keep Bill Clinton in office, you were right to do so.  A nation with no core values other than ‘I want what I want now and nothing else matters’ is a nation heading toward its own destruction.  Nonetheless, you then can’t turn around and do the same basic thing you condemn in others.  You can’t look at the deplorable record of Trump that, at best, is no better than the things Clinton was accused of, and dismiss it irrelevant next to the more important issues.

That’s what Clinton’s supporters did.  They convinced 66% of Americans that morals, character, values, truth and anything to do with sex are no big deal as long as I’m getting money.  Don’t become the same thing.  Flee while fleeing is an option.  Sometimes it’s better to take a loss with honor and dignity than give up everything for a win.  I’d rather us lose at this point.  As Jesus said, better to lose your eyes and hands and go to heaven than descend into Hell with body intact.  And in our case, we wouldn’t even have the pleasure of being intact when we descended, since winning seems unlikely at this point.