Point & Counterpoint

Point:
Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.

Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock.

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

Bleeding-heart liberals could accomplish far more if they reached out to build common cause with bleeding-heart conservatives. And the Democratic presidential candidate (particularly if it’s Mr. Obama, to whom evangelicals have been startlingly receptive) has a real chance this year of winning large numbers of evangelical voters. More

Counterpoint:
Dear Nick Kristof

by tristero

Dear Nick Kristof,

You write:

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.

Sir, let's not talk hypotheticals. I have discussed Michael Huckabee several times at New York parties. And I have derided Michael Huckabee at these events. I plan to do so again. And again. And again. Until Huckabee is pushed back to the margins of American discourse where he belongs. More

Bags O' Paper

I've got two garbage bags full of shredded paper, and more to go. It's simpler than perfecting my filing system, or a simple way to perfect it. For a long period, I had money in a managed account that, if nothing else, produced an avalanche of paper sale/buy notices. The perks, that free $5.00 Starbucks a year gift card (when it owned Starbucks) probably not worth it. If only I had a stove that burned paper, then it woulda been worth it.

w00t!

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An Open and Shut Marriage

An Open and Shut Marriage

By COLETTE DeDONATO
Published: February 3, 2008

AT an upscale pub in our small Northwestern town, one of the mothers seated around our table made an indissoluble confession: she told us she had been having a very serious crush on a man who was not her husband. She said the crush bothered her. Besides making her feel guilty, it also made her unsure of the status of her marriage. As she spoke, red blotches formed around her neck. More