Let’s talk about this instance of a cartoon called “Atheist Eve.” It’s hard to see in the thumbnail so you might have to click through, but the strip features a Christian woman making all sorts of legal suggestions: outlawing abortion, gay marriage, sponsoring religion in schools. The atheist essentially responds “leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone.” And the Christian has a conniption:
Stop persecuting me! Stop disrespecting my beliefs!
Heh. They do that, don’t they? Frankly, I think atheists and liberal believers alike spend an inordinate amount of time pointing out how the fundamentalists are hypocrites. They are not hypocrites. They are dishonest. Here are a couple of tips.
1. The Golden Rule is a liberal value. Even though the fundamentalists are making a tolerance argument, they don’t actually believe in tolerance. The reason they bring tolerance up at all is to change the subject. Address the argument directly, and you are no longer talking about abortion. Instead, you’re talking about whether or not you, personally, are a jerk.
2. The audience is not you. As liberals, we tend to think the purpose of discussion is to persuade people to our position. Religious fundamentalists have different values. They understand that political tolerance for their activity is more important than persuading people to their viewpoint, at least until they have enough political authority to impose their agenda. When they accuse you of intolerance, they are not trying to convince you of anything. They’re like that kid that kept smacking you in the back of the head in class. When you turned around to ask him to stop, he’d always holler at the teacher that you were hitting him. Instead, they are trying to convince uninvolved third parties — people who aren’t paying close enough attention, the people we call “undecided voters” in America — that you are the ogre and they are the people trying to exercise their freedom of religion.
Simply put, hypocrisy is not a moral failing for fundamentalists. It is a political strategy. It’s a rare fundamentalist that’s going to be convinced by someone re-emphasizing the Golden Rule. It would save us time and keep us more focused on the issues if we treated this argument with the scorn it deserved instead of thinking we’ve scored a point every time we “prove” a fundamentalist contradicts himself.
And perhaps we should learn to argue to the gallery as well. The fundamentalists don’t believe in discourse anyway; discussing things is also a liberal value.
