In the interest of equal opportunity...

I noted earlier that you are allowed to dislike the GOP. I should also note, in the interest of equal opportunity, you are allowed to dislike the Democrats. But the audience I was aiming at typically has to deal with universal approbation for the GOP and universal contempt for the Democrats, and therefore do not need to be reminded of this. Some precious few of you might be in the opposite situation, particularly if you're in an urban environment, so I give you permission to dissent as well. You're also given permission to dislike them both or like them both.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not going to make a secret of the fact that I am probably considered, by most American metrics, very liberal. I try to keep things on this web-log fairly balanced because I think, besides a few issues where Christians must agree on the ends attained (if not the means), this is all a matter of pragmatics and opinion and should not be a stumbling block. I saw recently on a message board somebody scandalized by the "extremely liberal" views of a moderate conservative. The person scandalized said he would be unsure about further investigations into Orthodoxy if such extreme views were common. I think the scandalous guy voiced some banal criticisms of Romney and a couple things mildly okay with unions, nothing about abortion or whatever, but that was enough. This is absurd and I don't want it to happen. It's irrelevant to the faith.

But, really, while abortion, war, capital punishment, and the like might rather obviously have implications to what side of the political divide you fall on (but not so obviously for the latter two that I would not expect good faith disagreement), other things should be relatively orthogonal. I do not see why a religious Christian must obviously be on one side or the other of immigration policy, gun control, voter ID laws, marginal tax rates, health care reform, etc. And some of those should be orthogonal to the others in the bucket - I don't see why beliefs about marginal tax rates should be tied to beliefs about voter ID laws, but they are.

But this is a long way of saying that, rest assured, I hold all the political views a Christian must hold in good faith and have a rather healthy distaste for the Democrats if you think that's a sine qua non, too. And I'll keep it at that to prevent people from stumbling.

EDIT: I am also not at all interested in debating, in case anybody wants to upbraid me for lack of ideological purity. I always enjoy interesting conversations, the more interesting ones should take place in e-mail, though I might respond slowly.