Monday, August 14, 2006

More MacDonald   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Nobody is disputing this point: MacDonald’s article asserted that conservatives were “crippling” themselves by alienating agnostic and atheist conservatives. That’s a strong verb, and a strong claim. Having chosen the alleged side of reason and empiricism for herself, has MacDonald provided a shred of evidence for this crippling? Not yet. She has not adduced a single data point to justify either the claim that there are a lot of atheist and agnostic conservatives, or that a large percentage of these folks are now seriously alienated.

 

On to the question of who’s distorting whom. After making the “crippling” assertion in her original article, MacDonald makes four assertions about what conservative atheists and agnostics believe. Most of these beliefs are pretty vaporous, and some of them don’t do much to distinguish conservatives from liberals. (If MacDonald thinks that liberals don’t “support traditional American values,” even if they understand those values and their implications differently from conservatives, she’s the one in need of a lesson in tolerance.) The one sharp proposition on her list was that these atheist/agnostic conservatives believe that “marriage between a man and a woman” is best for children. For me to point out that MacDonald provides no evidence for the implausible claim that there are many people who actually answer to this description—who, that is, are atheists or agnostics and oppose same-sex marriage—strikes me as a fair (crippling?) criticism.

 

Since MacDonald has no answer to this criticism, she attempts to pretend that I said that not many atheists and agnostics “support traditional American values.” I am therefore supposedly “bias[ed]” against nonbelievers. But I said (and believe) no such thing: see my 3:21 post for the words MacDonald is, no doubt inadvertently, twisting. She is just like the liberal who proclaims that his patriotism has been impugned when it has not. MacDonald writes, as though it is pertinent to anything I have said, that “[i]t is just not the case that only Bible study could lead people to conservative, disciplined lives.” With whom is she arguing? I’ve never denied it. I linked, this very day, to an essay that affirms it. Who has, for that matter? The closest MacDonald, the defender of reason and empiricism, has come to finding an example is an essay by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus from 1991, when some of my colleagues were in grade school. (And Neuhaus’s essay doesn’t assert that “only Bible study could lead people to conservative, disciplined lives.”)

 

I suppose it is possible that a reader who both refused to follow the link provided earlier today to MacDonald’s article and misread my posts to come away with the wrong impression about that article. But I have been posting to the Corner long enough to have a bit more faith, if she'll pardon the word, in our readers.

08/14 09:54 PMShare