That’s one of the things a President is supposed to be. That’s also one of the things our current “leader” isn’t. I frequently doubt that the man even knows what a conscience is.
I suppose I could give him the benefit of the doubt. When he says there are good people on both sides, I could allow that he’s just trying to be fair. I could, but I won’t. The problem with “fair and balanced,” to borrow a phrase from a network that rarely is, is that both terms are highly subjective. Fair to whom? What do you mean by “balanced?”
Conservatives are particularly disposed to argue in favor of presenting both sides of issues that have only one side. Evolution is about as thoroughly proven as anything can be without access to a TARDIS to hop back in time and actually observe it happening. Creationism, on the other hand, can provide no evidence at all in its favor. So the “other side” Conservatives want taught in school turns out not to be a side at all. True, they’re not pushing Creationism any more, since the courts have ruled it to be a religious doctrine, not a scientific one. Now they call it “Intelligent Design,” despite tons of evidence that if we were designed at all, it was done so poorly that it would seem intelligence had little to do with it. And, of course, it didn’t. Evolution puts the esophagus behind the trachea, which is a remarkably bad arrangement for a being who eats while upright, but works sensibly enough in four-legged creatures who eat with their heads relatively inverted.
There is a generally laudable tendency for Americans to side with the underdog. Usually that’s fine. But there are times when it’s stupid. Strictly speaking, both the Confederates and the Nazis were the underdog, since they both lost. But that breaks down when you consider what they were fighting for. The Confederates fought the war to insure they’d continue to be able to own other human beings (or, if they didn’t own slaves, to insure that others still could, because a free white man would still be better than a slave, even if he had nothing), and the Nazis fought to insure they’d be able to continue murdering other human beings. Their causes were lost, but they were lost because, morally, they were unjustifiable to begin with.
Fine, sure, God thinks slavery is just peachy. It says so all over the Bible, both testaments. Most Christian denominations didn’t condemn slavery until after the Civil War. Most of them also put it about that their condemnation came much earlier, and a ridiculous number of people today believe that antedated lie. If you think the mainstream Protestant churches were anti-slavery and pro-integration, ask yourself why there’s an African Methodist Episcopal Church. It isn’t because the Methodists were happily welcoming black people into the church from the beginning.
If you’re marching down the street waving a Nazi flag, don’t be shocked if I call you a Nazi. You’re thirty-years-old, so you obviously didn’t capture that flag while tramping through Germany in 1945 with the 82nd Airborne Division. You bought the thing because it represents your political outlook, that blacks should know their place, and that Jews should be exterminated, or at least forced to move to Israel. You’re marching to “defend” statues that represent what you think of as your heritage, despite the annoying fact that most of them were put up in the 20th century and sited in front of the courthouse as a reminder to local blacks that the courthouse, and particularly the voter rolls found there, were for the benefit of whites. Older southern courtrooms, city halls and country commission meeting rooms nearly all have balconies. That’s not to accommodate an overflow crowd, but so that any blacks attending trials or meetings could be stuck upstairs where the white people wouldn’t have to see them. The last thing a black man in 1940 Georgia wanted was to be on the main floor in the courtroom, because 95% of the time that meant he was the defendant, and the other 5% probably a witness whose testimony would be accepted, or ignored, more or less in direct relation to whether it supported the prosecution or the defense.
It often seems to me that Conservatives are binary people. They don’t think more than two options can ever exist. Everything is zero sum. If black people gain a right, that means white people lose one. If you let gay people marry each other, straight people’s marriages will become meaningless. If a computer projection on climate change isn’t 100% accurate, then climate change is a myth. If a clerk in a store says “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” it’s because there’s a liberal war on Christmas, and not because the clerk couldn’t reliably identify your religion just by looking at you. If the Bible says the world is only around 6,000-years-old, and science says it’s more like 4.3-billion, science has to be wrong, because it’s obvious a bronze age shepherd who could talk directly to God would know more about it than a modern scientist. (Strange that God stopped talking to people about the same time they started to understand a little about how the world actually worked, isn’t it?)
There are people in this country who would love to bring back blasphemy laws, so that atheists could be punished for their disbelief. Fundamentalist Christians think atheists hate God, which is ridiculous. It’s hard to hate something you don’t believe exists. Most atheists really don’t care about God at all. If they object to Ten Commandment monuments on courthouse lawns, invocations at high school football games, or changing the proper motto of the United States (E pluribus Unum; out of many, one) to the obviously sectarian “In God We Trust,” they’re in good company. James Madison, who wrote the first amendment they claim to be defending, would have happily told them they’re wrong. Madison stated quite clearly that even having congressional and military chaplains was unconstitutional if they were being paid with government funds. He also admitted he probably couldn’t do anything about it, but he still made the original intent of the law clear.
It should be fairly obvious by now that Trump isn’t really competent to be President. Whether or not he’s actually a racist himself, he won’t condemn them, which is just as bad. He doesn’t seem to understand that he isn’t running a real estate company any more, and can’t just tell people what to do and expect them to do it. This is someone who has actually tried to threaten members of Congress who didn’t do what he told them to.
And yet, bad as he is, what’s the solution? The House could vote to impeach him, and if the Senate voted to convict, he could be ousted. But if that were to happen, Vice President Pence would assume the office. Do we really want to go from someone who is merely incompetent and venial to someone who is competent and actually evil?
As Yul Brynner would say in The King and I, “It’s a puzzlement.”