Values, day two

And on day two post-election the values impact continues. This New York Times op-ed by Garry Wills, an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University, says Karl Rove’s approach shows “many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.”

I don’t begrudge anyone their cultural, spiritual or political beliefs. But I am fearful of becoming a nation driven by one political agenda, one cultural view and one spiritual identity. As Wills points out:

“Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

“It is often observed that enemies come to resemble each other. We torture the torturers, we call our God better than theirs - as one American general put it, in words that the president has not repudiated.”