"I know thy works, that thou art neither cold, nor hot. I would thou wert cold, or hot. But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth”
~ Apocalypse of Saint John The Apostle, Chapter 3, Verses 15 & 16
Let me tell you why I can't bring myself to hate Red Sox fans even though I love my Yankees. Sox fans are true believers. Come Hell, high water or Bucky Dent they love their Sox. In a way, they are classic People's Republic of Massachusetts liberals because they see their team as victims. The Sox don't lose because they are not good enough. They lose because life is unfair, because the baseball gods have a cruel sense of humor and love to throw banana peels in their path. They know in their hearts that something will happen, that they will never win. But they support their Sox anyway so give credit where it is due. They know who they are and what they believe. I respect that.
Not all fans are like that. Not all fans are true believers. Think of all those shiny red Bulls jackets gathering closet dust all around the country since Michael Jordan retired again and Da Bulls stopped winning NBA titles. And notice that you don't see nearly as many people in silver and blue since the Cowboys stopped dominating the NFL. The frontrunners have long since deserted the Cowboys. Maybe that's what proves that they really are America's team after all.
Americans have become suspicious of conviction. Or maybe just embarrassed by it. It is unsophisticated. It is not inclusive. It is judgmental. It seems to me that America is full of people with blue and silver jackets hanging in the back of the hall closet. They are lukewarm. Frontrunners who go with the easy answer. Go with the group. They are tepid.
Give me the true believers every time. Every cause has its true believers. In the war for the culture, in our political, economic and moral struggles you can always count on the unreconstructed collectivists of the left and the natural born anti-Federalists on the right to put forth their message. The true believers in "progressive" ideas (talk about your newspeak, huh?) will find a way to turn any idea or event into a reason for a new government program. They do it because they believe that we need the nanny state to take care of us. That the government will do it better than we ever could. I disagree. I abhor their logic, their ideals, their means and their ends.
But I admit to having respect for their commitment.
It is the lukewarm ones I cannot stand. They quote JFK and tell you that politics is the art of the possible and think that this means that compromise is all. But the only thing that is not possible is the thing you do not attempt. The tepid attempt nothing and so can accomplish no good. They split the difference between the possibilities and feel virtuous as a result. But a compromise between good and bad is still bad. Per Dylan, "When something ain't right it's wrong." Exactly right.
Think of abortion. It is easy and not entirely incorrect to point to NARAL and NOW and the rest of the usual suspects as the sustaining force behind this evil. They are the true believers who will fight for the right to stick a fork in a baby's skull with all that it is in them. Their beliefs are heinous, an abomination. They might believe in the right to a dead baby but at least they do believe in it.
But on their own the militant fork stickers would get nowhere. They need the tepid to do their work. As the frontrunners fill the stadium of the first place team the tepid fill the stadium with 1.5 million dead babies every year. It is the politicians who call themselves Catholic but insist on a woman's right to choose to kill her child that really make me sick. And people who call themselves pro-life but say it is OK to kill nascent humans for their stem cells because they have a niece who is diabetic. Tepid excuses for moral people.
On Thursday night, President George W. Bush joined them. He was presented with a magnificent opportunity. Like a famous Texan of the past he had the chance to draw a line in the sand. To say one thing is right and one thing is wrong and to tell the world whose side he is on. Instead, he split the difference. He has shown himself lukewarm. He has joined the tepid and now, after trying my best to support him as much as I could, I spit him out.
The simple fact is that there is no scientific necessity for using human embryos to harvest stem cells. European research has proven that there is plenty of promise in adult stem cells found in fat cells. Lord knows we have plenty of them in America. At last Teddy Kennedy can do some real good! Even more promising and far easier to obtain successfully are stem cells harvested from the umbilical cords of infants allowed to be born alive. Now there's a concept, America. Allowing infants to be born alive and seeing it as something good. Are you ready for it? I'm afraid not.
Harvesting babies on the altar of false science (embryonic stem cell research, in newspeak) is a stalking horse. Scientifically it is unnecessary, even inefficient. Morally it is the next steppingstone on the path of the American eugenics movement. They came for the embryos. They'll come for you and me someday. But, with the lapdog media blithely playing along, the left has successfully framed opposition to it as lack of compassion. And now Bush has made his deal with the Beast in return for some solid ratings for compassionate conservatism.
Maybe I'm a fanatic. There are people who think so. I don't but I am wrong often enough to stay humble. But if I am a fanatic, I'd rather be my kind of fanatic than theirs. I'll be fanatically pro-life and leave others to harvest babies. And maybe even more, I'd rather be my kind of fanatic that to be a lukewarm purveyor of compromise. It is one thing to kill baby because you think you have the right to kill anything that is inconvenient to your lifestyle choices. It is perhaps worse to do it half-heartedly as a political expedient. Better to be the Beast than to make a deal with him and tell yourself that you have reached a fair and compassionate compromise.
When something ain't right it's wrong. And tepid is as tepid does.
August 11, 2001
