Reply #205: Voting Reflects A People's Values

[OrdinaryTa]

I keep hearing a suggestion to the effect that the South should not be judged by how Southerners vote. Perhaps that's true in some other context, but not in this one. This is a political forum, and Southerners reliably and consistently vote for militarism, government secrecy, anti-environmentalism, union busting, opposition to the separation of Church and State, and hostility to civil liberties.

Look at the mess Bush has put us in after only 2-1/2 years. The fact that the South is still solidly behind Bush is more than dismaying to the rest of us, it also reflects badly on the South. The rest of us can hardly come to any other conclusion than to wonder What is wrong with those people?

It's been suggested here that we should overlook the damage that Southern voters do to the whole country. In fact, we are doing backflips to accommodate the fact that an entire region is chock full of people with political values that are, at the very least, questionable.

The rest of us don't care about pecan pies or cypress trees or the way Southern townsfolk exchange pleasantries on the street. It's how those people vote that matters. Voting reflects those people's values in a much more immediate way than what they eat or how they greet each other. Other Americans are more concerned with political choices and their impact on our shared future.