I grew up in the United Methodist Church. I miss the United Methodist Church, and follow its progress with a pride of a native daughter. And, when I started my political career I started as a democrat. About 6 years ago, I took a long hard look at some of the democratic platforms and concluded that I only agreed with some of them. More than I agreed with the Republican platform, but maybe not as much as I agreed with the Libertarian one. More importantly, I concluded that the Democratic party was taking the black vote for granted, and I wanted to be part of the wave that would break away and make Democrats fight for the black vote. Ha! Republicans make such movement pretty hard! LOL! I registered independent.

Now that I’m Baha’i, partisanship is actually forbidden – Baha’is are charged with the task of promoting unity in the world – the very opposite of partisanship. My very vocal and public support of Barack Obama probably is on the wrong side of that equation – but I at least maintain that I belong to no party.

I’m off to bed now, but will look for your diary on Open Left tomorrow!

QT

P.S. –

My online name is “Christian_Dem_NY” because I am Christian. I suppose that I would not be called evangelical/fundamentalist/whatever. But I do go to church every Sunday and I do tithe. I am a Methodist.
One thing that some Republicans do is to pretend that every flag, every cross, and every military uniform has “property of the Republican Party” written on it. I think that progressives often let the right-wingers get away with this because progressives think “Gee, it sure is tacky how those other guys wave 10 flags and wear 20 crosses. Surely if I am Christian and patriotic in a low-key, honest, non-pandering way, people will not fall for the right’s pretense of being more patriotic and more Christian.” And boy, those honest, modest, low-key guys keep losing elections. I am not personally running for office, but if I was I would probably wear 5 crosses and 10 flag pins on a daily basis.
There is a disgusting political game called “trick the hick”. The right does it constantly. The left thinks that game is undignified and dishonest, and we refuse to play. And so… who wins the election?
For more thoughts on why and how progressives should wear more crosses and wave more flags, see my Open Left diary: “divide and conquer the Republicans”

QT

QT

It’s an interesting discussion. I enjoy Open Left because of how much intellectual effort they put into thinking about the deeper structure of the political landscape. One of the competing ideas they espouse over there is that the Left “can’t” organize in the same way as the Right because of the lack of an authoritarian mindset and overall inclusiveness that makes for a lot of disruption and lack of cohesion. I even remember the fuss over the platform issued with the name “netroots” attached, and the fuss about anyone deigning to speak for the netroots. In this regard, I’m interested in Lakoff’s work and wonder how he resolves that potential conflict – or if the fact that Rockridge Institute is now defunct proves the point?

I am doing very little in the way of volunteering. I became Baha’i in 2004, and cast my first vote as a Baha’i that year – I voted libertarian then. I didn’t much like Kerry and couldn’t bring myself to vote for Bush, so I decided to advance the cause of a more open electoral process by voting for Bednarik. This year I’m so very excited about the Obama campaign, but it’s brought up some challenges, because Baha’is are not to engage partisan politics. It’s been hard to know how I can help without crossing the line.

One thing I did, and am doing – is engaging a call to prayer. It occurs to me that we who have spiritual principles seem sometimes to neglect to exercise faith in believing that prayer is a genuine asset to any effort. I don’t know if your name means that you ARE a Christian, or if your first name is Christian… but if you are a praying person, I invite you to participate in ongoing prayer on behalf of the campaign – whatever other efforts you engage.

ETA: I originally said “we on the left” in talking about prayer. That’s inaccurate, since I’m only on the “left” for the sake of this campaign. But it is typically the religious RIGHT that has an admirable commitment to prayer as an active part of their life and an admirable faith that their prayers are in fact effective. I believe that if we all prayed with that kind of faith we’d see God work wonders – because I don’t believe God is “left” or “right” – God is God – but if the people of Faith upheld the nation in prayer – I think we’d see a much better result.

QT