(The following is a note I wrote a friend who is a preacher. I had just attended his church, and heard him allude in his sermon to someone sneering behind a window whade as he protested outside an abortion clinic.)

I don't know how free politics is from God. I get the very strong impression from friends in the radical conservative camp that liberality is a hellbound train. What a great political strategy ? make the opposition's name into a curse-word!

I took Paul aside at the retreat and told him 20 ways in which Jesus invented liberality ? generous-mindedness ? responsibility for the forgotten ? the idea that all people are equal in God's sight ? the idea of empathy for the sufferings of others is a liberal idea. 
 
Respect, that's more of a conservative idea. Good one, too, but empathy ? Jesus just about invented it. Where in literature do we encounter it before? Ruth?

I believe that we all come to God from our own stories, and those stories forge our identities. 
 
I am a relentless, instinctual hater of bullies and bullying, owing to things I witnessed as a child ? God, unfortunately, being one of the bullies, which I continue to struggle with — and my politics (and maybe my faith problems) spring almost entirely from that.

The essence of radical (not historical) conservatism is sticking up for Caesar, covering up the truth, being indifferent to the opinions of others, extolling the Pharisee, ridiculing the publican, and telling the leper to shut his tattered yap.

I'm agin it.

Historical conservatism (people left to their own devices will do bad things, so they must be constrained) is something I agree with. But not this radical anti-reflective, who-cares-what-you-think stuff making the rounds today.

Who does the hard work for people in trouble? Liberals like my wife Rachel, who gut it out day after day, helping people with big problems, one at a time. The nurses and teachers and foster families and social workers who wade through misery every day for a living.
 
Not because they are Democrats, but because they have the idea that everyone matters. They live liberality. All these people are demonized by the current regime as ?liberal do-gooders.?
 
Many of these liberals hate religiosity, but they live a deeper kind of religion ? they act on the premise that other people are really there.

I'll bet someone did sneer at you from the window of the abortion clinic that day. But that's not the entire reality.
 
The bigger picture is that a lot of young girls are in a world of trouble, and they've too few resources to have their babies, and the people who work there ? despite the occasional person sneering, and maybe that person has a story, too ? they live in a war zone, and are subjected to enormous amounts of hostility and unkindness from well-meaning people.

War is insanity by definition ? the suspension of civility. If a sneer is all you suffer amid the shooting, maybe you got off easy.

And if society takes abortion away, and doesn't replace it with something as empowering for women, something that helps balance the power inequity going back to the cave era, girls lose and brutality wins.