Denny Burk:
...in 1999 in the national debate about Elián González. Here was a young boy who was separated from his Father, but who was being kept from him by his extended family in the U.S. The reason? Because his father was in communist Cuba. The Clinton administration wanted to return González to his father, but Republicans were howling in protest. It was a sad spectacle, and I don’t know how to explain why Republicans did what they did except for partisanship. They just wanted to oppose the president. Whatever the President’s view was, they wanted to do the opposite. In this case that involved keeping a family broken.
There are countless examples of this, and it is important for Christians wishing to be salt and light to be discerning about our tendency to “reverse-engineer arguments” in order to justify whatever one’s political party happens to be doing. If we are not careful, we could compromise a matter of principle for the sake of defending “our guy.” That’s not a principled way to participate in the public square, and it will take a good measure of self-awareness to discern when you’ve slipped into this kind of thinking.
Read the rest. Denny is responding to an article by Ross Douthat.
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