Ted, Ted, Ted

I’ve never been ashamed of my conservative religious upbringing. I just figured it was something that happens to some people, like rainy weather or a toothache. Today, driving to work and listening to John Ashcroft testifying at the Senate hearings, I realized what it must be like for those people who do feel ashamed. I heard that sad, hostile, hateful man gloating about the recent advances in his lifelong mission to return the freedoms summarized in the Bill of Rights (except No. 2, of course) to the ornamental status they enjoy in most other countries, and I felt ashamed of everything about me that had anything in common with him. I had always been pretty confident that the religious conservative was a complex phenomenon, containing some honor and caring mixed in with the fear and hate. I’ve argued that with other open-minded people who don’t know them as well as I feel I do: yes, parts of their minds are still in the caves, but it’s not that simple, and besides, many of them eventually come out and join the rest of us. Listening to Ashcroft explicitly and directly lie about the plain English in his military tribunals order, then decline to answer questions from Senators whose patriotism he openly didn’t trust (any one of whom with half the guts of even a Stevenson could have moved to hold him in contempt), I felt that conviction dissolving. Before this fall, it was possible to act like Ashcroft and his strange, complicated, semi-medieval constituency were, as scary as they might sound, ultimately just one of the more colorful slices of our diverse civil society. Today he made it clear that he is abandoning that pose and making a grab for the whole pie. The idea that I came from somewhere a little like the place this man lives in just makes me feel awful.