Editor,
In his column in Friday's Daily Lobo, Mario Hernandez argued that all good Christians should support raising taxes to spend far more money on foreign aid, child health care and preschool.
As a committed Christian who happens to support these three items as budget priorities, I am still disturbed by Hernandez's stance and tone.
Driven by baby boomers - the generation born between 1943 and 1960 - the culture war between the Christian right and the secular and Christian left has gone on for two decades now, polarizing America into red states and blue states and eliminating virtually every moderate from Congress.
Fortunately, over the coming decade, the ever-pragmatic problem-solving generation born between 1961 to 1979 will replace the boom culture warriors in national leadership.
This generation will set aside the ideology and the Bible verses and use common sense instead, in order to meet the triple crisis that threatens the survival of our nation - terrorism, global warming and the looming $84 trillion in unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare.
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Democratic Senator Barack Obama of Illinois is well on his way to being the nation's first president from this generation in the 2010s.
In a historic speech on faith and politics on June 28, Obama urged secularists to abandon their absurd hope for people of faith to leave their values outside the public square. He called on people of faith to speak about policy in widely shared language appropriate to our modern pluralistic democracy.
Obama frankly and bravely notes that the Bible legitimizes slavery and teaches us to kill children who stray from the faith, while the sermon on the mount is "so radical it's doubtful our own defense department would survive its application."
He also said that if any of us saw Abraham tying down Isaac and holding a knife over him, "we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham."
Hernandez's fellow progressive and Christian Obama offers a powerful response to his tone of culture war: "Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. No matter how religious they may or may not be, people are tired of seeing faith used as a tool of attack - to belittle or to divide."
Mike Weber
UNM student
