We Are the Moral Majority

You have to admit, the two major news stories breaking this week -- the reported homosexual relations by a football coach and boys on the Penn State campus and the accusations by at least five women of sexual harassment by former National Restaurant Association head and Republican presidential frontrunner Herman Cain -- contain the ingredients for a potentially salacious media orgy that could last for the rest of the year. Just to be clear, I am not writing about them today to further fan the flames.

Instead, I want to make a moral point that goes beyond the particular parties or indignities in both these cases. It is that we owe it to ourselves as a freedom-loving, justice-seeking nation to re-examine our attitudes about how the powerful few exploit the less powerful among us.

Such an examination should confront a truth about human nature too often ignored in our public debates. Primarily, we must discover how can we better confront and vanquish vast inequities imposed by money, power, influence, and large institutional barriers of protection. We have to decide whether we want fairness, honesty, transparency, and justice when confronting the imbalances between the haves and the have-nots.

In doing so, we must face such questions as: How can we revive the performance of our once-envied institutions in promoting the common good while also protecting those who haven't the resources to defend themselves? When our courts allow vast, faceless institutions of commerce to exercise the same fundamental rights as citizens, how do we ensure those corporate monstrosities are prevented from unduly compromising the rights, privileges, and opportunities of the individual? When we witness people in authority compromising the dignity of the young and less powerful, how must we respond?

I believe -- and I suspect a large majority in America would concur -- that our current public institutions and leaders of commerce, lawmaking, leadership, information dissemination and jurisprudence today are far less likely to perform their public responsibilities than in past generations. Explanations for why this is so may abound in the blogosphere, but really, in some respects, we are all to blame, because, having been lured into apathy by the false promises of the powerful, wealthy and privileged few over the last 40 years, we have abdicated our democratic ideals for short-term gains. Post World War II, many of us have forgotten, let languish, or never discovered the part of our human nature that supports nurturing behaviors designed to protect our species from the predators among us. Whether they are hidden within a famed college football program, sit on a bank board or Congressional committee, or vie for the nomination for president, such predators must be uncovered, disarmed, and punished without apology.

To turn to the political implications of this, I say to both parties: Denial is not a party plank. Moral leadership derives from a fundamental truth: We are all born equal in the eyes of God. But I insist on recognizing who among us most contributes to our moral decline. Under cover of a "survival of the fittest" canon,  Republicans and Tea Party supporters often profess hearing a calling from God yet continue to favor draconian measures to end federal support for the old, the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the homeless. Such cuts may feel justifiable to the far Right and many confused American voters in an era starved of rational conservative economic and political thought. But no political party should silently stand by, as Republicans did recently, after presidential debate attendees called out in favor of letting poor uninsured sick people die and booed a gay American soldier stationed in the Mideast. That is no more acceptable than leaving the scene of a child rape without trying to stop it or report it to police.

Nobody is arguing Democrats are morally pure, having given us both a Clinton-stained Monica Lewinsky blue dress and Anthony Weiner's crotch-gazing Twitter photo. Say what you will about the ineffective leadership within both governing parties in Washington; it hasn't been liberals and Democrats calling for drastic budget cuts on programs for America's most needy citizens. Liberals, progressives and Democrats have a long history advocating for programs that feed, house, defend and educate the underclass. That political legacy -- going back to Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society initiatives and continuing with Clinton's balanced approach to welfare reform and Obama's efforts to make health care more affordable -- explicitly defends minorities from the ravages of the better-off majority.

Moral courage shown in support of the most vulnerable among us is a fundamental value of Democrats and liberalism, and it is one value in which I encourage all openminded readers to become fully engaged.