In the Hobby Lobby pit thread, this article was posted. Rather that derail that, I’ll just ask the question separately.
Here’s the part that has me scratching my head:
There seems to be a distinction between “bleeding-heart liberals” and devout Christians. Maybe I don’t really understand what the bleeding-heart thing is all about, but aren’t devout Christians supposed to be especially mushy when it comes to people who make, yanno, $10 an hour or so? Is there a religious connotation to “liberal” and “conservative”? And is opposing Obamacare really all that conservative, since it is more-or-less a conservative plan in the first place?
I realize there is the “libertarian jerk” strain of the conservative movement these days which would advise paying your workers $1 a day if the market would allow it. But I can’t see how those views square at all with the outlook of “devout Christians”- wouldn’t they be more like bleeding-heart liberals and share the loot, even if they didn’t have to? Jesus told the rich man to give his money away, and the rich man despaired. ISTM a devout Christian would take the lesson that one should not be too clingy about money, conservative or not.
So… I don’t see where there would be a distinction at all between a devout Christian and a bleeding-heart liberal on this issue. The article, however, seems surprised that folks with such solid conservative credentials would do such a thing. I don’t get it, but I know the 'dope can clear this up for me. Full disclosure: I have always been kind of dumb when it comes to the meanings of these words. It actually seems to be getting worse, so don’t assume any knowledge at all on my part.
I thought I could just point you to an article on the term but, man, the first page of Google serves up some smelly tripe on the subject. I can’t do it justice in a paragraph, but I’ll provide a bit of context. (Bit O’Context, the non-sugary brain food that invigorates your synapses while blitzkrieging your taste buds.)
Most agree that the term was coined in the 1930s by Westbrook Pegler. (You can tell all those who had to go to Wikipedia to look him up by their habit of referring to him as “Francis James Westbrook Pegler,” names not even his closest enemies knew back in the day.)
Pegler invented the sort of rabidly vituperative hate-mongering that is now the staple of certain opinionators but then seemed wildly unusual in a national discourse that was normally outwardly polite. He was given cover by William Randolph Hearst, himself once a liberal, but by then also a rabid anti-New Dealer. He began to hate, in some sort of chronological order, the New Deal, Eleanor Roosevelt, unions, Commies, Jews, and blacks, eventually writing for the KKK and embracing fascism.
The term does have religious overtones, as in this definition from Safire’s Political Dictionary:
All this origin talk is mostly misleading. Liberals and conservatives as we understand them today don’t really appear until the late 1950s, after Buckley’s National Review gave conservatives a respectable venue in which to vent. You can see from this Google Ngram that “bleeding heart liberal” and “knee-jerk liberal” both start at around that time. They seem to be very different terms, but both meant almost the same thing: that liberals were mindless suckers as opposed to conservatives who were coolly rational thinkers who could supply answers to problems rather than government handouts.
That this thinking was opposed to standard rhetoric about the teachings of Jesus was noted even in the 1950s: Lenny Bruce got figuratively crucified for saying so, and a long host (yep: pun) of others have made your comments since. That’s all beside the point, since the real meaning of term is not religious. And even if it were, self-congratulatory doctrines from social darwinism to prosperity gospel have preached for more than a century that wealth is God’s sign of favor. If you work yourself to elite status, it couldn’t possibly be that you were lucky or that you had advantages not given to others.
So putting conservatives of all stripes at an opposite pole from bleeding-heart liberals is now-standard shorthand for a long tradition of looking at the world through two differing sets of axioms and seeing two wildly opposed (and irreconcilable) realities as a consequence.
I don’t see a distinction between Christians and bleeding heart liberals when it comes to paying with thier own money. I know plenty of bleeding heart liberals who will pay as little as they can get away with for services. I likewise know many conservatives who are extremely fair in how they base thier pay.
I very much believe in a minimum wage far below the livng wage for very specific industries. Restauraunts, retail, and domestic. Thses offer good part time job opportunities to students and housewives who otherwise may not have a job to go to.
Lots of people compartmentalize these things. Pro-life, but pro-labor union; believes in Global Warming, but opposes minimum wage; etc. Many people choose buffet-style rather than from a “platform.”
Ok, but that doesn’t even makes sense in this case. Hobby Lobby employees are doing what all the most upright moralists are telling them to do: they are getting a job, cashing their paycheck and paying their own way. How is that some ‘sob story’? They are willing to do the bidding of Hobby Lobby! If every “job-creator” in town is in cahoots with each other to ensure that no worker can earn jack shit, then I suppose it might be an honest-to-God sob story after all.
Yes, well, the conservatives’ opinion of themselves seems stuck in the 50s. They have a solution to government handouts all right- cutting the debt, which nobody actually cares about, at the expense of cutting every service possible.
Well then this is hardly original, no? Still, I only have a glancing awareness of Lenny Bruce, maybe I should go back and check it out. He’s kind of a Bukowski, right, only shocking to pretty much the most uptight prudes?
Well I don’t see why everyone has to be so Euclidean, for starters.
The ultimate answer is probably, “Try2B, your confusion is the result of the collision of a lousy writer, a crappy, venal cultural tradition, and your noble, innocent ignorance of the ways of the corruption of the human being.”
The Christian ideal might still be towards helping the poor. But among people who connect their religious and political beliefs, political Christianity generally heads in another direction. Political Christians tend to be more concerned about abortions, gay marriage, and creationism. The last time political Christianity was associated with a “liberal” cause was back in the fifties and sixties over civil rights.
It may be that part of the confusion arises from a confusion on the other side - the mistaken impression of liberals that opposition to taxpayer-funded charity is the same thing as opposition to charity in general.
Liberal thinking is that government is the first and only answer to any social problem, no matter what it is, and any reluctance to expand the role of the government, especially the federal government, means that the other side doesn’t care about the poor, and isn’t therefore Christian.
Thus the surprised tone of the cite in the OP - Hobby Lobby is doing what is perceived to be thge right thing, even though no law is forcing them to. They are not “bleeding heart liberals”, that is, they don’t believe that federal action is the only way, yet they are still acting charitably.
Good point. And just to be clear, they don’t believe that they need to force others to do as they do by government action.
Of course, this might not stand up to scrutiny across the issue spectrum-- eg, SSM. Traditional, devout Christians needn’t marry someone of the same sex if their religion tells them otherwise, but they often still want to prevent others from doing so.
Now, the other issue related to HL, contraception, also needs more than superficial analysis. We often here: Why are they denying women the contraception they need? No one is denying anyone anything. The women are perfectly free to purchase and use any contraception they purchase. HL simply isn’t participating in the transaction.
I think the right way to think about the owners of Hobby Lobby is “paternal”. They want to take good care of their employees and that extends to controlling their employees choices about birth control. Like good fathers, they want to make sure their “children” are well-provided for and live moral lives.
This is hyperbole – mainstream liberal thinking just believes in a greater role for government in solving social problems than mainstream conservative thinking.
Ugh… They are NOT controlling anyone’s choice of birth control. They are declining to participate in what they feel is a moral wrong. Their employees can do as they please.
All right, but how do you make the distinction that paying more than the minimum wage is a “liberal” cause? That’s exactly my point- if people claim to be Christians, distancing themselves from paying (closer to) living wages on the grounds that it is somehow “liberal” doesn’t make sense- it seems like it would be at the heart of their own point of view.
It seems like the only people who use the phrase “bleeding heart liberal” are conservatives, and Exapno’s definition seems to bear this out. So, the article seems to be written from the conservative perspective.
Ok, thanks. Is that really all liberal thinking is? If so, the article still makes no sense. Hobby Lobby isn’t involving the government in any way by paying their workers more, so why bother making the distinction that they are emphatically not “bleeding heart liberals”?
Beyond that, “liberal thinking” seems to be something that conservatives are constantly talking about. I don’t hear a lot of people coming out and declaring their own position as, “I think the first and only solution to any social problem is the government.” Do you? Maybe some examples would be helpful. Furthermore, if the conservative position is the opposite, that we should not involve the government in setting a minimum wage, but then these conservatives reveal themselves to be actually motivated by the simple desire to pay their workers the bare minimum (while grousing about the oppression of minimum wage laws as a liberal government intrusion), why would anyone waste time pretending that is Christian behavior? How could one say those people care about the poor?
It still doesn’t make sense then. The expectation is that only a “bleeding heart liberal” would pay more than the minimum wage, but that doesn’t square with your description of “liberal thinking”, which is that the government would force the issue. By your definition, the only people who actually ever would pay more than the minimum is Christian conservatives, since they are presumably motivated by something other than government regulation, and also other than greed.
Also implied by your response is the notion that conservatives just plain wouldn’t do the right thing unless forced to do so by the law, and that they will resist any attempt by the law to do so. If the intent of conservativism then is to do the wrong thing, unimpeded by any law, why associate it with Christianity? It doesn’t make sense.
Lastly, your explanation doesn’t make sense to be in light of history. It seems that every conservative administration actually increases the size of the federal government, and that it is only programs that actually do help the poor that they are opposed to. So in practice, conservativism doesn’t appear to be about eliminating government solutions at all, but only specific ones. Again, how does that connect to Christian views?
[note: when I asked if these terms had a religious connotation, what I meant was, "Is ‘liberal’ supposed to mean, ‘not Christian’?]
Not in this case - liberals do not want Hobby Lobby to play any role at all in deciding what to pay for. This is not having the federal government play a greater role - it is putting the government in charge, even if they are violating the right to the free exercise of religion.
That’s not how this liberal sees it. This liberal does not believe corporations can have their religious freedoms violated, and therefore Hobby Lobby should follow the law. The SC has interpreted the laws such that corporations, apparently, can have religious beliefs – I think this is wrong.
Sometimes people use “right” to talk of statutory entitlements. But the phrase “the right to free exercise of religion” pretty unequivocally refers to the First Amendment, which as you note is not implicated here. People have a hard time understanding that concept, and others wish to elide the distinction because the Constitution carries more rhetorical power.
Yep, and I think it’s a point worth clarifying in this forum. The statute was needed precisely because the right is not there, as currently interpreted by the SCOTUS.