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COMMENTARY
Carton: Who decides which values will be called moral values?
Evan Carton, LOCAL CONTRIBUTOR
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Thursday, November 11, 2004

Moral values, exit polls have told us, were more important to voters last week than any other issue, and those Americans who chose their leader on the basis of moral values voted overwhelmingly for President Bush.

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These all seemed to qualify as moral issues to me, and I wondered why they had not been discussed in these terms — or discussed at all — during our presidential campaign. But there were other, more topical moral issues that affected my vote.

I'm not a constitutional lawyer, so I can't say what is or is not constitutional, but I think it's immoral to arrest people and hold them indefinitely in secret prisons without charging them with a crime or giving them any access to an impartial legal system, no matter what they're suspected of.

Honesty and compassion are also values that I think are worth upholding, so I am morally offended by leaders who strategically manipulate people's fears of terrorist attack for partisan political advantage.

But, for me, the ultimate moral value is, "Thou shalt not kill," which I am pragmatic enough to understand not as an unconditional commandment but as a solemn obligation not to take life — or to send young surrogates to take the lives of others and lose their own — except in genuine self-defense.

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The values that guided my vote last week are not European or secular or academic or elite values. They are moral values. I feel them to be spiritual values. And when I read and teach and contemplate both Jewish and Christian scripture, these values seem to me more fundamentally religious than the value of shoring up the sanctity of my 30-year marriage by withholding the social blessing of the word "marriage" and the legal benefits of the institution from same-sex partners.

So it saddens me that, in the land of my birth, choice and affection, there is not a single prominent political leader or influential media organ that can be counted on to stand up for these values as moral values.

And it saddens me more that, at this moment in our country's history, the principles I feel in my heart to be our deepest, most spiritual and potentially most universal ones are scorned as unpatriotic and out of the mainstream, and cherished only by those who have given over to a less moral majority the vocabulary we need to call our values by their proper name.

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