“Judeo-Christian country” means different things to different people
by digby
Here’s Mike Huckabee comparing covering pre-existing conditions to issuing insurance to a house that’s burned down already. Seriously.
“It’s not about being cruel. It’s about using the realities of actuarial science to make an insurance policy work.”
Oh, now he believes in science?
It’s amazing that these people feel so comfortable defending this, dare I say it, un-Christian attitude toward their fellow man. You’ll notice he doesn’t have a clue — or apparently a care — about what’s going to happen to the poor man who has terminal cancer — and his family who would go broke from the bills. Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think this very religious minister believed that illness is a punishment and the person who gets sick deserves what he or she gets. Certainly he seems to have more concern for the insurance company than he has for the poor patient.
John McCain got himself in a pickle the other day, trying to explain to Republican voters that you can’t tell someone who’s lived in America for 50 years that they have to go “back” to a country they no longer know. People in the audience screamed out “why the hell not?!” and he replied, “because we have a Judeo-Christian ethic in this country.” I guess it’s a function of his age that he believes his voters still think of the Judeo-Christian ethic as meaning any kind of empathy or kindness toward others. (Not that he practices it himself necessarily, but he obviously considers it a common American value.) Someone of McCain’s years probably thinks that most people agree on some fundamental, moral level that it’s wrong to be cruel to others and so that argument is obvious. But I don’t think his voters believe that at all. These people understand the term “Judeo-Christian country” to mean one in which people who don’t look like them, worship like them and think like them are not “real Americans” regardless of their actual citizenship.
They do not believe the Judeo-Christian ethic has anything to do with shared values, but rather shared identity, which isn’t the same thing at all. Witness the great conservative Christian Mike Huckabee, casually talking about “pre-existing conditions” as if the main issue in the discussion is whether or not the “actuarial science” makes sense for the insurance company. No word on what makes sense for the people.
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