Chittister,
however, is not promoting dullness or politics without vision (indeed Kagan
hired scholars of the left and right – the Chronicle column is itself
misleading). Although I think American politics suffers from an inadequately populated
left, the driving of moderates from the Republican Party is also a matter of
significant regret. Chittister, a pro-life Catholic progressive, is critical of
segments of the right from the Tea Party to the leaders of the Catholic Church
(among other things, she wonders why children of lesbians cannot attend
Catholic schools, but Protestants have been able to do so – even when it as
thought they were going to hell), and she tries to push the agenda in more promising
directions.
But
the column primarily speaks against intolerance and the relative absence of a
deliberative democracy. She says
that: “In a society facing global change in every arena -- science, economics,
governance, education, ethics, sex roles and medicine -- it is lack for respect
of questions, not the presence of answers, that is really the problem. The
questions are serious but, in the face of intimidation or the presence of
unnecessary vitriol, they are either being unasked or unheard. . . . From where
I stand, it seems to me that a society without a middle -- or worse, a society
where the middle is suppressed, where the questions are rejected, labeled and
condemned, where thinkers are intimidated, drummed out of the corps, derided
and suppressed by those whose pronouncements do not admit of questions -- is a
society at war with itself.”
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