{"id":1148,"date":"2009-01-02T08:54:04","date_gmt":"2009-01-02T16:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1148"},"modified":"2009-01-04T09:24:41","modified_gmt":"2009-01-04T17:24:41","slug":"our-content-and-its-omissions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/our-content-and-its-omissions\/","title":{"rendered":"Our content, and its omissions"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the disappointments that commenters often voice, in the current open thread<\/a> and elsewhere, is: why do we have so many posts that discuss the role of religion in American public life, and so few that simply argue for one or another right-of-center position based on 100% guaranteed-secular premises? Why don’t we spend more time exploring the considerable differences between the various contributors on such topics as immigration or gay marriage or Middle East policy, in hopes of hammering out the “right” position for secular conservatives to take on that issue?<\/p>\n

My own answer would run as follows: this site does not represent an effort to develop some sort of Secular Right platform. It’s a bunch of writers. Writers in groups often get compared to cats in groups, with one easily distracted by any passing flash of color or light, a couple of others enjoying a brief swatting match before resuming friendly interaction, and yet a fourth waiting impassively at a certain mousehole. By design the site includes right-of-center writers with a very wide range of views, what DH called a “broad church<\/a>“, reducing yet further the chance of our reaching any sort of consensus beyond the most elemental premises (claims that sound governance and morality can rest only on a religious basis are erroneous; and the relationship between American conservatism and religion has gone wrong in certain respects and needs to be rethought). <\/p>\n

At any rate, here’s my suggestion for those who would like to see our writers displaying their talents on issues unrelated to religion and its role in public life: just use Google to search a combination of their individual names and the issue (+ “economy”, “multiculturalism”, “Iraq” or whatever). To find various brilliant and provocative things about universities, abortion, and polygamy guaranteed to be based on secular premises, for example, follow this link<\/a> or this one<\/a> or this one<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the disappointments that commenters often voice, in the current open thread and elsewhere, is: why do we have so many posts that discuss the role of religion in American public life, and so few that simply argue for … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,18],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1148"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1161,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions\/1161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}