Doing my best to understand Christian conservatives is something I try very hard to do. I live in the most conservative, religious county in the country and trying to understand my neighbors is something I have to work at.
Most of them are hard-working and charitable people, so long as the government doesn't mandate the work or the charity.
Generally we get along so long as we don't talk politics.
But every time I think I've got my neighbors figure out, I read items like this one in my local newspaper.
That link leads to a letter-to-the-editor explaining that the American problem with immigration was caused by abortion.
Seriously.
Ramon Swapp from Fairview, Utah wrote, "These foreigners are not doing jobs that Americans won't do; they are doing jobs that Americans can't do, because their lives were terminated in the womb."
I'm sure this was printed in the paper because of the extremely preposterous nature of the opinion, but I can't help but think that this view isn't as rare as any rational human being would assume it should be.
What frightens me is that this level of discourse and logic is on the same level I've seen from some of the more outrageous conservative mouthpieces like Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter.
I truly want to understand these people so that, perhaps, they might be helped to see reason. I'm not sure they'll ever be able to, but one has to have faith in something. Maybe the best we'll get is that these religious conservatives might see glimpses and glimmering moments of truth now and again.
Ramon ended his letter thusly, "Global warming is not caused by man's misuse of fossil fuel resources; it is caused by misuse of sacred reproductive resources. God has merely bumped the thermostat up a few degrees to see if man will repent."
In all this madness, he acknowledged an issue as critical as global warming. It's not much, but maybe that's all we can ask for.