I grew up in a southern upper middle-class part of town, and was hauled to church by my parents to a large church filled with other white, upper middle-class people. My parents, at least to the best of my knowledge, have no friends who belong to an ethnic minority. Think of this church as a country club for religious fanatics.

If you think I'm exaggerating, I'm not. It's large enough that its main building can seat over 2,500 people. And yet my parents, when asked how they were doing, remarked, "Oh, we had the black people from church over for lunch today." Now, the very fact that they can make a statement like that and uniquely identify a family is rather disturbing. And after I picked my jaw up off of the floor, I had to inquire, "Do these people have names?"

Now if you asked them directly if they were racists, they would explicitly deny it. But ask questions like, "What do you think about interracial dating?" You'll get answers like, "We don't think that it's a very good idea in most cases, but we think that white-asian marriages are better than white-black marriages." I'm not making this up. They'll deny any racial bias of any kind, but I think that from their statements it's pretty clear that some racial bias exists. You can make arguments for or against my interpretation of this in the comments!

So what do they think of Barack Obama? Well, fortunately, religious extremists aren't prone to the use of four letter words. But if there ever was a time when their use might be considered appropriate, it would be now, and with respect to this candidate, who is, "The most liberal person in the Senate." (How you win such a prize is still a mystery to me, since I don't think one actually exists; but I think that we actually should have a prize, complete with a large plaque, and Josh Marshall's signature of approval.) Their number one reason for voting against him, by their own words, is that he's pro-choice. They value human life, or something like that.

Now when you ask about human lives lost in Iraq -- in the hundreds of thousands by anyone's estimate -- because of a pointless invasion, they admit, yeah, that didn't work out so well. We regret that those people died. But those were actual living people about which there's no ambiguity. You don't need to decide if life begins at conception or at birth or half way between, or when morning sickness finally goes away, because we're talking about killing people who are already out and walking around and attempting to live normal lives.

McCain and Palin seem even more hawkish than Bush these days, as even Bush has reailzed that a lot of his foreign policy ideas have us in a position where, according to one of our top generals, we will never be able to apply the word, "victory." So I look at these two candidates as more than likely causing even more loss of life than the Bush administration. Palin basically said she thought war with Russia would, "possibly," be a good idea; and no one stopped her and said, "You know this would be nuclear, right?" Well, maybe they couldn't, because as a rule now, Republican candidates are prohibited from pronouncing the word "nuclear" correctly. She probably wouldn't have understood.

Yesterday on the phone, I made a rare foray into politics with my mother. She said, and I quote, "The most dangerous place to be in the world is the human womb." Technically, I think your unconditional probability of being aborted, if you're a fetus right now, is around 0.22, which isn't that high. I mean, there are plenty of countries in Africa with HIV/AIDS infection rates higher than that, where you also stand a pretty good chance of getting killed by someone's grab for natural resources. So I think it's inaccurate to say that the womb is the most dangerous place in the world to be, even if you think of a developing fetus as a full human life.

And then there's the issue of torture. The Abu Ghraib pictures came out and Sy Hersh brought out his A+ game to tell us that this was an official interrogation program sanctioned by the Pentagon. So because this is so outrageous and disturbing, I think that, regardless of your political views, you must find the pictures and stories of torture at Abu Ghraib disturbing. I telephone my father and ask what he thinks. His response? "Well, I think it depends on what you mean by torture." Okay, fine, but if people are being put through so much pain and suffering that they end up dead (oops), could we call that torture? Could we agree about that being torture? My family won't. "It depends," is the escape clause always used. 

So the conservative right values life. That's why you should vote for McCain-Palin. Palin values life so much she won't even abort a severely mentally and physically handicapped child who won't have much of a life. (But who knows? Maybe he'll grow up to be President of the United States: The Decider, the most powerful man on our little blue planet. Special needs is by no means an impediment to being President anymore.) But then while claiming to value life, they also think that there's basically no place on this earth that we shouldn't invade and blow up. Well, except Israel. But everywhere else is fair game. And when we invade countries, people die. Lots of them die. This isn't a game. Do you call that value for human life?

So if your primary objective is to support someone who values human life, it seems to me that you should vote for Barack Obama, a man who views violence as a last resort and who genuinely believes in multilateral diplomacy, a guy who actually values people who are out there walking around and trying to do stuff right now.

Two candidates: one group values fetuses, the other values people's right to value fetuses (or not). One group thinks that military action is the solution to everything. (It's like Football has gotten too boring. We need to do something really manly like go out there and kill a bunch of people for no reason at all.) The other views military action as a last resort. In addition to viewing military action as a last resort, Barack Obama also values human life in the sense that he values its quality. Being alive is nice, but being in poverty sucks, especially when you remember that the guy sitting next to you in traffic got a huge tax writeoff for buying his Hummer. And the other candidate thinks that you wouldn't pick lettuce for $50 an hour (a six figure salary).

So from my perspective, Barack Obama values human life a lot more than John McCain. But is that what conservatives are really voting for? Probably not.

Barack Obama is black.