With that in mind, let us briefly return to James Dobson's comments about Liberals:

KING: If the left gets glee, Doctor, does the right get glee over sexual peccadilloes on the left?

DOBSON: That's very possible. We're all inclined to look at other people. But it's interesting to me that those, again, on the more liberal end of the spectrum are often those who have no value system or at least they say there is no moral and immoral, there is no right or wrong. It's moral relativism.

Well let's consider some issues here.   I cross-posted last week's story on several sites, and pointed out that Liberals not only have values, but that they are utterly mainstream values.  I was disturbed, however, when several commenters claimed they were moral relativists, when clearly they were not.

These commenters were not, as Dobson accuses, accepting evil over good, but acknowledging that while there are commonly held notions of evil, there is also more than one definition of "good." Dobson, in his absolutist mind set, simply cannot tolerate that other Americans have different ideas about what is moral behavior. -- Especially if they differ from his.   And as Thomas Jefferson admonished, if the competing good "neither picks his pocket nor breaks his leg" then another's value of what is right is not his business.

Other commenters, confused exceptions to generally accepted norms of moral behavior with moral relativism. They were actually describing the concept of epikiea, or what we know as equity.

Epikiea/Equity is the concept that gives justice and morality a necessary sense of flexibility. Think of this musical example:

In the Judeo-Christian tradition (as well as others) it has always been understood that sometimes one needs to break the letter of the Law to achieve the spirit of the Law. For example, even in Orthodox Judaism if one is starving to death and the only substance that will keep you from dying is a piece of pork, then you must eat it to save a life in being.

If the written rules of faith are the keys to such music, then as with music we sometime must break the letter of the Law to achieve the spirit of a common morality.

Think of the song "Maria" written by Leonard Bernstein for his masterpiece West Side Story. The song, written in the key of C (no sharps or flats) famously uses the tritone, i.e. key of C with a prominent F#. The three note melody of the word "Maria" is C F# G. The tritone, or "flat-five" in jazz speak, is generally considered the most dissonant interval, but without that dissonance from the rules for the key of C, the song Maria would lose its essence. Equity or Epikiea is the prominent F# in a consistent, but flexible morality.

Dobson and his co-belligerents on the Religious Right insist on inflexible orthodoxy, theirs. It does not take into account the concept of Equity, something that has been a critical moral element throughout Western thought. No less than Aristotle, Maimonides and Aquinas have commented on its necessity. In fact by failing to account for the vital concept Dobson himself has become a moral relativist, not being able to see the requirement of moral equity. He has twisted the Liberal practice of equity and its closely related concept, empathy by claiming that Liberals have no values. He demagogically equates tolerance with licentiousness. He does not acknowledge that Liberals have different values that also distinguish good from evil.  He claims we have none. and that we believe that "...there is no right or wrong."

Nonsense.

And to those readers of last week's piece who said they were indeed moral relativists, I pose the following questions:

Would you kill your neighbor or even a stranger without any sort of justification?

Would you steal your neighbor's property without justification or without feeling any pangs of conscience?

Do you believe that you are free to act in pursuit of your unrestrained self-interest, even when it tramples on the rights of others and is in conflict with the common good?

If you answered "no" to the above, you do distinguish right from wrong, good from evil and you are not a moral relativist. In fact, you practice the most basic concept of a commonly held morality, the Golden Rule. It is what Jesus meant when He said, "Do unto others as you would have them done unto you." It is the same message that Hillel was communicating when he admonished, "What is hateful to thyself do not do to another. That is the whole Law, the rest is Commentary." We find the Golden Rule in one form or another in just about every major religion. And it is why the James Dobsons of the world are more concerned with what Hillel deemed "Commentary" than "the Law."

And once again, I return to Value Pluralism. Based upon empathy, it is the concept of a basic but still commonly held general morality that embodies the Golden Rule. It wisely recognizes that for the sake of domestic tranquility that while we legislate the will of the majority, we simultaneously do not trample upon the rights of minorities.  Most importantly, as Madison noted in Federalist No. 10, it prevents divisive factions from imposing their subjective will upon "...the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."

Perhaps William A. Galston best defined the difference between Value Pluralism and a correct definition of moral relativism:

Value pluralism is not an argument for radical skepticism, or for relativism. The moral philosophy of pluralism stands between relativism and absolutism. This can be demonstrated fairly quickly:

It is not relativist. From a value-pluralist perspective, some things (the great evils of human existence) are objectively bad, to be avoided in both our individual and collective lives. Conversely, some things are objectively good (recall Stuart Hampshire on the "minimum common basis for a tolerable human life" or H.L.A. Hart on the "minimum content of natural law").

Nor is value pluralism absolutist. There are multiple goods that cannot be reduced to a common measure, cannot be ranked in a clear order of priority, and do not form a harmonious whole. There is no single conception of the good valid for all individuals: what's good for A may not be equally good for B. Nor is there one preferred structure for weighing goods. In our moral as well as material lives, there are more desirable goods than any one individual or group can possibly encompass; to give one kind of good pride of place is necessarily to subordinate, or exclude, others. Some individuals and groups may be morally broader than others, but none is morally universal.

Agendas, Specific and General
When a James Dobson accuses Liberals of having no values and no ability to distinguish good from evil, he is making a charge that will be generally understood very differently as completely understood by the source. It is nothing more than an obfuscation of reality. He is, as James Madison described such characters, acting as " a judge in his own cause;" having "bias [in] his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt [in] his integrity.

They key to the Religious Right's message "that Liberals have no values" is simple: It is a not-so-esoteric complaint of not sharing their absolutist values. While most mainstream folks take that to mean an America where they say prayer in school, to the originator of the message it usually means an America where  Christian prayers are said in school. And for many pushing this or a similar agenda, it means a fundamentalist Christian prayer in public school.

The morality that Dobson or fellow Christian right leader D. James Kennedy proposes is one that does not even respect variations of Christianity other than his own. So if you are a Catholic or an Episcopalian who goes to church on Sunday, but believes in evolution, under Dobson's definition, you too are a moral relativist because you do not subscribe to his very subjective version of the truth.

Dobson, Kennedy and others on the Religious Right deliberately do not explain the exact form of society they desire. Their idea of conservatism is not the same as perceived by the vast majority of the American people. While most of their audience envisions a philosophy of Barry Goldwater, many on the Religious Right are actually thinking in terms of a pre-Enlightenment society, one in which there is only one hierarchically imposed definition of "good." That is their dirty little secret.