The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

We Need To Talk

Melinda and Rachael, your recent posts about knee-jerk political assumptions and the trend toward only listening to people we agree with really resonated for me. In years past, I had no trouble finding my political tribe. As a lefty lesbian, I might occasionally roll my eyes at the bourgeois liberalism of the mainstream American left, but I knew the difference between us and them.

And then, to oversimplify matters, came 9/11. Suddenly, I was out of step with a lot of my friends on national-security and foreign-policy issues, and conversation became more difficult. Should I tell my pals they sounded naive and disturbingly isolationist? Could they disagree with me without denouncing me as a deluded cog in the Bush-Cheney war machine? (The answer to both questions is sometimes.)

It's tempting to stay silent, but while I occasionally rely on a rueful smile to convey, "I think you're totally wrong, but now's not the time for that conversation," I've mostly learned to express my dissent. For one thing, it's more honest: To paraphrase a line from this week's Exes and Ohs, "You start be saying nothing ... and soon you have nothing to say." (I get all my political philosophy from bad TV shows.) But it's also damaging to pretend we all agree when we don't. One of the reasons I've found the anti-gay-marriage referendums of the last few years so hurtful is that, judging from the wide margins most of them have passed with, lots of Democratic voters supported them. My assumptions about what Democrats believe betrayed me.

We need to talk. The Democratic Party needs pro-life progressives. And the GOP needs social liberals (pro-life or not) like you, Rachael.