Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Of course this is true and personally, I think it has been blatantly obvious in politics for years, perhaps decades.
How moral is it to let children starve and suffer without medical attention? Yet politicians bash so-called welfare programs and decry it as anti-American to want some sort of social welfare.
The war on drugs has followed the same pattern -- look at Ashcroft's persecution of the desperately-ill people who use medical marijuana even when fully sanctioned by doctors and local government.
The reason so many "liberals" are outraged by a certain type of Christian is because they recognize this hypocrisy. The holier-than-thou attitude copped by certain members of any group serve only as a turn-off to people who might otherwise be sympathetic to whatever the given cause is. The environmentalist movement is a case in point, as are animal rights activists.

My own feeling is that the xenophobic behaviors and possibly even instincts that proto-humans needed to accomplish Darwinian survival eons ago has become the "us vs. them" attitude of modern existence. This is now to our detriment but I see no real addressing of it as a problem. In fact, I'd have to say that during the last 3-4 decades, it has been used by politicians and religious leaders to enhance their own positions. I see this in Chicago with Jesse Jackson and Operation PUSH as well as in many other places.

People who want to lead aren't motivated to promote compromise and empathy/understanding for "others." It serves them far better to use the power of fear to create divisions where none should exist, as a practical matter.
The entire marriage debate is a perfect example of this. I have yet to hear ANYONE defend the idea that same-sex marriages in any way are detrimental to opposite-sex marriages. No one's marriage really affects anyone else's on anything beyond a personal level. Yet advocates who state that their deep commitment to Christianity is the justification for all this hatred seem to me, an admitted non-Christian, to be violating their own principles of love and acceptance.....
The equating of sex with morality is so ingrained and so used as the powerful tool it will always be, that I can't really envision it ever changing extensively. We are built to be sexual beings and the power-seekers will always exploit this fact.