Ideas over Identity

 Once Again, The National Pulse is after me. I don’t apologize. 

I wrote a blog post about campaigning in the South Carolina and Georgia seven and half years ago. I was bothered by the cultural dynamics of several southern states and rural areas.

I don’t apologize for my words. Here’s why. I grew up in the 90s in the middle of this country in a small city surrounded by cornfields and cattle. Now I live in a small town surrounded by corn and hog farms. My formative years in school were punctuated by being in a totally color blind society. My grade school was made up of almost 25% refugee families from the conflict in Vietnam. Laotian, Cambodian, and Hmong kids were my friends. I thought race issues were non existent. 

The same could be said for where I live now. My church has large ministries to Hispanic and African immigrant populations. We have black, white, Asian, and Hispanic people, and every combination thereof in church. 

I am bothered when I go to places like Chicago and Milwaukee, where people are siloed up by race. I am bothered by small towns in the south where people choose to live on one side of the town or another to self segregate.

Maybe I’m still naive, but I still strive for a colorblind society. I hate everything that divides by race. My bible tells me that there are only two types of people; saved and unsaved. The New Testament is a for ALL people and there is only one race…the human one. 

I have laments about culture in areas of our siloed up country. I have admittedly urged people to move, but that is based upon where people can be more free from state intervention in their church or business. I lament the fact that there are white churches and black churches. I lament the fact that we can’t have discussions on cultural issues, like fatherlessness without bringing race into the equation. I lament because our government has pushed to see men pushed out of the home to be replaced by the government. That’s not racial. 

I shed tears when I heard Larry Elder give his history and talk about issues of family and culture at a recent Iowa GOP dinner. 

Our only dividing points should be ideas and principles. We can debate those things. We can seek to change long held cultural issues plaguing urban and rural America. Growing up in an area untouched by these issues showed me that it is possible to simply debate ideas.

I have seen a continued push to lift up how people look or their physical traits over ideas and policies. I’m harder right on policy issues that nearly anyone I know, but I also don’t want to see people divided by immutable characteristics. You can’t change your color. You can’t change your sex. 

This is why I can’t stand BLM, the alphabet mafia, or people like Nick Fuentes. They all seek division based upon physical identity. It all ends in the same morally depraved ditch, regardless of the direction. Until we move back to debating and seeking policy victories, the right will be a hollowed out husk of a political movement. 

I see hope in people like Ron DeSantis and my own governor, Kim Reynolds. They have had success in actually governing. They have moved their states to the right without focusing on immutable characteristics or identity politics. 

We must be able to focus on ideas. I don’t want to see our country fall into the European model of all political parties being big government socialist proponents with only superficial identity politics separating them. This is not something I could be a part of. I have had many moments where I think of finding a piece of undeveloped land in the mountains and going off grid to escape all of this, but my conscience won’t allow me to. I have to be engaged in this fight or I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. I can’t leave a nation of disparate groups of people who are pitted against one another for reasons that don’t matter. 

If you want to see more freedom, liberty, less government intervention in small and medium sized business, and a focus on tried and true moral principles, I’m with you. I you seek to divide over color or sex, I am not.