Now that the political calculus has changed in US...

I don't accept the notion that one must critique both right & left in the same way or even give equal time to critiquing them in order to have a fair & faithful public witness. Why?

1. Critiques that aim for equal time will end up missing underlying dynamics of power & responsibility. Those w/ power are responsible in different ways than those w/out it. And those who claim the name of Christ have distinct repsonsiblities from those who don't.
2. Critiques that posit right/left as mirror images miss that while each may operate on different principles, they do so w/in the same set of social shaping forces. IOW, they might be swimming in different directions but they're in the same stream
3. Critique emerges from a specific ethos & is directed to a certain audience. Critiquing those outside your tribe is so much easier than those w/in it. B/c of this, faithfulness might sometimes mean more focused critique of your own group & less of your ideological opponent.
4. Critique of opponents requires extra work to do fairly b/c it means understanding their arguments as they understand them. It requires asking right questions, hearing answers, & being able to find true sources of disagreement, not superficial ones.
All this to say, faithul public witness does not necessarily look like equal time or "both sides"-ing it which can be little more than "whataboutism" turned inside out.

Instead, faithful public witness rests on humility, self-awareness, & sensitivity to the Holy Spirit.
Faithful, fair witness means speaking truthfully while honoring the limits of our own knowledge & recognizing the needs & temptations of the audience to which we speak.
For conservatives, this might mean critiquing conservatives more directly than critiquing progressives. For progressives, vice versa. (Faithful are the wounds of a friend, after all.) But it also means receiving Qs & challenge from the other side that we're likely to might miss.
In end, social commentary is hard to do w/out simply becoming a partisan hack & using issues to reinforce our own sense of righteousness. Faithful, fair witness to the ways of God is much harder. Like Him, it should both confront & offer hope. It should both humble & surprise.
B/c just as Jesus did not come into the world to condemn it, the aim of our public witness is not to crush those already under condemnation. It is that the world might be saved. That all might find true hope & true freedom.

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"3 million people are estimated not to have official photo ID, with ethnic minorities more at risk". They will "have to contact their council to confirm their ID if they want to vote"

This is shameful legislation, that does nothing to tackle the problems with UK elections.THREAD


There is no evidence in-person voter fraud is a problem, and it wd be near-impossible to organise on an effective scale. Campaign finance violations, digital disinformation & manipulation of postal voting are bigger issues, but these are crimes of the powerful, not the powerless.

In a democracy, anything that makes it harder to vote - in particular, anything that disadvantages one group of voters - should face an extremely high bar. Compulsory voter ID takes a hammer to 3 million legitimate voters (disproportionately poor & BAME) to crack an imaginary nut

If the government is concerned about the purity of elections, it should reflect on its own conduct. In 2019 it circulated doctored news footage of an opponent, disguised its twitter feed as a fake fact-checking site, and ran adverts so dishonest that even Facebook took them down.

Britain's electoral law largely predates the internet. There is little serious regulation of online campaigning or the cash that pays for it. That allows unscrupulous campaigners to ignore much of the legal framework erected since the C19th to guard against electoral misconduct.

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