Pete Seeger tells us “Mod­er­a­tion in all things, even mod­er­a­tion.” A use­ful mot­to in many sit­u­a­tions. For instance, my friend Mike the Mad Biol­o­gist right­ly crit­i­cizes hack­ish pun­dits, and hack­ish politi­cians, for Com­pul­sive Cen­trist Dis­or­der, the belief that the true answer to any ques­tion must lie halfway between the posi­tions being advo­cat­ed, regard­less of what those posi­tions are, and where that mid­point hap­pens to lie. 

We might call this an extrem­ist form of moderation.

Mod­er­a­tion is a sticky issue in the cul­ture wars these days. Sam Har­ris and Richard Dawkins expend a good deal of effort explain­ing why reli­gious mod­er­ates are bad – just as bad – as reli­gious extrem­ists. The Club for Growth has start­ed run­ning ads boost­ing the pri­ma­ry cam­paign of for­mer Con­gress­man Jim Ryun, attack­ing his slight­ly more mod­er­ate oppo­nent, just as they tar­get­ted mod­er­ate Repub­li­cans in many Con­gres­sion­al races in years past. 

Some times both forms of anti-mod­er­a­tion get com­bined, as with efforts to purge pro-choice Repub­li­cans (see Ned Ryun’s recent exam­ple of that rhetoric, or the string of high-pro­file defec­tions from the Kansas Repub­lic Party).

I’m inclined to take a mod­er­ate posi­tion on mod­er­ates. I judge peo­ple by what they do, not the label they wear. At least one mod­er­ate mem­ber of the Kansas Board of Edu­ca­tion has described her­self as a cre­ation­ist. Car­ol Rupe speaks frankly about her belief in God’s hand in the cre­ation of the world, and holds that sci­ence explains how that hap­pened. She votes against cre­ation­ist cur­ricu­lum stan­dards because she does­n’t want to impose her reli­gious views on oth­ers. I agree, as do most reli­gious mod­er­ates who I’ve heard address that point. Their mod­er­a­tion con­sists in sep­a­rat­ing per­son­al ide­ol­o­gy from the author­i­tar­i­an impulse of the extrem­ist. Peo­ple can believe what they like, and sci­ence class should be about science.

On the oth­er hand, mod­er­ate Repub­li­cans tend not to dif­fer from extrem­ists at key moments. In a vote on a bill that would make it eas­i­er for work­ers to ini­ti­ate the process of union­iz­ing a shop, only one Repub­li­can crossed par­ty lines – Arlen Specter. Undoubt­ed­ly Repub­li­cans will point out that mod­er­ate Democ­rats did­n’t cross par­ty lines on this issue, but mod­er­ate Repub­li­cans tend to align with those mod­er­ate Democ­rats at least part­ly by claim­ing to be more work­er-friend­ly, a claim which did­n’t sur­vive an actu­al test: “once again we see that Ore­gon’s Smith, Min­neso­ta’s Cole­man, New Hamp­shire’s Sununu, and Maine’s Collins all sided against the rights of work­ers to organize.”

How do you tell who your allies are and who your ene­mies are? “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s cloth­ing, but inward­ly are rav­en­ous wolves,” cau­tions Matthew the Evan­ge­list. “You will know them by their fruits.” The fruits of reli­gious mod­er­ates are plu­ral­is­tic and inclu­sive. The fruits of mod­er­ate Repub­li­cans are an end­less occu­pa­tion of Iraq, bar­ri­ers to orga­nized labor and a Supreme Court that cen­sors stu­dents and priv­i­leges its own med­ical opin­ion over that of doc­tors and their patients.