Instead of glorifying the business people who sustain communities and provide jobs, liberals try to show their compassion by sanctifying the homeless – a population overwhelmingly categorized by substance abuse, criminality, and untreated mental illness. The aggressive insistence that government should champion the unfortunate doesn’t amount to the application of a moral calculus to political questions but, rather, the refusal to consider moral standards. The left looks for the least powerful or successful as the only appropriate recipients of governmental favor – considering only status (the more hapless the better), not virtue or vice.

The liberal discomfort with ethical absolutes became painfully apparent during Barack Obama’s joint appearance with John McCain at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church on Saturday night, August 16th.

The Democratic Senator dodged uncomfortable questions about marriage – declaring that he defined marriage “as the union between a man and a woman” but never explaining his opposition to a California initiative that supports that definition, or his commitment to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (signed by President Clinton) that applied the same standard at the federal level. When it came to abortion, Obama allowed that “there is a moral and ethical element to this issue” but said nothing at all about what that “element” might be while insisting, “I am pro choice.”

Most tellingly, when asked by Rick Warren about how to deal with evil (“Do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Or do we defeat it?”), Obama refused to answer, saying only that evil should be “confronted.” His examples of evil – Darfur, street crime and child abuse in America – pointedly excluded the transcendent depravity of Islamo-Nazi terror, which turns the murder of children, and the suicide of other children, into holy acts.

Instead, he seemed to suggest that the United States should feel guilty about its own evil deeds, committed on behalf of good intentions, saying it’s “very important for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil, because of a lot of evil’s been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.” In other words, Obama takes us back to the tired old moral equivalency arguments of thirty years ago, recycling a familiar plot from any number of acclaimed gangster movies – with the crusading cop becoming just as compromised and vicious as the criminal he’s determined to bust.

In real life, as in cinematic fiction, shades of gray occasionally do predominate, making it difficult to separate right from wrong, or to distinguish between good guys and villains. But on other occasions – most occasions in our contemporary world –it’s possible and necessary to make moral distinctions. That’s certainly the case in the current conflict between Russia and Georgia – where both sides may be imperfect, but one party to the conflict bears vastly greater guilt for aggression, destruction and obfuscation, while the other side remains far more worthy of sympathy and support.

The same logic applies to the American Presidential race and other political skirmishes of the moment. Both sides may be imperfect, but one faction carries a far more debilitating burden of obtuseness and relativism, while the other – for all its faults – strives more consistently for moral clarity and merits wider support.