Vive la difference

I had coffee this week with an older African American gentleman whom I had met recently, and it came too light that he was a Republican. It surprised me to meet a black Republican,, especially in North Carolina these days, so after we talked for a while about business and basic getting to know you stuff I brought the conversation around to politics.

He said that he felt that Obama had done a lot of things to mess up the country, and especially around gay marriage.  Earlier that week, he said, while doing some outreach work for his church, he had taken a fellow parishioner who was blind into the county clerk's office. While there, a marriage between two women was being officiated. It seems from his recounting that they had their hands all over themselves, because he gently launched into a little peroration about marriage being about more than sex and affection and so on.

He also said that he was on the board of some charter schools and that he was astounded at the attitudes of kids that things should and would just be handed to them. The fundamental grounding for his support for the Republicans was that he felt they were just more pro-business, as he was. I must say, being out in the business world, I get that. Compliance is hard, and in many ways it is much easier to promulgate regulation than it is to right-size it. It honestly gets scaled back by the sheer difficulty of funding and administering its enforcement.

It is difficult to engage in values-based discussions of politics with people who come from backgrounds different from your own. For one, we're always just working on earning our own livings and/or taking care of our own offspring. Or writing our own blogs. But there is very little that is more important.