Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis by Jimmy Carter

“It is much easier and more convenient to focus on sins of which we are
not known to be guilty.” -Jimmy Carter, on the Christian Right’s attacks
on homosexuality to the exclusion of other topics closer to home, like
adultery and divorce.

Jimmy simply savages the current administration in this book. I’ll
bet he doesn’t get invited to many of their parties.

Endangered Values is an overview of Carter’s worries on America’s
current trajectory in several realms, kind of an extended opinion piece.
He warns in the introduction he’s going to be mixing politics and
religion, but that he does so as a private citizen.

Given that his motivations are fairly different than mine (his reasoning
comes from his religious beliefs), we both end up at the same conclusions
most of the time. He’s a good guy.

I am wary, however, when people get too “Good Old Days” on me. I question
his assertion that the country is more sharply divided along partisan
lines than they used to be in his day. I don’t know for sure… I wasn’t
even remotely clued in to politics before the mid-90’s, to be honest. To
me, it was always just a bunch of people in suits squabbling with each
other. But I thought people got up in arms on both sides of that Vietnam
thing, and perhaps Reagan raised some hackles here and there.

At any rate, it’s a fine little opinion piece, and he scored points with
me for quoting both Warren Buffett and Stephen Jay Gould.