Hand-to-hand political combat in the heat of political campaigns certainly exists. But outside of that, it seems to me that good, reasoned debate on public policy issues demands respect for the ideas of others.

This is not as easy as it sounds.

This issue arose when two conservative bloggers (and friends of mine) were appointed as columnists at The Union (Nevada County’s newspaper), and agreed to have their blog content aggregated on theunion.com. The controversy was based on the fact that neither is a particularly ardent believer in man-made global warming.

(Disclaimer: I just don’t know what I think about this issue. Clearly, climate changes have been occurring for hundreds of years. Many important climate changes have been happening in the last few years. How much is man-made, I don’t really know. I’m interested in reading more about it when I get a break from  drinking at the fire hose of educational reform.)

The Union’s former editor, Jeff Pelline (another friend of mine) referred to the two of them as extreme. I like Jeff, and I think he has a pretty level-headed approach to most issues, although from his writing, it’s clear I’m probably a little more conservative than he is. (I used to be big into trying to label myself, now not so much. Labels are a little too simple.)

I worry about our public discourse when we fall into simply referring to others as extreme. I know it’s called for at times, but as I pointed out in the comments on Jeff’s post, one man’s extremism is another’s moderation.

Disrespect for other viewpoints is clearly in vogue at NCVoices.com, where the editor of that site (a woman named Anna, who I haven’t met) has taken the position that her view on global warming is completely correct, and places disclaimers on the opposing view telling readers in effect not to believe anything written there, and saying of those writers, “They must not have children, or else not like them much.” Because this really didn’t look like humor — and I’m the first person to appreciate humor — it appeared like both an absurd and disrespectful statement.

When we fail to respect each other’s view points, and simply reject their thoughts without consideration on the merits, we have no basis to actually debate. The result is polarization, balkanization and talking past each other. Not really healthy for a representative democracy.

To sum it all up, a fellow by the name of Tom Grundy signed on and wrote the following comments on Jeff Pelline’s blog in response to my point about respect.

Right on. Granted, we don’t yet know if Russ and George will suddenly become more well-rounded and open-minded in their posts, but, the Union is probably banking on the fact that they will stay as inflammatory as they have been in the past. It’s great for upping the ratings and the web hits by online commenters, etc.

I don’t really know Tom, but I want to make something clear. Russ and George don’t need to change their opinions (one possible definition of “well-rounded” and “open-minded”) to have respect for the opinions of others. I hope they express that respect by using their column space in The Union to disagree with others using data and reason, not just out-of-hand rejection.

And Jeff, Anna, Tom, Dixie, Zuri and all of the other people involved in this saga don’t have to change (or feel threatened in) their opinions to respect the viewpoints of George and Russ. I think Dixie said it most eloquently in her post: limiting yourself to only one viewpoint is like eating the same thing every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I thought of trying to embed a YouTube video of the Beatles with “All You Need is Love”, but I thought that would be over the top.