Month: April 2009

A “Public Christian”

Rod Dreher laments after Iowa:

The lawyer said that as soon as homosexuality receives constitutionally protected status equivalent to race, then "it will be very hard to be a public Christian." By which he meant to voice support, no matter how muted, for traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality and marriage. To do so would be to set yourself up for hostile work environment challenges, including dismissal from your job, and generally all the legal sanctions that now apply to people who openly express racist views.

Anonymous Liberal makes the rather obvious comparison:

I realize its often hard to appreciate how your words will come across to those who don't share your beliefs, but good grief, is it possible to be more oblivious? … eah, it's pretty rough being a Christian in America. Maybe Dreher should try being a "public homosexual" for a while and compare the experience. If I had a Quantum Leap machine, I'd be tempted to zap Dreher into the life of a gay high school student or maybe a gay man in a small Southern town and see how easy he finds it to publicly be himself.

One imagines how the early Christians might have responded to this threat: by embracing their marginalization and seeing discrimination against them as a sign of their righteousness. Today's Christianists, in contrast, need the government to enforce their religious doctrines, for fear that without government, these convictions could falter. It says a lot about the comparative strength of their faith and their paranoia.

But if Rod does actually believe that those who want to publicly express Biblical injunctions against their gay fellow citizens will be subject to active discrimination, then what he needs to do is not prevent gay people from civil equality but work tirelessly to protect free speech. As Rod knows, I'm a big opponent of hate crimes laws, of abuse of sexual harassment laws, p.c. speech codes and any infringement on religious or irreligious speech. Such infringements of freedom from the left are just as noxious as those from the right. I'll happily join him in opposing any attempt by the state to coerce or chill free speech.

But it must and can be perfectly possible for public orthodox Christians to live side by side with politically equal homosexuals. Just as it is perfectly possible for devout Catholics to live and work alongside divorced co-workers, even if they feel the need constantly to profess the impermissibility of divorce. This is not and need not be a binary choice. We can live together as equals. And when we do, we may find the conversation we can have that much more interesting.

The View From Your Recession

A reader writes:

I work for the state child welfare agency for Missouri. We have been routinely asked if the economy has affected the amount of child abuse and child neglect hotline calls that are made or the number of kids coming into foster care. So far, it has not. We assume that because most of our clients are already soaking in poverty that the economic downturns don't affect them because they currently survive in that same circumstance.
 
This is no longer the case. Today, we had our first child enter foster care because the parent's unemployment ran out and the parent could no longer care for them. The economy is now affecting us.

Will The GOP Turn On Gates?

Tom Ricks thinks so:

There is growing belief on the right that President Obama will use him for political cover to slash weapons programs and the defense budget…My bet is that Gates will stay on until about this time next year, and leave when the QDR (Quadrennial Defense Review) is done. By then, I predict, Republicans will be crying, “Bobby, we hardly knew ye.”

The High Culture Wars

Scott McLemee George Scialabba reviews Against the Grain, a collection of forty-five essays from The New Criterion:

In its crusade against the politicization of contemporary culture, The New Criterion is — on the whole, in the main, and not to put too fine a point on it — right. Notwithstanding the importance of legal and social equality for women, homosexuals, and members of racial minorities, most of the cultural strategies employed in the service of these ends have been — again, on the whole; and with many exceptions, not always duly acknowledged by conservative critics — misguided and counterproductive.

Multiculturalist pedagogy; the promotion of “cultural diversity” through arts administration, philanthropy, and public policy; academic departments of Women’s Studies and Afro-American Studies; the project of “critical theory”; and in general, the greatly increased weight — in teaching and research, hiring and funding, programming and grant-making — given to explicitly political considerations: altogether these things have done more harm than good. They have undoubtedly made possible some valuable work and attracted some people to culture who would otherwise have been lost to it. But they have also generated a really staggering amount of mediocre and tendentious work. And not only do these ideological priorities make for less accomplished artists and scholars; they also make for less effective citizens. Attempting to turn one’s professional enthusiasms and expertise to political account can distract from — can even serve to rationalize the avoidance of — everyday democratic activity, with all its tedium and frustration.

Will Iowans Vote To Keep Marriage?

Nate Silver crunches the numbers of increasing support for marriage equality in various states. Here's his conclusion:

The state has roughly average levels of religiosity, including a fair number of white evangelicals, and the model predicts that if Iowans voted on a marriage ban today, it would pass with 56.0 percent of the vote. By 2012, however, the model projects a toss-up: 50.4 percent of Iowans voting to approve the ban, and 49.6 percent opposed. In 2013 and all subsequent years, the model thinks the marriage ban would fail.