Rights and Retributions
Justin Anthony Knapp sent me an email today inviting comments on a story where a Christian student has claimed to be discriminated against on the basis of her faith, a claim that is contested (with some serious apparent evidence) in the blog post. (I have no independent idea of the details.) He also sent me an interesting op-ed from an old NYT. (Justin, mate, you seriously need to get your own blog instead of pleading with us to blog on what interests you!)
Coincidentally, yesterday Jim West posted a link to a report suggesting that gays are taking over the world. (Jim does seem easily persuaded to think the worst of gay people) I have no idea of the full stories behind any of the snippets reported there, and they provide no links to test them further.
I don’t doubt that in some cases we can and will discover politicly correct bullying done in the name of gay rights and other issues. God knows we have had centuries of religiously correct bullying done in the name of truth and orthodoxy. It was a mantra, for example, of pre-Vatican II Catholicism that “error has no rights” which excused all sorts of abuse of those who erred. In the end, people are stupid, and some (many?) are prone to do each other down. One does not excuse the other, and booth need to be opposed and challenged.
However, I have reached the stage where I suspect all stories of this kind. Christians have developed a story template for proving “persecution by political correctness”. (Atheists, gay people and indeed everyone else likes playing the victim game too!) I now assume, reading something like the report Jim refers to that all of these stories will prove more complex than the summaries suggest. I even find myself wondering whether there will turn out to be any truth in them whatsoever.
Very few people bring out the cynic in me nowadays as much as campaigns involving conservative Christians, where misrepresentation often seem to be the game all round. However, I can’t resist the impression, or refute the argument, that by and large conservative Christians are even better at misrepresenting things than their opponents, as much, I suspect, out of an overwhelming sense of having right on their side: a condition that has often been used, historically, to excuse the commission of many wrongs.
June 17th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
I thought Christians were supposed to hate the world - so why would they care if gays and lesbians are allowed to operate freely within it or even ‘take it over’? Of course Christians might also remember that God loves the world - so maybe even these 11th hour misfits will get their penny from the landowner and the prejudiced will complain about their own covenant.
June 18th, 2008 at 1:26 am
I am not sure where this gay conspiracy is or who is at the heart of it, or who is giving the energy for such a distributed network to kill off civilization. It is an argument of hyperbole at best - a poets most exaggerated device for propagating lies. I know many a gay person. They just want equal regard under the law. That there is not one single secular argument against this premise as a just rule for the right to marry and for marriage to be a gender-neutral relational contract is an hypothesis I have not seen even challenged except with the vehicular manslaughter of more lies and myths of reality that simply phatasms of the mind at best.
June 18th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
There was a gay wedding in my family last week. The two women planned carefully, established a will and durable power of attorney, and entered the commitment with more foresight than any heterosexual couple I’ve ever seen. They complement each other so well, I’ve been taking notes on how healthy relationships work! Two days after the wedding, a crisis arose with another family member who needed a mental health intervention. The new couple, who both work in social services, took time out from their honeymoon week to see the intervention through.
Funny how we can point to a few Scripture texts that really don’t translate into our time and culture and react hysterically to an imagined violation of them, but ignore the Scriptures that tell us we are known by our love and the fruit of the Spirit.
My gay relations are laying down their lives for others, showing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Somebody please tell me how they are a threat to civilization!
June 19th, 2008 at 2:49 am
Doug,
I prefer this method because I’m never held accountable. Thanks for your thoughts - someday I’ll be responsible enough to take responsibility for my own opinions.
-JAK
June 19th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Doug,
as Qohelet says somewhere, knowledge to the one who acquires it accrues pain to the same more than anything else. Actually, with that formulation, I toned down Qohelet’s point considerably.
June 19th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Yikes, John. I don’t think I’m clever enough to quite understand what you’re trying to say.