Here’s Tipsy Teetotaler’s Tasty Tidbits for the day:
- Rights Talk in America.
- Neither Red nor Blue (nor White)
- Apostasy in Islamdom.
- Apostasy (from liberal orthodoxy) in Moscow.
- What’s next for marriage? (Sigh!)
- The non-story that keeps on giving.
- Would this needlework be intelligible today?
- A glimpse into the American Soul — and into a Christian soul.
***
So far as I can recall, this question has been relevant the whole of my adult life: what is the difference between a “right” and a “want”?
Harvard Law’s Mary Ann Glendon wrote a book decades ago titled Rights Talk, so commonly was (and still is) the concept of “rights” bandied about in our society.
Fellow attorney and blogger Doug Masson recently Tweeted that “God didn’t give us any rights. We gave them to ourselves. And it’s up to us to retain them in the same fashion.” Seldom do I react so adversely to what Doug writes. If we “give ourselves rights,” we’re in a realm of total legal positivism, it seems to me, where a majority of “we” can take away (not just violate, but void) the rights of a minority. Maybe I’m making too much of a Tweet, a medium limited to 140 characters.
I also don’t want to make too much of people misusing the word in more expansive fora than Tweets, but surely a “right” must be more than a “want,” a “need,” a “burning desire,” etc.
It matters a lot when people say, for instance, that education or health care are “rights.” We live in a world of scarcity, after all. There can’t be a “right” to economically scarce goods or services, can there? I could easily name another example, that involves economic scarcity in a less obvious way, but I’ve blogged enough about it that you might think I’m obsessive if I do. It didn’t even prompt this reflection.
I don’t think Google or Wikipedia can answer what I’m asking. Any takers?
***
A Russian Patriarch refused to take sides between the Red Russians and the White Russians. I like what he said.
***
I am relieved, but not really surprised, to hear that, contrary to the impression I had formed, it is not universal belief within Islam that those who leave the faith are subject to death. Not that I was worried about it personally, mind you.
***
I don’t put too much stock in International declarations, but I was glad to see this news from a demographic summit in Moscow, affirming the natural family and procreation and opposing birth control campaigns (not, be it noted, birth control per se).
***
The New York Times “Room for Debate” forum has 5 views on “What’s Next for Marriage?” A Stanford Law professor opens by answering the question that proponents of a more traditional view of marriage were shouted down as alarmist and offensive for asking. “Why sure,” he answers, in effect. “We’ll get over our hangups about incest and polygamy.”
If I’m misunderstanding or misrepresenting him, then I’m not reassured by his rationale for why we don’t already permit incestuous or polygamous marriage:
The categorical prohibitions of incest and polygamy persist in part because people who commit either act are commonly reduced to that act (which is viewed as morally reprehensible) and, in turn, are not viewed as worthy of respect as people.
I don’t like that answer because I don’t like anyone being viewed as unworthy of respect. Oh: and the polygamists already, in shows like “Big Love,” are in process on eliminating the reductionist view of them as nothing more than promiscuous sex maniacs (or however we are to characterize a guy with multiple wives and the wives who more or less willingly go along).
We need a better rationale than “it’s creepy and it’s practitioners are sub-human,” because they’re not sub-human, and creepiness wanes with repeated exposure. (Ask your surgeon if it was creepy cutting into living human flesh for the first time.) The “yuck” factor may tell us something as a clue, but it doesn’t tell us all we need to know.
The other contributions are worthy of your critical reading and reflection, too. The NYT has kindly included some credible conservative voices. (As always: the New York Times has a pay wall, so reading this may count toward your freebies.)
***
I thought the DSK story should now fade away, but Ann Althouse thinks it’s a microcosm of the reality of police work (which is a bit grimier than NCIS and other TV paens).
Hmmm. I wonder if DSK had enemies so cunning that they timed things to force police to (1) let him go or (2) drag him off a departing international flight? I wish someone had pulled Roman Polanski off his plane.
***
Following the Boston Massacre, Faith Trumbull, wife of patriotic Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull and mother of famed portraitist John Trumbull, stitched an elaborate scene to explain the shocking event[:]
Explain.
You can, can’t you?
If not, it says a lot about cultural literacy today.
The lack of cultural literacy was not Joel Miller’s point, exactly, as he brought this piece to my attention. He does explain it, by the way.
***
“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
Walt Whitman, from the Preface to Leaves of Grass, published 156 years ago today. As a historically-rooted Christian, I can’t endorse all this as advice, but I can endorse it as a beautiful glimpse into the American Soul, in all its magnanimity and iconoclasm, this 4th of July.
Here’s advice I can endorse:
Be both a servant, and free: a servant in that you are subject to God, but free in that you are not enslaved to anything – either to empty praise or to any of the passions.
Release your soul from the bonds of sin; abide in liberty, for Christ has liberated you; acquire the freedom of the New World during this temporal life of yours. Do not be enslaved to love of money or to the praise resulting from pleasing people.
Do not lay down a law for yourself, otherwise you may become enslaved to these laws of yours. Be a free person, one who is in a position to do what he likes. Do not become like those who have their own law, and are unable to turn aside from it, either out of fear in their own minds, or because of the wish to please others; in this way they have enslaved themselves to the coercion of their law, with their necks yoked to their own law, seeing that they have decreed for themselves their own special law – just when Christ had released them from the yoke of the Law!
Do not make hard and fast decisions over anything in the future, for you are a created being and your will is subject to changes. Decide in whatever matters you have to reach a decision, but without fixing in your mind that you will not be moved to other things. For it is not by small changes in what you eat that your faithfulness is altered: your service to the Lord of all is performed in the mind, in your inner person; that is where the ministry to Christ takes place.
St. John the Solitary, Letter to Hesychias, 25-28. HT Father Stephen Freeman.
Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 