You can be as indignant as you like about Citizens United granting some measure of Constitutional personhood to corporations for purposes of “political speech,” but do you really want to say that Congress can keep the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal from editorializing about politics?
You can be as convinced as you like about Hobby Lobby having no right to free exercise of religion to protest and decline compliance with Obamacare’s employer contraceptive mandate, but:
What about an anti-kosher law? Imagine that an antisemitic legislature passes a law forbidding any business corporation from possessing or selling any kosher meat, for no other reason than animus toward Jews. Many butchers, grocers, and restaurants operate through corporations. Does it follow that they would have no ability even to challenge the law on religious grounds? That strikes me as a strange result, and it is not compelled by any precedent. It would make far more sense to say that corporations or the real parties in interest behind them have the ability to make religious-freedom claims, whose sincerity and validity will be judged on the merits.
This is how the law looks at questions, and that’s why the description of law school as a “bloodless lobotomy” remains amusing.
That perspective is why I sometimes can’t join in the Hugfest over every feelgood law.
Our community just hosted the sixth annual OUTfest, sponsored by Pride Lafayette. The local paper’s weekend entertainment section featured a photo of our two Greater Lafayette Majors hamming it up with the Fest organizer, which prompted a warm-n-fuzzy editorial about how far we’ve come in the 20 years since the two cities “added equal protection based on sexual orientation into human relations ordinances.”
But I remember a different aspect. Pardon me for bringing it up, but it illustrates that endless, exuberant, uncritical “liberations” can come with a cost.
Our local ordinances forbid “discrimination” based on, among other things, sexual orientation – without any acknowledgement that their definitions of “discrimination” – “any difference in treatment” – forbids reasoned discernment as well as invidious discrimination. Our local debate allowed no distinction between the two. That “discrimination” and “discernment” denote the same thing, albeit with varying connotations in modern parlance, was quite lost.
That came with a cost – a very heavy cost for two adolescent males in the community. A man whose sexual orientation made him unsuited to a particular position of trust, as any discerning observer could see, was nevertheless hired for it. And he abused the trust badly.
To be less vague, a gay man in his twenties was hired to supervise troubled adolescent males in a residential setting without effective checks and balances against the possibility that he would find some of his charges sexually desirable. He did find some of them desirable, and, undetected, took them to his parents’ home and anally sodomized them, making videos of his exploits.
When they complained, there was no suspension of judgment by local opinion-makers. The adolescents were vilified as lying agents of a fundamentalist conspiracy to upend the progress we’d made. Troubled adolescents, given more trouble still, by shrill and powerful partisans of their abuser.
They recanted. Years later, the truth of their original accusation was conclusively proven by videos when their abuser was caught by more serious-minded authorities in Wisconsin.
So to put this in terms of how the law looks at questions, is it really true that any difference in treatment based on sexual orientation (or other characteristics) is wrong? Should this gay young man have been put in charge of troubled adolescent males at all, or at least with no real safeguards in place?
No matter how you answer that, I’ll tell you right now that if I’m ever faced with a choice between (1) complying with the law and (2) discerning one of those rare cases where sexual orientation is truly a relevant consideration, I’m going to consider it – and to hell with the law.
Scylla and Charybdis are ever with us.
[W]hat we need most urgently at the present time are spiritual approaches that help gay Christians to integrate their sexual orientation with their faith in a manner that steers a safe course between the Scylla of indulging in sexual vice and the Charybdis of destroying their sanity through denial about their sexuality.
(Aaron Taylor) Mudblood Catholic has been trying to steer that course, too, having apparently survived a close call with Charybdis.
Jason Peters goes to the Farmer’s Market, where an EZ2BGRN license plate sets him off:
[O]ne problem with morality in our day—aside from its conspicuous absence—is that it is apparently reducible to slogans, which means it is no morality at all. All of it is as easy as being outraged at some slightly well-known person’s use of a racial slur.
From the Left: “Can you believe so-and-so opposes a woman’s right to choose? I’m like, what?”
And from the Right: “Did you know so-and-so believes in evolution? I’m all, you’re kidding me!”
That kind of claptrap, it seems to me, works in and conduces well to a world where it’s also EZ2BGRN. It’s easy, in the first place, because “green” is a word that, like “environment,” hardly signifies. “Green” is no better or more nuanced than the equally unsubtle blue and red into which the know-nothing pundits divide the country. “Green” means you like trees and rocks and water, even though rocks and water aren’t green, and trees are mostly grey (and all grey a good part of the year)
Which means that if you say you’re “green,” what you mean is that you’re in the habit of rendering simple what is complex. You’re saying that all the complexities of living peaceably and harmoniously with the ultimately unknowable mysteries of nature’s ways can be reduced to a color, which is to say that such living can be painted over and given that patina of peace and harmony amid warfare and discord.
It’s easy to be green if being green means you get to keep driving so long as you’re driving a Prius. It’s easy if it means making only slight technological adjustments to an otherwise unimpeachable way of life.
Just as troubled adolescent males being sodomized is apparently an acceptable price to pay for equal rights for horny young gay male social workers, so ignoring the white working class is an acceptable price to pay for assuring the political ascendency of those animals that are more equal than others – and the party that has learned how to court them.
So note Ross Douthat and, derivatively, Rod Dreher.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 