I missed most of the Cheney family kerfuffle because of more pressing issues like electric power outage in my home. From a galloping Monday Morning Quarterback chair, I’m having trouble not seeing a contradiction between, say, Frank Bruni’s concession “Having a lesbian sister doesn’t compel her to support marriage equality,” and his indictment “Liz’s decision to chart a course and publicize a view bound to offend her sister is entirely volitional.”
A candidacy for most national and state legislative public offices is almost certain to raise questions related to SSM. Unless you’re prepared to say that no opponent of SSM with a gay relative can run, or must decline to answer questions, how was Liz Cheney to act differently? Apart from the suspicion that she is opposing same-sex marriage for political purposes (whatever that means), is her real transgression that she has given the lie to the liberal shibboleth that conservatives only believe as they do because they lack empathy?
I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten some variation of “you’d feel different if it was your daughter” in the abortion context, and the same sort of offensive assumption – that one has decided with empathy disengaged – comes up over and over now in the gay rights context. Well, I have gay relatives, some of whom I don’t know very well, others of whom I love. And gay friends. (Yes, it can be delicate to navigate at times.)
The other dog that doesn’t hunt is “remember the Golden Rule.” Rather, beware the ménage à trois of American utilitarianism, individual rights, and a deficient interpretation of Christian love.
Pastor Frank Schaefer has been convicted in a United Methodist Church trial for officiating at the “wedding” of his gay sone to the son’s male partner:
“True love draws boundaries. Scripture says that true love does not rejoice in evil,” said the Rev. Dr. Christopher Fisher, counsel for the church, in his closing argument. “Cheap grace does not lead to being conformed to the image and likeness of Christ. We ought not turn the grace of God into immorality. Is it true to tell young people that their identity can be determined by something like our sexuality?”
Meanwhile, outside, protesters sang great hymns of the Christian faith, like “we are gay and straight together.” I’m not making this up. It was the first thing to register with me on NPR as I arose Wednesday morning:
“The body is sick, friends. Sick and tired. For over 40 years, our beloved United Methodist Church has suffered with an illness called bigotry and homophobia,” wrote [Chett] Pritchett.
“Good physicians know the first rule of medicine is always this: Do No Harm. Today’s events have proven this: the body is sick, friends. Only Christ’s healing can bring the comfort we truly need.”
Schaefer is one of several cases in the United States of Methodist clergy opting to perform same-sex weddings in open defiance of their denomination’s rules.
Have I mentioned lately “beware the ménage à trois of American utilitarianism, individual rights, and a deficient interpretation of Christian love“?
I consider the United Methodist “course correction” during my lifetime, veering from a trajectory toward Chett Pritchett’s utopia back toward Christopher Fisher’s relative orthodoxy, almost miraculous. I would not have predicted it.
I once had a client a lot like John Freshwater, an Ohio middle school science teacher fired for insubordination in failing to comply with orders to remove religious materials from his classroom. The Ohio Supreme Court upheld his firing:
Chief Justice O’Connor in an opinion joined by Justices French and O’Neill held that the school improperly ordered Freshwater to remove his personal Bible from his desk. The order infringed Freshwater’s free exercise rights; the Bible posed no threat of an Establishment Clause violation because Freshwater did not use it while teaching. However, Freshwater was properly removed for insubordination in failing to comply with orders to remove other religious materials from his classroom.
(Religion Clause) There was, however, a “blistering dissent” which particularly brought my client to mind:
Thus concludes the sorry saga of John Freshwater, excellent junior-high science teacher, terminated as a result of an extreme overreaction of the parents of a decent student, followed by even less informed and measured responses by Mount Vernon school administrators and the school board…. [T]hey have managed to divide a really nice community and cost the school board and/or its insurance providers well over a million dollars to free itself of a very good teacher. And the people they did it for left town.
There is a clear set of winners today: the lawyers…. They have told themselves that they are participating in the evolved version of the Scopes trial, when in reality they have created a modern Jarndyce and Jarndyce….
The main difference between my case and Mr. Freshwater’s is that some experienced constitutional lawyers I consulted – culture warriors by disposition, and aligned with my client – cautioned me. They weren’t interested in the facts beyond that my guy was unabashedly creationist. I did deny (and still deny) that he taught creationism, but the taint was there, and my advisors clued me in to one of the unwritten legal rules: “creationists lose.”
I really hate unwritten rules, especially the kind that say one side is permitted to poison the well by labeling the other without proving any wrongful conduct. And I hate vengeful or gutless school administrators, who run out of town any teacher plausibly accused of harboring and insinuating scientifically dissident views.
Words I need to hear sometimes. No, make that almost all the time. It’s a bad lifetime habit, although I know some people who are even a bit worse:
The Critic, Fearing He will Fail, Does Nothing
It is easy to be critical of another person, finding fault with what we perceive they are doing, or have done, or have not done. Yet the man who points out how another man has stumbled, finding fault in something he himself has not done, and in what he himself thinks he could have done better, is in reality the one at fault. It is the one who has done the work whom he criticizes.
The doer of the work may have stumbled, or perhaps could have done a better job, but he must still get credit for having tried. This man still deserves credit, for he is the one who put out the effort, whereas the critic has done nothing, and, knowing he has done nothing, wishes to take the spotlight off himself, pointing, instead, to the doer.
The credit belongs to the man who has erred, and who perhaps comes up short again and again. He knows that without chancing some error and shortcoming, no deed will ever be done. This man takes up a worthy deed with great enthusiasm, even in spite of the fact that he may fail. The critic, fearing he will fail, does nothing. The critic will never know either defeat or victory.
Love in Christ,
Abbot Tryphon
(Facebook) There’s an earlier version of what I think is a thought in pari materia with the good Abbot except that it may have a particular kind (my kind) of slacker in mind:
Purity . . . is not the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.
(William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience) Ouch!
I got an envelope in the mail. It said “Check Enclosed.” It also bore something like 10.2¢ of postage, so I knew it was some kind of political or charitable scam.
check: n. a draft upon a particular account in a bank, in which the drawer or maker (the person who has the account and signs the check) directs the bank to pay a certain amount to the payee (which may include the drawer, “cash,” or someone else).
(Law.com, emphasis added) The “check” John Boehner had so kindly sent me for the National Republican Congressional Committee was marked “This check is a facsimile not redeemable or negotiable and has no cash value.” But the envelope promised a “check,” not a “facsimile.” As one of my law professors said in a commercial law class, “if a car is sold ‘as is’ without warranty, but the sound coming from under the hood is a recording, not an internal combustion engine, is it really a car? Is the dealer in the clear because of the warranty disclaimer?”
I cannot absolve this kind of deliberate lie with a quote from William James about dirt marks inadvertently picked up from getting in the game. We live in a low-down world where lying is a constant, shameless and ubiquitous background noise. I could find examples from left and right, religious and political, and that excludes the lies we call “puffery“ in commercial transactions.
That kind of story can’t end well, as it breed cynicism at best, paranoid distrust and violent self-defense or retribution at worst.
Fr. Robert Barron recalls a comment made by Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, who had been asked what he was thinking as he stood on the balcony of St. Peter’s after the election of Benedict XVI. George said, “I was gazing over toward the Circus Maximus, toward the Palatine Hill where the Roman Emperors once resided and reigned and looked down upon the persecution of Christians, and I thought, ‘Where are their successors? . . . But if you want to see the successor of Peter, he is right next to me, smiling and waving at the crowds.’”
As an Orthodox Christian, I don’t believe the Pope is uniquely the successor of Peter, but I still like the anecdote. (H/T Elizabeth Scalia)
Ancient astronauts make us, the human species, special. The ancient aliens looked upon Earth and found promise. They crossed an interstellar distance and they invested time and resources and maybe even a few of their own lives doing it. For whatever purpose they planned (creating human slaves or establishing a cosmic classroom) they found us worthy of the effort. For a brief time in the childhood of our race, we were the center of someone’s attention, someone from out there. Maybe they will be back, just to see how we have done.
(Russell E. Saltzman, What Ancient Astronauts Teach Us) I find that story strangely familiar, yet twisted.
Oh wait! Could it be this? Or this? Or this?
It’s kinda pathetic if a Lutheran layman is into ancient astronaut stuff to find a story that makes humans special.
And now for something different:
Yes, that’s a Priest running a Marathon in his cassock.
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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 