"A republic. If you can keep it." (Benjamin Franklin)

 

TODAY, OUR NATION FACES ITS GREATEST CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS SINCE THE CIVIL WAR!

For the first time in my sixty-one years I've received a questionnaire, that I am bound by law to complete and return, weighing my eligibility to serve as a juror in US District Court in Philadelphia.

I mean, can you even IMAGINE how such a thing might end well? :-)

"Jesus has chosen everyone."

“These are things of love! Love does not consider whether someone has an ugly face or a beautiful face: it loves! And Jesus does the same: He loves and chooses with love. He chooses all. In His list, no one is ‘important’ – in inverted commas – according to the criteria of the world: it is the common people. But there is one thing, yes, one thing to emphasize about all of them: they are sinners. Jesus has chosen sinners. He chooses sinners. And this is the accusation made by the doctors of the law, the scribes: ‘This man goes to eat with sinners, he talks to prostitutes…’ Jesus calls everyone! Let us call to mind the parable of the wedding of the son. When those who were invited did not come, what did the master of the house do? The Gospel says he told his servants: ‘Go out and bring everyone to the house, good and bad.’ Jesus has chosen everyone.”

-Pope Francis
9/9/2014
Morning Homily
St. Martha’s House
Vatican City

"Francis: Jesus is among the people and he chooses sinners" (Vatican Insider)

Private Morality In A Pluralistic Public Society

I am trying - harder than one might realize - to empathize with my conservative (invariably) Christian friends on their concerns regarding abortion, gay marriage, and - more generally - the idea that America is going to Hell in a handbasket.

I don’t know any pro-choice folks - and I know A LOT of them - who believe in euthanizing babies except POSSIBLY in third-trimester situations because of terrible birth defects (often it takes time to get the test results back) or to save the life of a mother.

So the issue isn’t whether we should kill babies but when does a fetus become a baby.

And I suspect that - just like age of consent, age to drive a car, or age to become a senator - the decision will be a legal judgment, absolutely arbitrary, and will no doubt be regularly re-litigated as scientific knowledge of the development of a fetus increases.

I don’t believe gay marriage is going to go that way.

It is simply going to become more difficult to treat them as second class citizens (or worse) just as it is in matters of race, religion, disability, age, gender, etc., AND IT WILL BECOME INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT to advocate AGAINST association with this particular CLASS of citizen who is different from the norm AND STILL BE CONSIDERED A DECENT PERSON.

And there is the rub. Because my conservative Christian friends (and the not-so-conservative ones as well) have REALLY BECOME COMFORTABLE in the presumption of privilege in the realm of morality bestowed by virtue (VIRTUE?! HMMM… :-)) of being white, heterosexual, Christians. (And if they happen to be MALES, so much the better!)

THIS LOSS OF STATUS AND PRIVILEGE in the eyes of the larger society, which is becoming much more pluralistic and diverse in matters of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and disability, is - to paraphrase the Apostle Paul - the “sting of death” to them.

They don’t fear a gay couple in another state or, for that matter, as their next door neighbors so much as they feel that their neighbors - all or most of them - will no longer consider them decent people.

And, in a “politically correct” society, where their children - whether in public school or, unbelievably, IN BOY SCOUT TROOPS will be taught that their gay friends as well as the gay parents of their straight friends deserve equal treatment and the same presumption of morality as straight people.

And, as with religion and gender and race, once their kids rub elbows with “those” kids THEY WILL SEE - whether or not their parents agree - that this is the moral thing to do in a pluralistic society.

No doubt segregation - that which Dr. Martin Luther King deemed a violation of natural moral law as it is degrading - will continue de facto in private and that’s okay. That’s why the Bill of Rights protects the right of association. That’s why you can belong to a white supremacist church.

I NEED NOT HAVE BLACKS OR GAYS over at my house or in my (truly) private club or my church, if I have “issues” with such people. That is my right.

But if I work in the government or hang a door on my business that says “Open to the Public,” I has better treat ALL people - Black or gay or both - equitably or I will increasingly NOT be seen as a decent person NOR will I enjoy the presumption that the law is on my side.

This is the way it works for everyone. This is the way it works for me.

I work in a tiny, evangelical, Christian company where most (not all) of our employees believe homosexuality is against God’s law and that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.

AND EVEN THERE we treat the prospects and customers and employees of strategic partners,, all MANNER of people, with respect.

Conservatives talk about “tolerance” as if it were a filthy word.

It’s not.

It’s the basis of our Constitution.

We tolerate and work with people in the public arena even if they are profoundly different from us in dress, language, politics, religion, and ethics. And, yes, that includes my religious and politically conservative friends, neighbors, co-workers, acquaintances, and even adversaries (never enemies - even Robert E. Lee couldn’t bring himself to call the federal army from which he resigned “the enemy,” referring to them instead as “those people).

And we count on THEM to tolerate us.


#distressingideas #pluralismandtolerance