Dear visionaries,
I am sorry to leave our discussion just when it gets to “the feast of reason and flow of soul” stage. But I will be out of town this next week. Have fun with this.
Robert says: “What she advocates is that laws are created preventing someone from being fired . . .” But to give liberty (from being fired) to an employee is the flip side of the coin that takes away the liberty to fire from the owner. Focusing only on the liberty you grant is nothing more than press release philosophy. All laws restrict freedom as well as grant it. Our debates are therefore about who should enjoy what liberty and who should be restricted in what way. And so that I may remain Johnny One Note, by what standard should we make these decisions?
And when, in Robert’s idyllic scenario, he suggests that Mrs. Schwartz learn to overcome her bigotries and bake little Jason cookies, just two comments. First, I have no problem with elderly Lutheran widows showing kindness to anyone, including homosexual neighbors. Second, I do have a problem with calling the cops if she does not do it. If a Christian feels morally responsible to her God for what goes on in her apartment upstairs, to force her to compromise her religious standards (by passing a law making it illegal to take sexual orientation into account as she rents) is calling the cops on her religious beliefs. You are forcing her to conform to your views, and forcing her to abandon her own. Just say so, and you will all feel better.
Robert also said, in response to my friend’s post: “Not one of the people who belong to this email, whom you’ve labeled “Moderns,” has advocated violence, but somehow now you’ve accused people of it.”
See above. What happens to those people who say that their Christian beliefs do not permit them to rent to homosexual couples? Does anybody respond with, “I am sorry you feel that way. But after all, it’s your apartment. You bought it”? Or do they complain to the people with guns who have the power to fine and incarcerate? What do you think violence is?
And Thomas is the latest participant on this forum who believes that we can somehow be embarrassed by a magazine we have been publishing for close to fifteen years, and have been mailing all over the country. You know, when we publish something, we don’t mind when folks read it. Please, have at it. And we don’t even mind things taken out of context, so long as you spell our names right. Like Tom Petty, we are not backing down. You all can try something else now.
And Susan is to be commended for being one of the few in this discussion that is actually interacting with what we say. Not that praise from us will be likely to make her day, but there it is anyway. She missed one important thing, however, when she took my last mathematical observation as supportive of a “breeding for power” approach on our part.
What actually happened was this. Over the last twenty years, we have delighted in our children, and have had many of them. We don’t shuttle them off to day care, or leave them with professional care providers. And we home school them, or have them in schools which encourage direct parental involvement. Our families are tight. We have had many children because we love them, despite hostile stares or comments from those outside our community. To quote a comment made to my wife on the street years ago, “My, you don’t believe in the pill, do you?” But we didn’t mind — kids are a kick. And, as I can now say, grandkids are a kick. It just keeps getting better.
But then one day, we were distracted from our work by all this yelling that was coming from the general direction of the Moscow School District. “Where have the kids gone!? How could this have happened? Maybe they moved out of the state!” And the powers that be put lighter fluid in their hair, set it ablaze, and ran in tight little circles. “Where are the kids?” You see the state takes away money for each little breathing bipedal carbon unit that doesn’t show up in the classroom each autumn, and it turns out this is serious business.
So, against my better judgment, I say something like this: “Um — maybe you don’t have kids in your schools because you quit having them. And if any actually make it into the womb, you think it should be legal to get them out of there violently. Talk about eviction. And if any of successfully run that gauntlet and actually show up, you provide them with a fifth-rate education, and then turn them loose into your hollow and ugly world. And maybe you don’t have access to our kids anymore because we looked at all this and quit handing them to you to educate. Just a thought.”
Take care not to get the whole thing turned around. Susan’s sign-off — “breeding my way to a better tomorrow” reminds me of a joke that can be reapplied to our situation. Early in the twentieth century, a refined woman from Boston was at a high brow social gathering where she met a woman from Chicago, who didn’t quite fit with the refined lady’s ideas of deportment. “Here in Boston,” the great lady said with a sniff, “we think breeding is everything.” “Well,” the other lady said, “out in Chicago we think it is a lot of fun, but we don’t think it’s everything.”
“Apologetics in the Void” are repostings from an on-going electronic discussion and debate I had some time ago with members of our local community. The list serve is called Vision 20/20, and hence the name “visionaries.” Reading just these posts probably feels like listening to one half of a phone conversation, but I don’t feel at liberty to publish what others have written. But I have been editing these posts (lightly) with intelligibility in mind.