re Dan’s post to the effect that making the wrong argument to the right effect can be a problem, let’s don’t forget that we can point that out to lots of people:
Instead, he argues from organizational self-interest — never mind if it is right or wrong, the policy puts Scouting Inc. in a tough position, so best to abandon it. Duty to God and country? To heck with that — management always has its own priorities.
Depending on your point of view, Gates is either doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason or doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
It’s a long way to Tipperary, and it’s a long way from here to charitable, hospitable Toleration.
Here’s your reference frame:
Last month, as Indiana’s rather tame religious-freedom legislation was being torched by the mob, America’s more devout dissenters were informed that the price of participation in the marketplace was the subjugation of one’s conscience to one’s Caesar. “You can’t opt out of the law,” the agitators explained. “This isn’t the Jim Crow South!” Their core message? That if we all keep quiet about our views — and if we treat commercial transactions as commercial transactions — nobody will end up getting hurt. Or, put another way: “Cater my wedding, you bigot.”
So at the time, the range of responses that didn’t require an immediate change of laws (which I think is strongly warranted) and didn’t insist that only bigots could oppose gay marriage described an arc from “go along to get along” to “deal with the problem when it comes to you” to “do business with absolutely anyone, but do it in a noisily Christian way.”
(Actual bigots just don’t get a voice in this conversation, as far as I’m concerned. But people who treat others according to their real human dignity and yet decline to participate in their delusions and promote their self-destruction need a sensible, lawful, just way to do what’s right.)
All three of the above strategies were recommended by those (including me) who thought that pre-emptively declaring “won’t serve pizza at gay weddings” was unwise. My favorite is the last, actually.
This case suggests the limitations of such strategies, and what you must anticipate if you adopt it:
a Canadian Christian jeweler custom-made a pair of engagement rings for a lesbian couple, Nicole White and Pam Renouf, at their request. Later, when they found out that the jeweler personally opposes same-sex marriage, they went to pieces and demanded their money back.
…
Let’s understand what happened here. This Christian jeweler agreed to custom-make engagement rings for a lesbian couple, knowing that they were a couple, and treated them politely. But when they found out what he really believed about same-sex marriage, even though the man gave them polite service, and agreed to sell them what they asked for, the lesbian couple balked, and demanded their money back — and the mob threatened the business if they didn’t yield. Which, of course, he did.
I think this is a good example of the kind of sober reflection on current events that we need to be doing–for our sake, and especially for the sake of those who must learn to live in the world we’ve made:
Listening to these voices made me think again of David Brooks’s astute comment that there are the Résumé Virtues and the Eulogy Virtues. The résumé virtues are what create success in status competitions. The eulogy virtues are what gives meaning to life in the face of the inevitability of that ultimate failure, death.
The problem is not that these teens are pushed to succeed at school; it is that when confronted by their own fear that they may fail to do so, at least at the same level as their peers or their parents, they have not been given a powerful vision of how and why their life would nonetheless be worth living.
I would change “the” to “a” in the first sentence, but I emphatically agree that some sort of modus vivendi would be an acceptable alternative to the sort of charitable and hospitable Toleration that I would prefer, and that it is up to Christians to take the initiative to seek this and find it.
I suspect the main danger to our freedom to practice our faith publicly comes precisely from this culture-war mentality in which Christians always approach their neighbors solely in a mode of hostility, thus legitimizing and reinforcing ther hostility to us. Our only hope is to defuse the culture war, and that will only happen if Christians approach their neighbors (they will not go first, we have to) and say, “we don’t want to be locked in this struggle with you. We can share this country.”
However, I have to say that from a Catholic perspective, it simply doesn’t look like this. Our leaders have, if anything, spent too much time trying to do exactly this: you have no idea how much surprise and betrayal there was when, after advocating for something like Obamacare for decades, the bishops discovered that the administration was planning to target their institutions! To me, this was a profoundly encouraging moment: the Church was suddenly startled awake, and began to re-articulate its basic principles in ways that reminded the faithful that these were consequential. We need more like this, not less.
In writing to Don Giovanni–a Catholic priest, Lewis commented on the matter and observed that modern man was in such a lamentable state that perhaps it was necessary “first to make people good pagans, and after that to make them Christians”.
