At church we talked about how Christians are to be different. To follow not the rules of this kingdom, of this power, of this world… but instead to forgive, to grieve for their sin, to be merciful, to be honest, relying on God and not on wealth and status.
If we are like this, we preserve our culture. if not, we do not. We can see the corporate effectiveness of our witness in the culture around us.
And what I see is fascism and intolerance, generally in the name of freedom and antifascism.
So, Dr. Miller-Young, a who teaches students about black history, pornography and prostitution, apparently committed the crimes of assault, theft and destruction of property. Perhaps one could add on a violation of civil rights (free expression) lawsuit. Incidentally, I’ve often wondered why the absolute worst kind of black women are so often promoted in universities, almost as though those in charge are deliberately creating a caricature of black women as offensive political radicals who revel in smut and abnormality. I look around at my socially conservative black neighbors – who are far more religious than your typical white Seattlite – and wonder why they get passed over. By promoting pornographers like Miller-Young as “professors,” one could draw the conclusion that academics are deliberately promoting negative racial stereotypes and actively encouraging young black women to behave badly, when they need exactly the opposite message.
What is most frustrating about these episodes is that police selectively enforce the law depending on who is involved. If some feminists were promoting abortion and divorce and I were to violently grab a sign and destroy it, you can bet I’d end up in jail that same day. Hell, I’d probably even make the news as an “extremist,” and face widespread condemnation. I might even be charged with a hate crime. But when a liberal – a professor no less – does the same on a college campus, cops laugh it off. According to the students who were attacked, police refused to take any action until they saw video of the assault and theft.
Andrew Sullivan is equally telling — and it tells us how far we have fallen that a classical liberal (who is gay) has to defend a young man (also gay) because — horrors — he went to a Fundie university and is thus unfit for any job in journalism. The soviet dialectic is clearly not dead.
So I’m perusing the web on the airplane to Los Angeles and saw a blast of incandescent gay fury all over the place. It turns out that Ezra Klein had the gall to offer a writing fellowship at Vox to one Brandon Ambrosino, a 23 year-old professional dancer who is a graduate of Liberty College, Jerry Falwell’s joint. Judging from the reaction, you might have thought Ezra had hired Rick Santorum. Oh! the screeds and harrumphs, the sighs and the gasps! Here’s the gay politburo official at Slate, Mark Joseph Stern, in a dreary tract against what he calls Klein’s “unbelievably bad hire”:
[go read it: I’ll wait]
So, as you would, I went and read some of Ambrosino’s work. We posted about one recently but I hadn’t read much else. The most impressive by far is a funny, sometimes moving, self-deprecating and brutally honest memoir of his time as a gay kid at Falwell’s school. Maybe The Atlantic‘s editors made it better (as they do) – but as a piece of writing, it’s livelier and funnier than anything I’ve read from, say, Mark Joseph Stern. As for his other pieces, they do suffer from some occasional cluelessness and attention-seeking pyrotechnics. But is a young writer not allowed some attention-seeking pieces any more? And his critique of gay-left intolerance gains a little poignancy as the rhetorical lynch mob now prowls the interwebs in order to get him fired.
Here’s what I also found: He wants the gay rights movement to adopt more of the forgiveness and compassion that marked the spirit (if not always the letter) of Martin Luther King Jr. He gets a little grossed out by hyper-sexual antics at gay rights parades – which is a bit of a bore, at this point, but within his rights (and certainly something some gay people say sotto voce). He conflates too many issues when discussing gay identity – but, in his emphasis on choosing sexual identity, he echoes the new left rather than the gay right. Sure he trades on being the gay writer willing to criticize the gay world, but he seems perfectly sincere to me, if a little jejune. And why is he not allowed to criticize what he sees? Is he supposed to take some gay test before he’s allowed a voice?
As I say all too often, I am not an American. I do travel to Canada, where I have keep my opinions under my breath because a more relentlessly boring politically correct state is hard to find. I refuse to go to the USA: I consider the TSA a hazard to my safety. I live in a country where gay marriage is legal, and churches can refuse or permit gay marriages. Where the rhetoric is less heated because we generally know our neighbours — the gheyz are not an object of 14 minutes of hate and the Fundiez 25 minutes because they are our neighbours, our workmates. The country is too small to tolerate ghettos — apart from our one big city, and there are good reasons not to live there, including ghettoization.
But on the issue of morality, the church has to discipline its own. We should bear witness outside — but we have to live differently and live better. It is not merely whom you love and how many or The abortion — and these things matter — but how greedy you are, how much you compromise, how much you let hate stop you from seeing that there is has been pain in your enemy — and how much you forgive.
Of all these things, forgiveness is the hardest. I am reminded to pray for my ex-wife — and it is not merely me who holds the scars from my divorce, but my children, my ex sister-in-law (who was in the congregation this morning).
We need to work out how we are going to forgive. How we are going to be truthful. How wer are going to deal with the damage we have done.
And this requires we speak truth.
