I’ve been doing some thinking about James Dobson’s crusade against gay cartoon characters - er, I mean cartoon characters who are being used to promote tolerance of gays and lesbians (allegedly).
And now that I think about it, maybe he and I aren’t as far apart on this one as I thought. I don’t think that from a Christ-centered perspective, we should be promoting tolerance at all.
Let me say that again. Followers of Jesus should not be tolerant.
Why? Because Jesus didn’t teach tolerance. His teachings went far beyond that. He taught us that we should be promoting compassion, understanding, and sacrificial love towards all people who are different than ourselves - and that includes people who may have a different sexual orientation than ourselves.
Time and again, Jesus encountered individuals who were clearly sinners as defined by his own teachings - adulterers, divorcees, tax collectors (who were oppressing their own people so that they could get rich). And time and again, he responded to them with a non-judgmental love and compassion - far beyond mere “tolerance.” If Jesus responded this way, certainly there should be room in our hearts for non-judgmental love and compassion for a group that Jesus does not even discuss, much less condemn - gays and lesbians.
But instead, parts of the church have chosen to vilify them, saying that their “agenda” is going to somehow infect our youth. They have chosen to wage war against them, lobbying to get discrimination written into the Constitution. And they have ignored the part that all of us have played in undermining the institution of marriage through our half-hearted commitment to it and instead focused on some imagined threat to it posed by gay marriage. This doesn’t seem very Christ-centered to me.
On second thought, I guess Mr. Dobson and myself are pretty far apart on this after all.
Max takes Glenn Reynolds to task for this statement:
“When Ted Kennedy can make an absurd and borderline-traitorous speech on the war, when Michael Moore shares a VIP box with the last Democratic President but one, when Barbara Boxer endorses a Democratic consultant/blogger whose view of American casualties in Iraq is “screw ‘em,” well, this is the authentic face of the Left. Or what remains of it.”
Read the whole thing - it’s worth it. I particularly liked the way he closes the piece:
“If you had your way, Saddam would still be in power.” Yes, if I had my way, Saddam would probably still be in power. And ten thousand American families would not be suffering. That’s an easy call.
Not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families.
But what I wanted to focus on was something I have discussed a number of times in the past - the fact that supporters of the party currently in power seem to be fixated on using McCarthyesque language to attack those who disagree with them.
Case in point - Reynolds’ repetition of that favorite right-wing talking point: anyone who speaks out against the war is a traitor (or at least, borderline-traitorous).
Now, I’m sure I’m just mistaken here, since Glenn Reynolds is a law professor and all, but I always thought that the First Amendment protected our freedom of speech. And given the fact that we’re supposed to be living in a democratic society, I thought that it was the role of our elected representatives to debate the policies which will be followed by our government, not just rubber-stamp the misguided policies of their overlords.
Not that I would ever want to stoop to their level, but it’s thinking like this which makes me wonder:
Which is more traitorous, exercising your Constitutional right to free speech in order to criticize an unjust war instigated by an administration which used misinformation to get it started, or claiming that those who use those First Amendment rights are “borderline-traitorous”?
And which is more patriotic, calling for our troops to come home from a lost cause which is only making America MORE vulnerable to terrorism, or stubbornly insisting that we rack up another several thousand casualties before we finally retreat with our tail between our legs?
And which is more un-American, calling our President on his repeated misrepresentation of the truth, or being the President who brazenly misrepresents the truth to the American people?
Now, the extreme right (our current overlords) has been terribly effective at framing the language in support of falsehood. But imagine how much more powerful it would be if the rest of us could finally learn to frame our language in support of the truth?
I know, I know, I’m just a traitor like the rest of them. But then, I guess the fifty-five percent of Americans who feel the President is doing a bad job in Iraq are as well, right Glenn?
