Isn't It Ironic

You don't have to accept the terms of the sexual revolution.

Photo by Jonathan Pendleton on Unsplash

It has been such a busy week, and I have a browser full of odds and ends I’ve been wanting to get to. But, one internet item is so nettling me that I feel I must dispatch it rather than working through a lot of disparate subjects. I’m going to suspend Friday Takes for today, and talk about a screenshot from the timeline of Sheila Wray Gregoire that someone sent me this week. If anyone is really disappointed, I’m going to try to do something fun to make it up—maybe today or tomorrow—we’ll see. But first, on to the subject at hand.

It is being said (if the screenshot isn’t a deep fake) that the cry for “charitable” disagreement about some subjects is an unacceptable proposition to make because “these aren’t just theological debates.”*

Goodness, you might think to yourself. That is an interesting thing to say, given that for the last ten decades or so, “charity” and “kindness” have been the rallying cry. No one should take too extreme a position about anything, because that isn’t nice. We should all be able to go on talking about everything all the time because we live in a tolerant and pluralistic society. In fact, one of the foundation stones of social order—so we have been told almost every day of the week—is being able to disagree without cutting the other person out of all human society.

So, one might wonder, what subject could be so essential, so critical as to require shutting down the other side and giving them no quarter to make their case, or even to wonder more about the topic? Is it, perhaps, who should live and who should die?