and then the ad with Megan Fox
Megan Fox
In a 2011 “Esquire” interview, Megan Fox famously confirmed her bisexuality, stating, “I think people are born bisexual and then make subconscious choices based on the pressures of society. I have no question in my mind about being bisexual. But I’m also a hypocrite: I would never date a girl who was bisexual, because that means they also sleep with men, and men are so dirty that I’d never want to sleep with a girl who had slept with a man.”
In just five years, however, this has changed. Students now arrive in my class thoroughly versed in the language and categories of identity politics; they are reticent to disagree with anything for fear of seeming intolerant—except, of course, what they perceive to be intolerant. Like, for example, “What is Marriage?”
My students hated it, as I suspected they would. They also seemed unable to fully understand the argument. As I tried to explain the reasoning behind the conjugal view of marriage and its attitude toward sex, I received dubious stares in response. I realized, as I listened to the discussion, that the idea of “redefining” marriage was nonsensical to them, because they had never encountered the philosophy behind the conjugal view of marriage. To them, the Christian argument against same-sex marriage is an appeal to the authority of a few disparate Bible verses, and therefore compelling only to those with a literalist hermeneutic. What the article names as a “revisionist” idea of marriage—marriage as an emotional, romantic, sexual bond between two people—does not seem “new” to my students at all, because this is the view of marriage they were raised with, albeit with a scriptural, heterosexual gloss.
While I listened to my students lambast the article, it struck me that, on one level, they were right: marriage isn’t in danger of being redefined; the redefinition began decades ago, in the wake of the sexual revolution. Once the link between sexuality and procreation was severed in our cultural imagination, marriage morphed into an exclusive romantic bond that has only an arbitrary relationship to reproduction. It is this redefinition, arguably, that has given rise to the same-sex marriage movement, rather than the other way around, and as the broader culture has shifted on this issue, so have many young evangelicals.
Biblical Gender Roles ht Wendy Gritter Facebook
There are so many interesting layers to the article and both discussions.
http://theweek.com/articles/557089/how-irelands-gay-marriage-vote-exposes-catch22-modern-christianity ht. Dreher
Linker
Confronted by critics preaching equality, defenders of the institution’s authority and traditions invariably end up sounding like modern-day Pharisees upholding abstract rules and ancient privileges against a gospel of love and universal dignity. It’s fruitless.
Dreher
Traditional religion, he contends, cannot withstand the appeal to equality, which Linker defines as “the equal dignity of all persons” — a position that is profoundly Christian. (But what, I would ask Damon, is a person? “Equal dignity” does not mean that everyone should have an equal right to believe and to do whatever they want. But that’s a different argument.) Any dogma or doctrine held by churches that is deemed contrary to Equality melts like wax before a flame. The Catholic writer James Kalb has called the essence of liberalism — that is, the post-Enlightenment forms of thought that define both conservative and liberal politics in the West — “equal freedom,” which he explains in this interview, about his bookThe Tyranny of Liberalism:
Handing This In Late
I finished reading this book right before a week of vacation, wrote half of what I wanted to write on chapter 10, but then didn’t pick up this task again until now. I’ve listened to chapter 10 twice and mulled on it, and the book for a while now. John Suk posted a review in GoodReads review.
I posted what I think is probably my briefest summary of this book as a comment.
It is in the end kind of a self-help book. He charts a course to help yourself to become the kind of person that David Brooks thinks you should be. This type of person embodies the virtues of 20th century “middle America” with a “now improved with better treatment of blacks, women and gays”. It’s a mid-century modern mainline ethos that tries to avoid the self-indulgent cliff he sees today.
Now to what I started before vacation.
The Big Me Continue reading
The Culture War as Competing Visions of “The Good”
In the most contested battlegrounds of today’s culture war both sides imagine themselves occupying the moral high ground and the other is morally deficient. Where they differ is where they imagine they derive their source of morality.
Cultural Conservatives and traditionalists will tend to appeal to religious or cultural tradition or religious texts for their moral guide. They feel that the Bible, the Koran, the ways of our founding fathers or past cultural lights should have the authority to shape our private and public worlds.
Many of the cultural progressives today also appeal to a source of authority, the true self within. Culture should support the free expression of individual identity and convictions, at least as far as it doesn’t hurt or impinge on the freedoms of others. This is an egalitarian, libertarian and individualistic view of the good where individuals as free moral agents are served best by creating the lives their passions or inner selves dictate and the duty of society and community is to support these developments. The idea is that if all are thriving as individuals then the community itself will thrive.
David Brooks in his book The Road to Character outlines this conflict.
If you were born at any time over the last sixty years, you were probably born into what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called “the culture of authenticity.” This mindset is based on the romantic idea that each of us has a Golden Figure in the core of our self. There is an innately good True Self, which can be trusted, consulted, and gotten in touch with. Your personal feelings are the best guide for what is right and wrong.
In this ethos, the self is to be trusted, not doubted. Your desires are like inner oracles for what is right and true. You know you are doing the right thing when you feel good inside. The valid rules of life are those you make or accept for yourself and that feel right to you.
“Our moral salvation,” Taylor writes, describing this culture, “comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” It is important to stay true to that pure inner voice and not follow the conformities of a corrupting world. As Taylor puts it, “There is a certain way of being that is my way. I am called to live my life in this way and not in imitation of anyone else’s…. If I am not, I miss the point of my life. I miss what being human is for me.” 17
From an older tradition of self-combat we move to self-liberation and self-expression. Moral authority is no longer found in some external objective good; it is found in each person’s unique original self. Greater emphasis is put on personal feelings as a guide to what is right and wrong. I know I am doing right because I feel harmonious inside. Something is going wrong, on the other hand, when I feel my autonomy is being threatened, when I feel I am not being true to myself.
In this ethos, sin is not found in your individual self; it is found in the external structures of society— in racism, inequality, and oppression. To improve yourself, you have to be taught to love yourself, to be true to yourself, not to doubt yourself and struggle against yourself. As one of the characters in one of the High School Musical movies sings, “The answers are all inside of me / All I’ve got to do is believe.”
Brooks, David (2015-04-14). The Road to Character (pp. 249-250). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
It isn’t hard to see why there is so much angry conflict. Most of us hold these positions pre-consciously. We experience them simply as part of how we see the world. When someone or something violates our sense of “the good” we react.
Both sides in the culture war feel themselves to be deeply moral, but their sources of morality differ greatly.
Conflict in the Early Church of Rome Continue reading
David Brooks Nails the Implicit Contemporary Source of Identity and Moral Authority
In progressive American culture