Leadingchurch.com

NY Times

It is common, this freshman urge for self-invention. The football player tries his hand at poetry; the classical violinist fiddles in a bluegrass band. But Ms. Tushnet — whose parents, Mark Tushnet and Elizabeth Alexander, are a well-known liberal Harvard law professor and a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, respectively — did not imagine that she would become a Roman Catholic, nor that 10 years after graduation, her voice, on her blog and in numerous articles, would be one of the most surprising raised against same-sex marriage.

The Atlantic Conor Friedersdorf

Discriminating Between Discriminations

Some of the considerations supporting our limited prohibition of racial discrimination apply to discrimination against gay Americans. But some don’t. Sexual orientation, unlike race, is not transmitted across generations, which means a gay person born in 1980 is not starting from a position of disadvantage that can be traced to a legacy of homophobic laws in the same way that a black person born in 1980 is likely to be disadvantaged by centuries of government-enforced racism. We don’t see the same profound and persistent socioeconomic disparities. Sexual orientation is also not generally obvious to casual observation in a commercial context, which as a practical matter makes exclusion more costly and labor intensive for the bigot. And while I’ve seen any number of claims that allowing private orientation discrimination would give rise to a new Jim Crow era, the fact is that such discrimination is already perfectly legal in most of the country, and it seems as though very few businesses are actually interested in pursuing such policies.

Rather, the actual cases we’ve been hearing about recently involve bigoted* photographers or bakers—who run small businesses but are effectively acting as short-term employees—who balk at providing their services to gay couples who are planning weddings. (I take for granted that gay marriage should, of course, be legal everywhere.)  What’s the balance of burdens in these cases? The discrimination involved here doesn’t plausibly deny the gay couples effective civic equality: There are plenty of bakers and photographers who would be only too happy to take their money. Under the circumstances, the urge to either fine or compel the services of these misguided homophobes  comes across as having less to do with avoiding dire practical consequences for the denied couple than it does with symbolically punishing a few retrograde yokels for their reprehensible views. And much as I’d like for us all to pressure them to change those views—or at the very least shame them into changing their practices—if there turn out to be few enough of them that they’re not creating a systemic problem for gay citizens, it’s hard to see an interest sufficiently compelling to justify legal compulsion—especially in professions with an inherently expressive character, like photography. In short: Yes, these people are assholes, but that alone doesn’t tell us how to balance their interest in expressive association against competing interests at this particular point in our history.

GroundMotive

Furthermore, although the Greek can be translated as “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted,” as it is in the NRSV, if we pay attention to Matthew’s writing style elsewhere, then it is not just some of the eleven that doubt. They all do. Grammatically the second pronoun is not used in a ‘partitive’ sense. In Greek, there is a hoi men . . . hoi deconstruction that means ‘some . . . others’. Hoi de (used on its own) can also mean, ‘some on the other hand . . .’ But Matthew doesn’t use hoi de that way anywhere else. So in 28:11, Matthew is actually saying: “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but [they] doubted.”

The word Matthew uses for “doubt” here occurs in only one other place in his gospel: in Matt 14:31, when Jesus, after the ‘walking on the water’ encounter with Peter, says to him “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” In that narrative, worshipping Jesus follows fear and doubt. Here, it seems, seeing Jesus and worshipping him and doubting is something the disciples experience at the same time.

Dreher

• The Guardian

First Things

But they didn’t go anywhere, did they? They stayed put. They didn’t venture an inch. They didn’t undo a single sin anywhere. They remained together and they were still there when Thomas finally shows, late. (That’s what we should call him, “Late Thomas.”)

John 20:19 shows the stone wasn’t rolled away to let Jesus out but to let us in.