Well, first off - fascinating piece, and I will have a longer response up at a later time, but I think you're very much on to something here with this question of Self and Value and our inability to draw meaningful connections between the two.

However, you have placed this in the Goodbye to Culture11 series and this is another relationship which I can draw no sensible parallel between... ;-)

All this inside the blog world weeping and ripping of garments is pathetic. Scott writes in his lachrymose good bye "...C11 was destined to be much more than just an on line magazine or a series of blogs." Apparently those in control of destiny had a different destination in mind. Jeez, maybe Calvin was right, good works count for naught. I'm relegated to a very uncomfortable spot, I mean that rock and hard space, frying pan into the fire, agreeing with Will. Oh Lord, what shall we read! Let's hear it for the free market.

E.D. - Exactly. And if you could find a good, concise explanation as to how to take that road, I'd be forever in your debt.

Well said, Mark.

So, the example of essentially theocratic arguments doesn’t refute what I said at all - it is instead a good example of choosing the intellectually lazy approach to ideology over the healthy, but intellectually challenging approach.

Right on the money. Is this, in a sense, a question of simply taking the high road in all debates, arguments etc.? When faced with pure partisanship, or thoughtless ideology, one must simply take the Zen approach? Find the way to maneuver the conflict by doing the least harm, and making the most strides forward?

So much to consider...

“I understand that you are not convinced by the theory of evolution, which conflicts with your deeply held beliefs."

I noticed being nice to creationists has never accomplished anything, for the same reason being nice to a terrorist who wants to kill you won't accomplish anything. I prefer to tell the creationist retards to keep their breathtaking stupidity out of our schools or else they will be taken to court.

Its funny that you use the word "exhausted" because I am exhausted too. I thought a lot about this since last posting and your posts have made me evaluate my point of view which is yet to be determined. Thank you for the rational discourse and respect. Nice blog, not too nasty, which is rare and unusual. My opinion may be changing based on all of these posts of mine and others.

Seriously. Why do the theocrats, crypto-totalitarians, neo-imperialists, corporatists, and garden variety hacks get so many venues (from RS to NR to FR)? It's a sad world when Hugh 'Shit-for-Brains' Hewitt has a 24/7 podium from which to spew his idiocy, but the likes of Friedersdorf and Poulos are standing in the bread lines of the blogosphere.

Every day, I warm a little more to Freddie's thinly veiled revolutionary machinations.

Jack, the one thing you don't have to worry about is that particular act of God taking much longer. Then perhaps they'll pick another reformer, or at least another decent man like John Paul II.

Thanks for stopping by!

E.D.:

It's impossible to express the degree of disgust I feel at the Church for this re-investiture.

To be clear, I'm a nonbeliever (to use President Obama's phrase) and non-practicing, but I was raised Catholic and follow the Church as a serious and important global institution, hopefully, as a force for progress. I root for the Church in much the same way as I root for the Red Sox.

But this is simply intolerable. When Cardinal Ratzinger first became Pope Benedict XVI I kinda cringed at some of the Nazi cheap shots just because, well, to have expected any kid to make the moral choice to reject the duties of the state imposed by joining the Hitler Youth is unfair.

But not now. As far as I'm concerned, the Vatican is a malign force until the day Benedict dies.

You know what, he didn't smoke. He complained about not smoking, and warned us that he might be off his kilter a little because of it, but he did great. Not a cigarette in sight.

Bob

My nature argument is that marriage is an idealization of the male-female relationship that bascally exists in all living things except for rare times like asexual reproduction. Hopefully, we can all agree that we need intersexual activity for the world as we now it to go on, not just for humans but all life. Marriage is mans' codification of that union with additional motivation including bloodline, property, etc. But it is a codification of male-female unions that exist in nature. I am not arguing that marriage is nature but that it is mans' codifying of behavior that exists in nature. Whether polygamous or not, it has always been male-female, as coupling in nature is, notwithstanding nature under duress, meaning no mates leading to asexual reproduction. My nature argument is simple - it takes male and female to reproduce, egg and sperm, one produced by man, one produced by woman. Marriage is mans' way of exalting that natural action, protecting it, enhancing it with additonal rights that are only specific to humans. It is simple belief, don't complicate it. I don't believe that it is an argument because I don't have to convince anyone of what I believe. The only argument is the one against marriage as it currently stands.

You said asexual reproduction means my nature argument doesn't work. You misstated my argument by saying that I said marriage is a mirror of nature. If I did argue that marriage was a mirror of nature, by arguing asexual reproduction as disproof of marriage as nature, you were in effect arguing that there should be no laws if any anomaly exists, thus no laws, because there is always an exception. Do you see that your argument doesn't grasp what I am stating?

Yes, circumstantial or perhaps geographical segregation does exist at very high levels but this is not based on purposeful segregation so much as it is on the nature of racial groups to live in segregated neighborhoods in a semi-organic fashion. This would not be the case with nerds or gays, at least I don't think.

Also, I think both the notion of kicking kids out of school and creating schools specially for them is just a little absurd in that a lot of teenagers are very confused about their sexuality. There's a lot of questions, doubt, experimentation etc. that goes on for young people. A lot of them probably won't come to grips fully with that part of their maturing selves until after high school. People should not be so quick to either judge them or encourage them to fully understand their own complicated sexual beings at that young, hormonal age...

I think you're absolutely on to something with that Scott, but I wonder where one can draw a clear distinction. Sports perform a social function. Arguably so do other forms of entertainment. So it's tricky. And politically I think it's very muddy waters to go at the jugular of the private schools, whether or not they deserve it...

I think there is a difference between employment and school, though, just as there are different rules for private clubs vs. places of employment. I'm not placing a value on that, per say, but there are reasons for this.

And I do support wrongful dismissal laws for employment purposes.

Agreed, E.D. And my comment wasn't meant to reflect otherwise. But does this mean, therefore, that you don't believe the State has anything to say about a private company firing someone because they suspect or it comes out that that person is homosexual?

I'm not arguing for no boundaries, I'm arguing for boundaries where they make sense and I can't personally find any logical reason why a private business can't fire someone based on their sexual orientation (something that seems obvious on the face of it) but a school can kick two students out based on the same evidence.

I guess on a practical front, I'd say if my son or daughter were gay, and there was a private school hostile to gays I would certainly not send them there and they wouldn't benefit from my patronage. However if there was a public school whose administration was hostile to gays I would take legal recourse.

I'm just not sure it's an easy question at all, though, and you're probably right to be "agnostic" on this one. I wonder if there are legal grounds for "wrongful dismissal" if a private school expelled a child for just thinking they were gay. Sort of like wrongful dismissal in the work place?

Look, I'm agnostic on this question. I do think that there is a huge difference between a priest being forced to engage in the behavior of giving a sacrament to anyone, like the sacrament of marriage, and a school being allowed to keep children out because they think the children have the status of being gay, a status which might not reveal itself in behavior on school grounds in any way. I think it's funny that people mention the right of schools to discriminate on moral content; is any school out there saying "Your daughter can't come to our school because we have an intuition she's a bad person"? Not because of some behavior, but because they believed she was a bad person. Of course that doesn't happen; schools don't think that they can intuit that kind of thing, and anyway don't care. As usual, people are more interested in adjudicating and judging homosexuality than in doing so for morality.

I disagree, Scott. There has to be a boundary between the State and private schools, private organizations, my home, and so forth. Allowing the State to determine these things outside the public sphere goes against the very grain of the freedoms from the State, that this country stands for.

I would be very grateful for your thoughts on this piece, though, which touches on some of the notions of freedom of speech and so forth, especially since I mention Canada and their hate-speech laws a bit...