Civil Commotion

Matt Barber is outdoing himself.

It is not so much that Christians wish, willy-nilly, to call homosexual behavior, polyamory, fornication, adultery, bestiality, incest or any other disordered sexual proclivity “sinful.” It is, rather, that we must. For the true Christian, God’s objective truths will always trump man’s subjective desires.

And so this opinion, let’s call it “Kennedy’s folly,” will result in, must necessarily result in, widespread civil disobedience – disobedience of the sort we haven’t seen since the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s.

For 2,000 years, whenever such conflicts have arisen, Christians have placed the laws of God above the laws of man.

What makes you think we’re about to change now?

Ummm … OK. As a practical matter, what would this widespread civil disobedience consist of?

• Will you refuse to sit at lunch counters where same-sex married people are served? How will you know, and who will know or care that you drove down the street to instead eat lunch at … well, where? Mama’s Klavern?

• Will you demand that same-sex married folk surrender their bus seats to you?

• Will you hold massive rallies on the National Mall, and find a charismatic speaker to demand that gay people be stripped of their civil rights so that you are “free at last?” And just whom do you plan to have lead a rousing chorus of “We Shall Overcome?” Sarah Palin?

Seriously: What could this civil disobedience possibly consist of?

I’m telling you right now, Matt: If your civil disobedience consists of not appearing as a loudmouthed belligerent at some relative’s wedding reception it is going to backfire, because all you’re going to provoke is gratitude.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: The Moral Ideal

§353   A criticism of the good man. Honesty, dignity, dutifulness, justice, humanity, loyalty, uprightness, clean conscience … is it really supposed that, by means of these fine-sounding words, the qualities they stand for are approved and affirmed for their own sake? Or is it this, that qualities and states indifferent in themselves have merely been looked at in a light which lends them some value? Does the worth of these qualities lie in themselves, or in the use and advantages to which they lead (or to which they seem to lead, to which they are expected to lead)?

I naturally do not wish to imply that there is any opposition between the ego and its alter in the judgment: the question is, whether it is the results of these qualities, either in regard to him who possesses them or in regard to environment, society, “humanity”, which lend them their value; or whether they have a value in themselves —

In other words: is it utility which bids men condemn, combat and deny the opposite qualities (duplicity, falseness, perversity, lack of self-confidence, inhumanity)? Is the essence of such qualities condemned, or only their consequences? In other words: were it desirable that there should exist no men at all possessed of such qualities? In any case, this is believed –. But here lies the error, the shortsightedness, the monocularity of narrow egoism.

Expressed otherwise: would it be desirable to create circumstances in which the whole advantage would be on the side of the just so that all those with opposite natures and instincts would be discouraged and would slowly become extinct?

At bottom, this is a question of taste and of aesthetics: should we desire the most honourable types of men, that is to say, the greatest bores alone, to survive? the squares, the virtuous, the upright, the good-natured, the straightforward and the “blockheads”?

If one can imagine the total suppression of the huge number constituting the “others,” even the just man himself ceases from having a right to exist, he is, in fact, no longer necessary and in this way it is seen that coarse utility alone could have elevated such an insufferable virtue to a place of honour.

Desirability may lie precisely on the other side. It might be better to create conditions in which the “just man” would be reduced to the humble position of a “useful instrument” an “ideal herd animal”, or at best a herdsman: in short, conditions in which he would no longer stand in the highest sphere, which requires other qualities.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: The Moral Ideal

§352   Power, whether in the hands of a god or of a man, is always understood to consist in the ability to harm as well as to help. This is the case with the Arabs and with the Hebrews, in fact with all strong and well-constituted races. The dualistic separation of the two powers is fatal — In this way morality becomes the poisoner of life.

This is the anniversary of the adoption of the language of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress, in 1776; independence of England was declared 2-days earlier, on July 2^nd. Fireworks for All!, I say, and good for us for continuing to strive, however unevenly, toward fulfillment of the ideal of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness for each of us.