Civil Commotion

What does this mean? That we should expect great waves of fired-up Southern Baptists to make such nuisances of themselves that only jail can shut them up? God save us from His publicists. Mercifully, they’ve just adjourned and I can stop looking at the bad accident.

Lost? Seriously? Who believes in talking snakes and donkeys and thinks the most important thing anybody can know about himself is that he’s no damn good? The Christian misuse of the word ‘lost’ is a good example of the way that seizing language can shape and misdirect a conversation.

Well.

Discussing Bruce Jenner’s imminent transition to Caitlyn Jenner a few weeks ago, I made the following observation:

But he thinks of himself as female, and that is bound to set up exhausting internal tensions. Surely, rather than disdain, we owe respect to those who have lived with those tensions and thrived in spite of them.

As I mull this over, something else occurs to me. Jenner has expressed a desire, for now, to be referred to as a male; presumably, that will change at some point in the future, and he will ask that he be referred to as a female, and by whatever new name he gives himself. As an editorial matter, and mindful of the difficulties he has overcome along the way, I see no reason why his wishes should not be respected.

But here’s the thing: After all of Michael Jackson’s famous bleachings, could it ever be appropriate, if it were editorially relevant, to speak of him as a ‘white man?’ Something about that bugs me, though I can’t say what exactly, and I think I would resist doing it, though I can’t say why exactly. A binary block of my own? Dunno.

The matter is before us now in the case of Rachel Dolezal, a (just resigned) NAACP official in Washington who was born ‘white’ but identifies as ‘black,’ and who undertook to change her appearance in order to — What? Pass?

There is a lot here to think about, and it doesn’t parse easily.

• Almost universally, science and medicine accept that gender identity and sexual orientation are real things, innate and irrevocable settings in our individual operating systems. With equal unanimity, science and medicine reject the concept of race as objectively meaningful. So glib comparisons of Jenner to Dolezal don’t stand up; Jenner really is in some sense — plumbing be damned — a woman. But none of us are white or black or any other handy identifier; we are homo sapiens.

• But … wait. Those persons we identify as black have a well-documented propensity for sickle cell anemia. Is that natural selection at work then, with cultural pressures toward black unions reinforcing and isolating a genetic trait?

• As a child in school, in the years before the civil rights movement really formed-up, my social studies text book spoke of three major people groups: Caucasians, Asians, Ethiopians. Is that still a staple of early education? I don’t know. What was that actually about, anyway?

  I have seen North Carolina textbooks from the 1930s, and they explicitly declared that Ethiopians are less intelligent, but generally stronger, than Caucasians. Reading them, one has the distinct sense that it is something like comparing my boxer dogs to the neighbor’s yappy little Yorkshire Terrier.

• We tend, I think, to conflate race and culture. Most of us (white folk, anyway) tend, for instance, to avoid visiting predominantly black neighborhoods when possible; we aren’t avoiding blacks per se, however, but the crime and violence we associate with predominantly black neighborhoods; that’s not racism so much as common-sense prudence, but tends to reinforce and exacerbate the isolation that inhered in “separate but equal.”

  There are suburban Detroiters who haven’t been inside the city in decades.

• The eradication of Jim Crow laws should be counted moral progress — but there is a cloud behind that silver lining: the associated “black pride” movement doubtless slowed assimilation of blacks into the mainstream of American society. We all know what the epithet ‘Oreo’ means — and who uses it.

• Returning to race and culture, we have a black president who was born to a white woman, and who spent much of his childhood living with white grandparents in Kansas, and Barack Obama exemplifies I think the distinction I want to make between race and culture.

  It’s easy to imagine standing in line with he and the girls at the local Starbucks, and the prez impatiently rolling his eyes as they try to settle upon an order. But Nicki Minaj of “you a stupid hoe” notoriety? Not so much.

  Obama is in some sense — culturally, I think — like the majority of Americans, though disparaged as an Oreo during the 2008 campaign.

• It was Lyndon Johnson who demanded that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s include public accommodation protections for minorities, and for that he should be celebrated. Without it, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that blacks would still not be sitting at lunch counters here in North Carolina.

• Just yesterday the Southern Baptists, now whooping it up at their annual meeting, adopted yet another resolution urging racial reconciliation. I question the sincerity of that, given that they are an engine of the Republican Party decline into the political arm of a regional religious and racist movement; I think it is no more than cynical recognition of the fact that they are in decline and there are a lot of unexploited black people right here on their home turf. But economic forces move people much more swiftly than platitudes about brotherhood, so good.

So, then: What about Ms. Dolezal? I can no more refer to her as black than I can refer to Michael Jackson as white, even if biologists insist that the distinctions are objectively meaningless. Still got that binary block, I guess.

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

§334   Today when every attempt at determining how man should be is received with some irony, when we adhere to the notion that in spite of all one only becomes what one is (in spite of all that is to say, education, instruction, environment, accident and disaster), in the matter of morality we have learnt, in a very peculiar way, how to reverse the relation of cause and effect. Nothing perhaps distinguishes us more than this from the ancient believers in morality. We no longer say, for instance, “Vice is the cause of a man’s physical ruin” and we no longer say “A man prospers with virtue because it brings a long life and happiness”. Our minds today are much more inclined to the belief that vice and virtue are not causes but only effects. A man becomes a respectable member of society because he was a respectable man from the start that is to say, because he was born in possession of good instincts and prosperous cicumstances —

Should a man enter the world poor and the son of parents who are neither economical nor thrifty, he is insusceptible of being improved, that is to say, he is only fit for the prison or the madhouse —

Today we are no longer able to separate moral from physical degeneration: the former is merely a complicated symptom of the latter; a man is necessarily bad just as he is necessarily ill —

Bad: this word here stands for a certain lack of capacity which is related physiologically with the degenerating type for instance, a weak will, an uncertain and many-sided personality, the inability to resist reacting to a stimulus and to control one’s self and a certain constraint resulting from every suggestion proceeding from another’s will. Vice is not a cause; it is an effect —

Vice is a somewhat arbitrary epitome of certain effects resulting from physiological degeneracy. A general proposition such as that which Christianity teaches, namely, “Man is evil” would be justified provided one were justified in regarding a given type of degenerate man as normal. But this may be an exaggeration. Of course, wherever Christianity prospers and prevails, the proposition holds good: for that demonstrates the existence of unhealthy soil, of a degenerate territory.

The Southern Baptist Convention humiliated itself today by adopting the following resolution.

RESOLUTION 5:

ON THE CALL TO PUBLIC WITNESS ON MARRIAGE

WHEREAS, God in His divine wisdom created marriage as the covenanted, conjugal union of one man and one woman (Genesis 2:18– 24; Matthew 19:4–6; Hebrews 13:4); and

WHEREAS, The Baptist Faith & Message (2000) recognizes the biblical definition of marriage as “the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime,” stating further, “It is God’s unique gift to reveal the union between Christ and His church and to provide for the man and the woman in marriage the framework for intimate companionship, the channel of sexual expression according to biblical standards, and the means for procreation of the human race”; and

WHEREAS, God ordains government to promote and honor the public good and recognize what is praiseworthy (Romans 13:3–4); and

WHEREAS, The public good requires defining and defending marriage as the covenanted, conjugal union of one man and one woman; and

WHEREAS, Marriage is by nature a public institution that unites man and woman in the common task of bringing forth children; and

WHEREAS, The Supreme Court of the United States will rule in 2015 on whether states shall be required to grant legal recognition as “marriages” to same-sex partnerships; and

WHEREAS, The redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples will continue to weaken the institution of the natural family unit and erode the religious liberty and rights of conscience of all who remain faithful to the idea of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife; and

WHEREAS, The Bible calls us to love our neighbors, including those who disagree with us about the definition of marriage and the public good; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Columbus, Ohio, June 16–17, 2015, prayerfully call on the Supreme Court of the United States to uphold the right of the citizens to define marriage as exclusively the union of one man and one woman; and be it further

RESOLVED, That Southern Baptists recognize that no governing institution has the authority to negate or usurp God’s definition of marriage; and be it further

RESOLVED, No matter how the Supreme Court rules, the Southern Baptist Convention reaffirms its unwavering commitment to its doctrinal and public beliefs concerning marriage; and be it further

RESOLVED, That the religious liberty of individual citizens or institutions should not be infringed as a result of believing or living according to the biblical definition of marriage; and be it further

RESOLVED, That the Southern Baptist Convention calls on Southern Baptists and all Christians to stand firm on the Bible’s witness on the purposes of marriage, among which are to unite man and woman as one flesh and to secure the basis for the flourishing of human civilization; and be it finally

RESOLVED, That Southern Baptists love our neighbors and extend respect in Christ’s name to all people, including those who may disagree with us about the definition of marriage and the public good.

The difficulty, of course, is that the Genesis creation account is incontestably false, and so these poor deluded characters are reasoning from a fairy tale.