Tuesday, June 30, 2015

David Brooks to Social Conservatives: Become the Christian Left, Instead.

David Brooks recommends that Christian conservatives give up on a losing culture war about sex.

Instead, he proposes this:

The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other. Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life.

In other words, the Christian right should instead join the Christian left.

I mostly agree with this sentiment.  However, there is a division between Christian left and Christian right in the first place because they disagree about whether the first priority of Christians should be the economic order or the sexual order.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

I Am Glad the Confederate Flag is Down in South Carolina, But Not That Way

When two activists climbed the flagpole and removed the Confederate flag - or more accurately, the Segregationist Flag - from the South Carolina capitol grounds, they acted wrongly, I believe.

It would have been more powerful to have the elected governor of the state take the flag down, as she has already pledged to do. In fact, now South Carolina has to put the flag back up, so that they can take it down the right way.

What makes it all the sweeter is that this particular governor, of Asian descent, would also have been branded non-white by the segregationists who erected the flag in the first place.