Round up: this one heavy on links from The American Conservative, but with some liberal links as well
Posted by Sappho on October 8th, 2014 filed in Blogwatch
Conor Friedersdorf on How Christians Could Talk to America About Sex
Noah Millman on A Sign From Hashem? Don’t Know. Helping Others? … Couldn’t Hurt. (These two, combined, are an interesting discussion of sexual ethics.)
Quakers and Sex: A Call to Embrace Sexual Diversity (If Conor Friedersdorf, while not Christian himself, has an interesting take on what traditionalist Christians might have to offer if they expressed some of their concerns in a “Do Unto Others” form, this video, from a more liberal religious point of view, does a nice job of framing the liberal insight as “people differ,” rather than “every choice is equally good.” Every choice in my own life, even every mutually consensual choice, was not equally good; some were mistakes. Probably not every choice, even every consensual choice, is on average equally likely to have good results. But people do differ, and even those who think some sorts of sexual choices are much better than others would do well to acknowledge that people’s subjective experiences of those choices differ a lot.)
Daniel McCarthy on Was the American Revolution Secessionist? (An interesting take on the mixed consequences of the American Revolution.)
Gracy Olmstead on Why Cities Need Localists. (OK, I’m linking a lot of posts on The American Conservative in this round up. Though I’m neither conservative nor localist, I found this one interesting for the questions it raises, about whether cities are inherently less conservative or whether they’re simply less conservative because conservatives have leaned rural, and over what localism might have to offer cities.)
There comes a point in your life when you realize that the stuff that happens in your lifetime is also history. For me, that was the moment, when I was a kid, when my older brother came home and said “They’re comparing Watergate to Teapot Dome.” Nixon’s resignation was still a ways away, but I realized then that I was observing, as it happened, something that would later go into the history books. Then there comes a time, when you’re rather older, when you realize that something you lived through is past history, that Times Change and the college friend who went on to become a rabbi (Josh Marshall’s college friend, not mine, and his post), and who is now coming out of the closet as gay, would probably not be closeted if he came of age now.
Thoreau, at Unqualified Offerings, suggests that
… There’s a non-trivial percentage of Americans who believe putting any paperwork in the way of a person seeking to buy a firearm is tyranny, but putting more paperwork in the way of people trying to vote is sound policy.
Now, they might defend their stance by noting that keeping and bearing arms is a Constitutional right, but even if we leave aside the perplexing ambiguity in the relevant Constitutional language, voting rights are very clearly and explicitly protected in several parts of the Constitution and its Amendments. I’d say that any reasonable interpretation of the Constitution would accord at least as much protection to voting rights as gun rights….
And Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews Jordan Davis’s mother, Lucia McBath, about the guilty verdict in the trial of her son’s murderer, and what it’s like To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black Child.