Blargh!-Worthy Facebook Memes: Some Helpful Corrections

A couple of times recently on this blog, I've found myself inspired to comment on a Facebook meme. But the ones that inspired these length treatments are hardly the only ones I have something to say about. So, I thought I'd round out this theme with some quick (for me) rejoinders to some of the more problematic recent Facebook memes--memes that just make me want to say "Blargh!"; or, in a few cases, memes that poke fun at those I disagree with, too, but which aren't really fair--and so are memes which I think should make me want to say "Blargh!" (even if I don't). There's more of the former. So sue me.

Anyway, here goes:

1.

No. No, no, no. If you state your opinion it's free speech. If I state my opinion it's free speech. Whether the opinion is ALSO hateful and intolerant depends on the content of the opinion.


2.

Let me be clear about something: I thought the Huckabee-created "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" was a terrible slap-on-the-head-worthy misdirection of the energies of Christians and others. Christians, in my view, should live out an ethic of love--and I'm convinced that living out that ethic is at odds with the sort of theology (usually a biblically fundamentalist one) that would inspire people to endorse and underwrite with their lunch money Chick-Fil-A's support for the systematic social marginalization of our gay and lesbian neighbors. Christians who think Chick-fil-A's support of discrimination is Christian are, it seems to me, Christians who have been deluded by bad arguments and bad theology.

But those very same conservative Christians, deluded as they may be about homosexuality, are also Christians who tend to rather consistently contribute time and energy and resources to food banks and homeless shelters and poverty-focused mission trips and other projects that help the poorest among us. But these contributions are made throughout the year. Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day got them all out on one day.

Don't get me wrong. I believe that the conservative Christian focus on sexual minorities serves, more often than not, as an easy way for conservatives to feel good about themselves: if you happen to have a heterosexual orientation, it's astonishingly easy to avoid the "sin" of homosexuality, so if being a decent human being is about being straight, you get to be good without any effort...at least if you're straight. And this easy validation often serves to obscure all the ways in which our way of life contributes to the problem of poverty, both at home and abroad. In this respect the meme above is gesturing to a deep truth.

But to suggests that Christians in general are more about supporting discrimination against sexual minorities than they are about feeding the poor, based simply on how many people showed up at Chick-fil-A on a particular day...well, that isn't fair to all those conservative Christians who, week after week, year in and year out, are contributing time and resources to helping the needy.


2.

The foundation of a democratic society, the basis for a government "of the people, by the people, for the people," isn't the right to drive. It's the right to vote. It isn't the right to board an airplane. It's the right to vote. It isn't the right to use a credit card or donate blood or open a retirement account.

It's the right to vote.

Asking for ID to vote may not be overtly racist, but it does impose an additional hurdle between the would-be voter and their ability to cast a vote. If you're part of the middle class, you don't tend to think of it in those terms because photo ID has become integral to the middle class way of life--as the above list of standard middle class activities highlights. But there are people who aren't part of that life--such as, it seems, some nuns and students, as well as those who are sufficiently underprivileged that driving their own car, boarding an airplane, making a bank transaction, writing a check, and pawning jewelry are things they only dream about.

Voting rights shouldn't be something they dream about too.

In the absence of substantive evidence of a serious problem of voter fraud, the very concept of democracy seems to demand that we err on the side of enfranchisement.


3.

Of course I'm ready. Because you remember how those violence-hungry liberals rioted and tore the country to pieces back in 2000 when Al Gore lost a highly contested election in a controversial Supreme Court decision despite getting a higher proportion of the popular vote.

Oh, yeah. That didn't happen.

And by the way, although I haven't seen a comparable poster warning about riots when Obama wins re-election, I'm hopeful enough about the general character of the American people that I'm not going to brace for revolution in that case either. Painting the opposition as fundamentally irrational, as poised for violence if the democratic process doesn't go their way, helps no one...which leads to the next meme.


4.

Yes, this meme made me chuckle--cleverly playing as it did with Missouri Republican Congressman Todd Akin's comments about women's bodies having a built in birth control mechanism to prevent pregancy due to "legitimate rape." But then I imagined a comparable meme taking some absurd comment by a Democratic politician--someone who'd been rebuked by the Democratic establishment for saying those very words, who apologized for them--and having whose words turned into a general remark about the stupidity of all Democrats.

There are legitimate thoughts--and dumb ideas--coming from both sides of the aisle. The polarization of our polity is making it harder not only to see this, but harder for everyone to be as thoughtful as we can be. In fact, sometimes members of one party seem obliged to take issue with the good ideas of the other just because the other side came up with them first. Hence, I suggest the following revision: "When a legitimate thought is about to occur, polarized political ideology has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."



5.

Now John Locke is one of the most important modern political and social philosophers. And I don't actually have a problem with Locke's words here. But I'm puzzled by these words being linked to a libertarian website--and even more puzzled that it should be posted by someone I know to be a follower of Ayn Rand's "objectivism." Do these words of Locke's actually support modern libertarianism or Randian objectivism?

I won't answer that in detail here. But it bothers me when a philosopher's words are taken out of the larger context which is required for us to understand what those words are really about. And so, being a philosophy teacher, this is a good opportunity to offers some philosophy education by providing the context.

The quote comes from a larger passage in the Second Treatise of Government that lays out Locke's basic argument for private property rights. Here's the immediate context:

"Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property."

This context has both a communal aspect--nature is the common property of all--and a private property aspect. And we can't rightly understand the latter without the former. And Beyond this immediate context there is an important broader context. Specifically, Locke offers two important qualifications that limit the right to acquire property through your own labor.

The first such qualification is that this right exists "where there is enough and as good left in common for others." In other words, your right to acquire property through labor is limited if, in appropriating for yourself more than your fair share of the common resources of nature, you leave others with less opportunity for flourishing than you yourself have managed to enjoy.

The second qualification comes in answer to the question of "how far" God has given to us the resources of nature. His answer is two words: "To enjoy." But this leads to his second crucial limit on the right to accumulate property: "As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labor fix a property in; whatever is beyond this is more than his share and belongs to others." So, if you're just greedily accumulating wealth that doesn't add to the quality of or enjoyment of life, then you no longer have a legitimate claim on it. It rightly belongs to others whose quality of life would be enriched by it.

Which leads me to the last Blargh!-worthy meme...

6.

Now this one came to my newsfeed from the same source as the Locke meme, so it's only fair to judge it in terms of Locke's philosophy. And according to that philosophy, those who have appropriated for themselves more than what can meaningfully contribute to their quality of life, or who haven't left as much and as good for others, don't rightly own what they've appropriated, even if they worked hard to appropriate it. And so a government redistribution that makes it available as part of the common good which will contribute to the life quality of those who don't have as much and as good...well, that wouldn't be theft. If what was taken away fell outside of the bounds of our legitimate claim on private property, then the government would be taking it from those to whom it didn't belong. 

Interestingly, the above meme was paired with a quote from one of Locke's intellectual inheritors, a guy by the name of Thomas Jefferson (who adapted Locke's "life, liberty, and property" phrase for use in the Declaration of Independence). Here's the Jefferson quote:

"A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."

Yes--but what about when grossly unequal distribution of wealth, caused in no small measure by those who've gained an economic advantage leveraging it into an opportunity to exploit laborers, to compensate them for their toil far less than their labor is worth--what if such practices lead to honest laborers not having enough bread to put in their mouths? Is redistribution of wealth theft then?

Sometimes, redistribution of wealth is theft. Sometimes, redistribution of wealth is returning what was stolen.

When to Boycott

A few weeks ago, in response to my first Chick-fil-A post, someone left the following comment:

"We should boycott OPEC by not purchasing gasoline. After all, Saudi Arabia executes homosexuals."


At the time I ignored the comment for a few reasons:  (a) the comment was off-topic, since I wasn't arguing in the post that we should boycott Chick-fil-A (although I certainly won't be caught eating there); (b) the commenter, in leaving something so brief and glib anonymously, didn't strike me as likely to be interested in a genuine exchange; (c) Patrick offered a fine response a few days later; and (d) the comment struck me as obviously silly in any event.

But I've since learned from my wife that this comment has become something of a meme. People in her circle of acquaintances keep repeating it, mostly on social media. And things don't become memes unless there are a significant number of people who don't find it obviously silly--who, on the contrary, think it's a good point well made.

And as I reflect more on the issue, it seems that taking the time to actually engage with this comment can offer some insight into a broader question with some social significance: When should we boycott?

There are actually two questions here: First, when do you have a duty to boycott? Second, when is it a noble or praiseworthy thing to boycott, even if you don't have a duty to do so?

In considering these questions, we need an understanding of what boycotting is. Boycotting a business or a product is more than just choosing not to frequent that business or purchase that product. There are all sorts of reasons you might not go to a particular restaurant: you don't like the food, you hate the atmosphere, the manager's your ex. To boycott involves not only withholding your business, but doing so for reasons of conscience: the business is engaged in practices that you find morally objectionable, practices that at a minimun you don't want to underwrite with your dollars.

It typically also involves an effort at collective action: you encourage others to withhold their business as well, or join in with others who are already deliberately and publicly withholding their business, again for reasons of conscience. And associated with this collective action is the aim of putting pressure on the business to change the behavior you find objectionable (or, if not that, to send a message to other businesses that it might not be wise for them to behave in similar ways, since they may lose customers).

Those with a moral conscience anything like mine, however, have a problem in this world: There are so many businesses doing so many morally questionable things that it's hard to keep track of them all, and it would be practically impossible while still living in the world to withhold your business from every company that did something you found morally troubling (or that used raw materials from a supplier that did something morally troubling, etc.).

The example of OPEC oil is actually an excellent one for the purposes of highlighting the problem. Basically, fossil fuels are so implicated in our way of life that to boycott them would require that we remove ourselves from society in a rather decisive way. After all, fossil fuels are used in the growing of our food, in the production and transport of most goods, in powering our homes, as well as in getting us to and from work, getting our kids to and from school, etc. It's not as if our world is set up so that we can easily distinguish between goods that were brought to market only using fuel derived from non-OPEC oil fields. We can't even choose a gas station that can give us such a guarantee.

And this means that the decision to boycott OPEC is the decision to fundamentally withdraw from modern social life, to turn our lives radically upside down. It would likely involve giving up our jobs and homes and communities in order to...well, maybe hope the nearest Amish community will take us in, and failing that learning to hunt with a homemade bow and moving into some remote wilderness.

Now I don't want to say that people can never have an obligation to so radically change their lives, to make staggering sacrifices. But it does seem that as the cost to oneself of boycotting something goes up, the presumption of a moral duty to boycott weakens. And so the case for such a duty must become correspondingly weightier.

There are, I think, at least three distinct factors that make the case for a duty to boycott weightier: (1) the gravity of the wrong; (2) the chances that boycotting will do any good in reducing or eliminating the wrong; (3) the level and directness of your own complicity in the wrong (were you not to boycott).

If a wrong is very grave, but boycotting would probably do no good and it's not the case that your dollars are being used to directly finance the wrong, then the overall case for a duty to boycott may not be especially strong even though the wrong at issue is serious. Still, the seriousness of the wrong all by itself may be enough to generate a duty if there's little or no cost to you--if you can get by just fine without the product. But if the cost to you is a complete upheaval of your life, even if the wrong at issue is grave you may not have a duty to boycott. It might be a noble or praiseworthy thing to do, but it wouldn't be a duty.

So, bringing this to bear on the difference between Chick-fil-A and OPEC: To boycott Chick-fil-A costs me very, very little. Unlike my wife, I don't actively dislike the taste of their chicken. But I don't especially crave it or anything. And there are countless alternatives for getting fed each day.

When the costs are that low, a duty to boycott might arise when you have a significant wrong (e.g., the business finances organizations that actively seek to perpetuate the social discrimination against and marginalization of my gay and lesbian neighbors), some chance of sending a message that could make some difference in the world, and some direct complicity in the wrong were one to give money to the business (since a percentage of Chick-fil-A earnings are donated to anti-gay groups).

On the issue of when it is praiseworthy to boycott, even if not a strict obligation, we need to think about some other issues. For example, boycotting something may not merely create hardships for me, but for others who are dependent on me. As a father, were I to boycott OPEC I would be choosing the weighty implications of this choice not just for myself, but also for my children. And so we need to see how those implications relate to my duties to my children--what I have a right to choose for them and what I don't, how I ought to provide for them, etc. Taking these things into consideration, boycotting OPEC might not be praiseworthy at all. It might even be impermissible.

More broadly, if a boycott has ripple effects that do more harm than good for all those affected, then a boycott might not be praiseworthy even if the wrong one is protesting against is significant.

Finally, while boycotts can be a powerful tool for influencing corporate behavior, their potential to be such a tool may depend on a certain selectivity in their use. If I call for a boycott whenever there's a business misstep, I may have far less effect than if I save that call for those issues that score high with respect to at least one of the factors (1)-(3). And so it may not be praiseworthy to call for boycotts too often or too indiscriminately.

When it comes to the Chick-fil-A controversy, it may be that culturally we have reached a juncture where boycotting a business that funnels profits towards the marginalizations of LGBT persons acquires a certain symbolic significance, one that resonates beyond the particular controversy and succeeds in calling widespread attention to the issue of why so many in our society regard the marginalization of sexual minorities as being the very opposite of the morally upright choice that the Chick-fil-A leadership takes it to be. If  so, then a boycott in this case, at this time, may actually make a difference in a way that it wouldn't have at another time and place. So, perhaps, it wouldn't have been praiseworthy to call for a boycott against Chick-fil-A fifteen years ago, but now it is--even if the wrong being committed, and the consumer's complicity in the wrong, hasn't changed.

In any event, these are some of the factors that I think need to be weighed when deciding whether to boycott a business. Since this is the first time I've ever thought explicitly about this question, I'd be especially curious to know what other people think.

Straw Men and the Chick-fil-A Kerfluffle

As I've followed the heated Chick-fil-A kerfluffle, one thing I've noticed is the plethora of straw men.

The "straw man fallacy," as it's called in critical thinking textbooks, is the fallacy of rejecting a view (or argument) by attacking a related but different view (or argument) that's easier to discredit. You thoroughly discredit a position that your opponent wasn't actually endorsing but act as if you've refuted your opponent (perhaps hoping no one notices the trick, perhaps not noticing it yourself). The fallacy is, I believe, named after the practice of burning in effigy a straw stand-in for the real target of outrage.

Sometimes the straw man fallacy is deliberate, sometimes inadvertent. I think the latter is more common: We don't listen carefully, we jump to conclusions, or a pithy retort springs to our lips before we can examine whether it's really fair. We fail to notice a distinction, and so attack what strikes us as outrageous rather than what the other person actually meant (a point which suggests that the straw man fallacy is related inversely to the principle of charity). I'm sure I'm guilty of this myself.

So, for example, Abe encounter progressives who are upset by Chick-fil-A's unapologetic financial support of organizations committed to perpetuating discrimination and social marginalization of sexual minorities. Abe then represents them as being upset about Chick-fil-A COO Dan Cathy exercizing his right to express an opinion, and trumpets how importance freedom of speech is to the American way of life and how awful it is that people are trying to deny Cathy this right. That's the straw man fallacy. To be opposed to practices that promote discrimination isn't the same as being opposed to someone's right to express an opinion.

There are other examples, from both sides of the debate. I know that some who came to Chick-fil-A's defense were actually opposed to Cathy's anti-gay practices but were equally appalled by certain city mayors who seemed to be threatening the right of Chick-fil-A franchises to operate within their cities. They were worried about the precedent that would be set if the right to do business could be jeopardized by where you donated money--but they were treated as if they thought there was nothing wrong with those donations. Defending someone's right to do X is not the same as saying X is right.

I'm sure you can provide your own examples.

My own favorite example comes in response to my own post about the Chick-fil-A business. Not many days later Methodist pastor Brent White, on his blog, vigorously critiqued a distorted variant of my post--rendering my argument easy to attack by ignoring terms like "many" and "in most cases," and by uncharitably interpreting an ambiguous use of the phrase "these people" so as to make the people referenced a much broader class than I had intended to be talking about. I suspect, given his tone of righteous indignation, that the straw man fallacy in this case was inadvertent--that his sense of affront led to a failure to read with care and charity. The result is that the view he was attacking, although it wasn't mine, burned very brightly indeed--as straw is wont to do.

So the question is, what do you do when you've been "straw-manned"? In fact, I think the most useful response is to use it as an opportunity for clarification. If a distinction has been missed, you now have the chance to make it explicit. If a qualifier has been overlooked, you can call attention to it. If you've left something out of your discussion for the sake of focusing on a particular issue--but what you've left out leaves you open to misinterpretation--you can fill in the blanks.

It's easy to get mad and defensive when you've been straw-manned. But it's better, I think, to treat it as an opportunity. One might say something like this: "I actually agree that the position you're attacking is mistaken for the reasons you offer. But I'm afraid you've misread or misheard me if you think that view is mine. Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I could have been. Here's what I meant to say..."

If you're a blogger, I think responding to straw-manning in this way is especially important. Because if one person has misconstrued your position and dismissed it based on the misconstrual, then it's quite likely that others have as well.

But if all of this is right, then I suppose I should do all of this in relation to Brent White's critique of my Chick-fil-A post. Here's how White understands my argument:

The author, Eric Reitan, says that the Christians who turned out last week during “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” did so because they have an “allegiance to an untenable theory about the Bible, a theory about how the Bible’s words are connected to divine self-disclosure, a theory that, as I see it, cannot stand up to any serious engagement with the Bible’s actual content and history.” They are, he says, inerrantists.

Really? For the record, while I’m not aware that my position on marriage and homosexuality differs from Dan Cathy’s, be assured, dear reader, that I am not an inerrantist. John Wesley wasn’t an inerrantist. Neither was Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, Anselm, Augustine, Athanasius, Origen, or St. Paul, for that matter.

This is classic straw-man reasoning. After all, go back just a few words in the very sentence White quotes, and you hit on the qualifying phrase "more often than not." While a universal claim can be refuted by a short list of counterexamples, the corresponding non-universal claim cannot be thus refuted. "All X's are Y's" is refuted by finding an X that isn't a Y. But "Many X's are Y's" is not thus refuted. For White's retort to work, he has to attribute to me a universal claim I didn't make.

But while this is adequate to expose the fallacy, I don't think stopping there is sufficient if one's aim is to use the straw-manning as a springboard for helping to clarify one's position.

So let's step back a little further and put the passage White quotes into its broader context. I begin by claiming that the Chick-fil-A "appreciators"--more precisely, those who stand with Cathy in endorsing the social and legal marginalization of gays and lesbians, as opposed to those who showed up simply to stand against any infringement on Chick-fil-A's right to do business--are guilty of a short-coming in love. But I think the problem lies with their actions more than with their motives: while what they are doing is unloving towards their gay and lesbian neighbors, they don't want to be unloving. They mean well. There is a disconnect between motives and actions.

Of course, this way of putting the issue is premised on the view that the categorical condemnation of homosexuality and the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage really is harmful to gays and lesbians. It wasn't my aim to make the case for that premise in a definitive way (one can only do so much in a blog post)--and so all I did was sketch out my case.

Here's the sketch, put in slightly different terms: Those of us who have really paid close and compassionate attention to the lived experience of gays and lesbians--those of us who have really sought to uncover the fruits of conservative anti-gay teachings--have a very hard time finding those teachings even remotely plausible. In practice, systematically excluding gays and lesbians from access to the bedrock instiution of society, treating their intimate life-partnerships as something less than familial, regarding their love as sin and hence treating their most meaning-bestowing relationships as something that ought to be broken up--all of this damages the lives of gays and lesbians in a holistic way. Hence, all of this is unloving in practice, no matter what the motives.

But it seems to me that many of those who engage in this unloving practice are no less loving in their underlying character and motives than most of the rest of us. So what is the source of the disconnect between heart and action? One answer lies in false beliefs.

So which false beliefs can cause well-meaning people, motivated by love, to endorse practices that bear such bad fruits--often tragic ones--for our gay and lesbian neighbors?

There are, of course, multiple answers. Back in the respective eras of Wesley and Calvin and Luther and Aquinas and Anselm and Augustine and Athanasius and Origen and St. Paul, the answer wouldn't be belief in biblical inerrancy--since, as White rightly points out, inerrancy is a fairly modern notion. But before the modern era, people knew next to nothing about homosexuality. The concept of sexual orientation as we understand it today was essentially unknown. The cultures of these eras lacked the conceptual categories that would have enabled those with a homosexual orientation to make their experience understood in the way that we can understand it today.

And so, in these earlier eras, it is quite likely that the theologians White mentions would have had false beliefs about homosexuality and false beliefs about the effects of church teachings (since those most affected by those teachings lacked the public voice to make their experiences known and understood). If, in relation to sexual minorities, there was a disconnect between their motives and their actions, I'd locate the source, not in a doctrine of inerrancy, but in understandable ignorance.

But the question I was posing wasn't about what caused the disconnect among long-dead theologians. It was about all those decent, ordinary American Christians who showed up on Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day to "appreciate" and facilitate Dan Cathy's financial support of discrimination and social marginalization. What explains the disconnect between their ordinary decency and their committed endorsement of the indecent treatment of fellow human beings?

Again, there are multiple answers. But the modern notion of biblical inerrancy has developed enormous currency among contemporary Christians in the pews, even in mainline churches that do not (at the level of their theology) endorse inerrancy. While I haven't done a sociological study of the matter, I suspect from my personal experience that the opposition to homosexuality among conservative Christians today is most often supported by an appeal to "what the Bible says"--an appeal of the sort that at least implicitly presupposes biblical inerrancy (in the sense that, without inerrancy as a hidden premise, the conclusion simply wouldn't follow).

But this is hardly true of all those who oppose homosexuality and same-sex marriage. White is absolutely right about that (which, again, is why I said "more often than not"). Among Roman Catholics, appeals to various natural law arguments or to Church authority are likely to be invoked. Others offer a range of arguments based on the purported social harms of normalizing homosexuality--which is why I have considered various arguments of this sort on this blog. It's also why I haven't contented myself with critiquing arguments against same-sex marriage, but have sought to make positive arguments in support of it.

And because conservative Protestant theologians from mainline denominations are likely to be conscious of the limitations of proof-texting and more conventional natural law arguments, my first published work on this issue (back in the '90's) took on a holistic biblical and natural law argument offered by a Lutheran theologian, one which tried to read into the Bible a "heterosexual order" to creation and attempted to ground opposition to same-sex relationships in their "violation" of that order.

Perhaps, at some point, I should summarize the argument from that paper (co-authored with John Kronen and published in Faith and Philosophy on this blog. Perhaps I should also devote a post to the various permutations of the natural law argument. There's something to be said for completeness.

But to take up all of these possibilities in the Chick-fil-A blog post would have distracted from its more focused aim--which was to zero in on what I take to be the most influential force underwriting anti-gay discrimination among lay Christians today. And that's why I prefaced my discussion of inerrancy and the way it prevents people from connecting compassionately with their gay and lesbian neighbors by saying that "more often than not" (not "always") the source of the disconnect between motives and actions on this matter can be attributed to an unreflective assumption of inerrancy.

And to be clear, I didn't mean "more often than not" in the history of Christianity. Prior to the modern era, the source of the disconnect was more likely, as already noted, to be invincible ignorance about the nature of homosexuality. Wesley and Luther and Calvin, etc., formed their understandings of sexual ethics without the benefit of being able to appreciate what it is like to be gay. They knew none of the things that can and should inform our thinking today. The question is why so many today don't inform their thinking in the light of this new knowledge. For some it may be misguided allegiance to a traditional teaching that was formed in the midst of profound ignorance. For others it may be something else. But for most Christian conservatives in America today, it seems to be allegiance to "the Word of God."

When I said that "these people aren't biblical scholars," I was referring to most of the conservative Christians lining up to give money to Chick-fil-A last week. Most of them were, I suspect, convinced they were standing up for what the Bible teaches--but not in some nuanced sense of "what the Bible teaches," according to which the teachings of the whole may deviate from and override the teachings of the parts. They weren't there because they had done a study of the Bible as a whole, uncovered the roots of its overarching sexual ethic (perhaps in the light of a careful critical reading of L. William Countryman's Dirt, Greed, and Sex) and taken a side in a controversial theological debate about what the Bible's sexual ethic is (if it has one at all) and how its authority for contemporary Christians should play out in the case of homosexuality.

Perhaps one or two among thousands fit this description. If you're one of them, I'll note here that your arguments should emphatically not be discounted just because they aren't the most prevalent. If they are to be rejected, they should be rejected because they aren't sound. If you are in this camp, you should know that I haven't been convinced yet by the arguments of your peers, and I think your burden of proof is extremely high given the despair and suicidal self-loathing that the views you support sow in too many gay and lesbian hearts. But if you want to share your own substantive positive case for the moral rightness of something that I have observed to cause so much life anguish for my gay and lesbian friends, I'll skeptically consider what you have to say, perhaps in the book on this topic that I've started working on.

But I'll also note here that you aren't typical of those who showed up for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day. My post was about the typical conservative Christians who stood in solidarity with the Cathy family and the Chick-fil-A franchise, who stood with Chick-fil-A because of shared values. And what would these average conservative Christians waiting in line, if asked why they believed Cathy was in the right to use Chick-fil-A profits to support discrimination, have said?

I'm pretty convinced from the body of anecdotal evidence available to me that they would have pointed to the fact that Paul calls homosexual acts unnatural and indecent in the first chapter of Romans. Or they would have invoked some other "clobber passage." Or offered a vaguer claim to the effect that "the Bible calls it a sin."

But I will concede that my evidence is anecdotal--and my experience may be colored by the fact that for the last 12 years I've lived in the Bible belt. Suppose the numbers game turns out differently. Suppose it was only 40% who fit the description I was focusing on in my earlier post--that is, well-meaning Christian Chick-fil-A supporters who failed to allow their choices to be shaped by an appreciation of the anguished cries of their gays and lesbian neighbors, and failed because they were trapped behind walls created by an unreflective allegiance to a doctrine of inerrancy.

Then I'd be wrong in my claim that "more often than not" inerrancy shaped their views. But my deeper point wasn't about how many were trapped behind walls of inerrancy. My deeper point was about how inerrancy can trap otherwise decent people behind walls, how it does so with many Christians, and how in those cases we should treat the misleading doctrine as the villain rather than the people who are misled.

But none of this is to say that every opponent of same-sex romantic intimacy is an inerrantist. That is clearly not true. I agree wholeheartedly with Brent White on that point. Where we disagree is on the issue of whether every opponent of same-sex romantic intimacy is mistaken.

That Chick-fil-A Business

I stayed clear of Chick-fil-A yesterday.

And so far, at least on this blog, I've stayed clear of the topic--not because I don't have things to say about Chick-fil-A's staunch opposition to gay rights and marriage equality, but because most of what I've had to say someone else has already said as well as I can--points about the right to free speech not being a right to be free from criticism for what one says; points about Chick-fil-A doing more than just expressing opinions, but directing their profits to promoting legal discrimination against gays and lesbians, etc., etc.

But as I was taking my daughter to her gymnastics class a little awhile ago, I couldn't help but look at all the happy, smiling Christians who were dropping off and picking up their kids...and wonder how many of them stood in a long line yesterday to eat bad fast food.

The owner of the gymnastics studio puts on Christian pop music during open gym. She exudes niceness. I saw the playful smile and wave she gave my daughter as we walked in. And I wondered if she'd gone out of her way yesterday to support a business that's fighting hard to make sure my best friend John and my cousin Jake are denied full equality in our society.

Here's one thing that's clear to me: Chick-fil-A's president stood up and said "guilty as charged" because he believes in what his company stands for. Many, if not most, of the people who stood in line on "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" were sincere. They thought they were doing something good. They thought they were standing up for what is right.

Many of the people who deliberately directed money towards Chick-fil-A--knowing it to be an organization that is committed to using some of that money to help marginalize my gay and lesbian neighbors--many of those people mean well.

The difference between us lies not in our disposition to care about and pursue what we take to be good. The difference lies in what we take to be good.

And so, when I call what they're doing a sin--and I do--they're likely to shake their heads and call me crazy. They won't repent of this sin, because they don't think it is a sin. They don't think they're courting divine displeasure. They don't believe they are violating the teachings of Jesus. I think they are, but they don't. Just as they think my gay and lesbian loved ones are violating God's will, even though I am confident this is false.

Let me say a few words about my perspective. I think that biblical inerrancy leads people to plug up their ears with Bible verses so that they don't hear the anguished cries of their gay and lesbian neighbors. I think that the result is a failure of love--a failure to adequately live out the love command of Jesus.

Not that they don't mean to love gays and lesbians. They do. But what would we say about a misguided father who, out of the sincere belief that play is ruinous to children, systematically denies his child the right to play? Such a father is doing deep and lasting harm to that child. It's not the sort of thing a loving father would do if he knew what he was doing. And so there's a sense in which the father is failing to do the loving thing, even if his motives are loving. There's a disconnect between his motives and his actions caused by a false belief.

Likewise, there's a deep disconnect between the motives of many conservative Christians and the character of their actions--a disconnect created, more often than not, by an allegiance to an untenable theory about the Bible, a theory about how the Bible's words are connected to divine self-disclosure, a theory that, as I see it, cannot stand up to any serious engagement with the Bible's actual content and history.

But these people aren't biblical scholars. They often don't realize they are endorsing a controversial theory about the Bible when they equate every passage with the Word of God. They've never seriously considered any alternative view. Their failure to recognize that they could be wrong in their theory about the Bible isn't the result of a pride so great they don't think they are capable of making mistakes on matters as profound as the nature of divine revelation. It's more a result of simply failing to see that there is a controversy here.

It's like when you look through a pair of sunglasses at the world, and after awhile you forget that the glasses are there coloring what you see. It's not overweaning pride at work. It's simply the fact that no one has pointed the glasses out to them and invited them to look at the glasses themselves.

And so, unaware of the controversial character of their theory, they cannot take seriously the idea that the Bible might contain the prejudices of its human authors. Ancient Jewish culture was homophobic. And--big surprise--homophobic ideas come out in a few scattered passages. Is this God's eternal Word, or is it the filter of human fallibility and small-mindedness manifesting in the Bible's pages? Can we view this collection of texts as sacred, can we lend it deep authority, let it provide the organizing narrative of our lives, without treating it as so infallible that we have to follow it even when the neighbors we are called upon to love cry out in despair, crushed by the oppressive application of a few isolated lines of text? Can we judge prophesy by its fruits, as the Bible recommends, even in relation to the Bible itself?

I've argued that we can (here, for example). And if we do, what follows? To know the fruits of the categorical condemnation of homosexuality--to know the fruits of what Chick-fil-A so proudly endorses--we need to look at how this teaching affects our gay and lesbian neighbors. And I don't mean that we should look at whether they get what they want or not, but that we should look at how their lives go.

Those of us who have really paid attention to our gay and lesbian neighbors, who have listened to their collective witness, have consistently come away with an inescapable conclusion: The traditional Christian teachings on homosexuality have deeply poisonous fruit. They help drive people to suicide and despair. These are teachings that are anti-evangelical in their effect, twisting and distorting the relationship that gays and lesbians have with God. The signs of spiritual awakening--the fruits of the spirit--tend to flood in only after gays and lesbians have shaken off and rejected these teachings.

I cannot make the case for all of these claims in a blog post. My point in sharing these things is to provide a context for understanding what I have to say. My point is that these lessons, these insights about the poisonous effects of traditional Christian teachings, come from paying sustained, compassionate, open-minded attention to our gay and lesbian neighbors. But for so many Christians, the very thought of such attention feels like a betrayal of God. To open oneself up to what our gay and lesbian neighbors have to teach us, given their outrage and hurt, amounts to opening ourselves up to being proved wrong. And courting the possibility of error--when what would be declared erroneous is something Paul expresses in his epistle to the Romans--seems blasphemous, at least once you've bought the premise that anything appearing in the Bible must therefore be the very revelation of God.

And so, many of my fellow Christian brothers and sisters go through life never really hearing the stories of how our gay and lesbian neighbors have consuming poisoned fruit from the pulpit--or if they do hear these stories, they never really taking them to heart enough to understand their significance. These stories of suffering, of brokenness caused by conservative Christian teachings, are but a whisper--while the message that homosexuality is a sin is thundered from the pulpit as an unquestionable given.

And so, while I can only condemn their support of social marginalization, of discrimination, of hurtful policies and soul-crushing practices, I cannot expect that they will feel remorse for it. You feel remorse when you do something you believe was wrong. The leadership of Chick-fil-A sincerely don't believe they have done anything wrong. Those who stood in line to buy chicken sandwiches sincerely thought they were standing up for something good.

The enemy here isn't these people. It's the system of belief that has trapped them behind walls, walls that block the ability to really hear and appreciate the lived experience of our gay and lesbian neighbors. The biblical invitation to love, to open ourselves up to what lies beyond ourselves, is thwarted by a theory about the Bible that puts so much of what is other beyond the walls.

What they see within the walls leads them to unwittingly support injustice, to magnify human suffering and alienation without ever seeing that this is the consequence of what they do. From behind the walls, given what they see, it looks like goodness.

My job, then--and the job of those who see what I see--is not to call the owners of Chick-fil-A and those who support them evil or hateful or bad. Our job is to help them see the walls, and then to help hoist them up to look beyond.

And if I'm wrong abou this--if somehow I'm trapped behind walls that I don't realize are there--then what I ask is for those who think this is true to return the favor.