Smart people saying smart things

Last updated on: March 16, 2012 at 10:27 am by Fred Clark

Smart people saying smart things 2012-03-16T10:27:39-04:00 Fred Clark

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David Wong: “6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying“

Our entire philosophy about money kind of revolves around this premise — that there is no poor or working class, but only people who have chosen to not buckle down to the task of getting rich (and thus deserve whatever salary, insecurity or poor work conditions they get). So there should be no talk about improving the lives of the non-rich, since any of them can simply choose to elevate themselves out of that group, right?

Seriously, now. How much time do you really have to spend off your goddamned yacht to see that this isn’t true? You don’t even need to leave the dock — there’s a guy standing right there who you pay to fix your boat’s engine. You know that 1) you absolutely need guys like him and 2) he will never get rich doing what he does. He could be great at his job, he might be the Michael Jordan of mechanics, he might work 100 hours a week — it doesn’t matter. Sure, if that one guy somehow also has the head for management and finance and the networking skills, he could maybe open his own chain of yacht repair shops. But they can’t all do that.

So “anyone can get rich” isn’t just untrue, it’s insultingly untrue. You can’t have a society where everyone is an investment banker. And you can’t have a society where you pay six figures to every good policeman, nurse, firefighter, schoolteacher, carpenter, electrician and all of the other ten thousand professions that civilization needs to survive (and that rich people need in order to stay rich).

Sandra Fluke: “Slurs won’t silence women“

Most recently, certain political commentators have started spreading misinformation about the underlying government regulation we are discussing. … The regulation under discussion has absolutely nothing to do with government funding: It is all about the insurance policies provided by private employers and universities that are financed by individual workers, students and their families — not taxpayers.

I am talking about women who, despite paying their own premiums, cannot obtain coverage of contraception on their private insurance, even when their employer or university contributes nothing to that insurance.

Restricting access to such a basic health care service, which 99% of sexually experienced American women have used and 62% of American women are using right now, is out of touch with public sentiment. … Attacking me and women who use contraception by calling us prostitutes and worse cannot silence us.

Andrew Brown: “If lay Catholics now accept remarriage, why not gay marriage?“

The condition of gay and of remarried Catholics is pretty much the same and the scriptural warrant for rejecting divorce is quite a lot stronger than the evidence for damning all gay people. I think it’s pretty clear that the authors of the Bible would have been horrified by gay marriage, but it is nowhere explicitly denounced the way that Jesus denounced divorce.

Despite this, the policy of the Catholic church, in England and Wales at least, is the eminently sensible and humane one of doing everything possible to keep divorced and remarried couples as part of their parishes, attending church regularly. It may be that this is driven more by necessity, or horse sense, than humanity: if only Catholics who fully accepted the church’s teaching on sex went to churches they would all empty. Nonetheless, the argument from humanity would be widely accepted. In Christian language, remarried couples can be a means of grace to one another.

And, if remarried couples can, why can’t gay couples, too?

This is the question that, I think, convicts [Cardinal Keith] O’Brien of something more than old age and pugnacity.

Randall J. Stephens & Karl Giberson: “Conservative Christianity and Its Discontents“

Anti-intellectualism is deeply rooted in American evangelicalism, reaching even into the classrooms of popular schools, like Cedarville University and Liberty University (the largest evangelical university in the world), where students are taught that the earth is 10,000 years old. Millions of evangelical youth grow up hearing that there is a real debate when it comes to human origins. They also come to learn that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle choice that can be repaired with prayer. They are taught that secular historians are suppressing the vision of the Founding Fathers and that America was supposed to be a Christian nation.

Controversies that should have died decades and even centuries ago are kept alive by organizations invested in the answers of yesteryear, often because those old answers, say stalwarts, came from the Bible and are believed to have been laid down by God. These answers informed the thinking of a long-gone society that, through the rose-tinted glasses of those nostalgic for a better time, looks moral, family-oriented, and respectful of God’s laws in ways that the present age is not.

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