I am trying to excerpt a short paragraph from John Holbo for my "Noted for [Day X]" feature: This is what I come up with…
- John Holbo: Weird Arguments About Love and Marriage: "Douglas Wilson… [makes] bad arguments… from a failure to appreciate the sense in which theological arguments ‘can’t be offered’…. The problem isn’t that they can’t be offered – it’s a free country!… It’s that the person offering the argument can’t reasonably expect it to be accepted. It will be – should be – weighed in the balance as a private expression of preference. But someone else’s preference as to how I should behave doesn’t, automatically, carry much weight. Suppose your neighbor leans over the fence and says, 'Dear neighbor, I notice you tend to sleep in until noon on Saturdays. I wish you would get up by 8 AM. I have a moral view according to which people should get up by 8 AM on Saturday morning.' Your neighbor is free to say this. But he isn’t entitled to you taking him seriously. If you tell him to keep his opinions to himself and he gets indignant – 'that is a rigid standard for public discourse!' – the scene has crossed over into comedy. Best of all would be if he developed a mild persecution complex, slinking along your fence of a Saturday morning, a cross between the Underground Man and the Soup Nazi. Imagine a character who is always telling people what to order in restaurants and, when they refuse, rolling his eyes unto heaven: 'The early Christians were persecuted, too!'… [T]here is some confusion about what ‘respect’ for religious liberty properly entails. Legally and morally, people are inclined to treat religious convictions as more than mere 'private preference'. (If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be so many efforts to accommodate religious belief.) But obviously there is something problematic about obligatory 'respect' that treats everyone as having a duty to, sort of, half believe everything that anyone wholly believes, on religious grounds. (The Flying Spaghetti Monster is designed to embarrass this way of thinking, and rightly so.)… That’s not quite like having an established religion, more like semi-establishing all religions. Which some people may think sounds pretty good, actually. But it shouldn’t."
This is far too long. But I cannot compress it and stll do it justice. What do I do? To have every single "Noted for [Day X]" to have a:
- John Holbo: What John Holbo said
line is deeply inadequate as well…
