Poling: Guilt by Association
The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.
This week I read two very different articles in two very different publications that made the same point crystal-clear: Sometimes when you are dealing with a difficult ethical question, a useful short-cut is to figure out what the jerks think and pick the opposing view.
The Jewish Times carried an article describing the conversion of state Sen. Jim Brochin from con to pro on the gay marriage bill that his committee moved out of committee this week. Brochin had opposed same-sex marriage in favor of civil unions, and indeed lost out on an effort to amend the current bill accordingly. Still, he now supports same-sex marriage, and if you take him at his word the credit for his switch goes to the anti-gay marriage activists.
"Ideally," he told the JT's Phil Jacobs, "I support civil unions, not marriage, but I can't side with these people." By "these people," he meant the activists who spoke up at his committee's hearing "calling gay people androids and pedophiles ... saying that gays were beneath us, that they were second-class citizens." However uncomfortable Brochin is with legalizing same-sex marriage -- a position he opposed publicly as recently as two weeks ago -- Brochin was more uncomfortable with "be[ing] on the side on the senate floor demonizing homosexuality." The bottom line for Brochin: "I'm not backing hate and divisiveness."
Public Discourse is a publication of a quite different sort, featuring heady articles that often involve traditional conservatives arguing with one another about topics from philosophy to religion to ethics to aesthetics. I confess that many of its articles sail well above my head, but I always work to understand the pieces written by Hadley Arkes, an esteemed professor of Constitutional law at Amherst College. (That a Williams grad thinks well of an Amherst prof speaks volumes in and of itself.)
Arkes wrote in response to a few recent pieces in Public Discourse arguing that lying is always wrong. Hang on there, Arkes said. If you're not careful with this sort of absolute proscription of telling falsehoods you're going to have to say that the people who hid Jews from the Nazis and lied to the Gestapo were guilty of an immoral act. What's more, you have to say that a moral person could never serve in a position of authority, say, the presidency, that requires complicity with the sort of disingenuousness that enables an agent to infiltrate a terrorist cell.
The fact that your ethical analysis yields such unbearable results, Arkes argues, means that you really need to go back and figure out where you went wrong since you obviously didn't come out with anything resembling what could be considered a right answer. Beyond this, I would note (though Arkes doesn't work this angle in his piece), you make it very, very difficult for people who might be sympathetic to your position to align with you.
On a host of issues, it is undeniable that the way the "Christian Right" has practiced its politics over the years has managed to alienate many people who might otherwise be allies. There's guilt by association, of course, the fear of being seen by others as cozying up to a noxious movement that I encountered on vacation recently when Ravens fans gave themselves extra distance when walking past Steelers fans.
But there's also the fact that people like Jim Brochin, as well as people like you and me who cast votes far less frequently, are from time to time forced to say, "Do I really want to be one of them?" I experienced much the same thing myself several years back, when I found it difficult (given what I know of First Amendment jurisprudence, not to mention American politics) to take seriously the people suggesting hysterically that American pastors would find themselves in danger of being thrown into jail for refusing to officiate same-sex marriages, indeed that this sort of thing was what "the gays" were trying to accomplish.
There is plenty of this nonsense going on on the other side of the aisle, of course, as when teacher's unions want us to believe that anyone who expects a teacher to be either competent or fired is out to destroy public education. In Wisconsin right now the Legislature has been brought to a standstill by people who expect that their fellow citizens will be sympathetic to the notion that public employees shouldn't have to pay for their own retirement and health insurance like the rest of us.
Certainly there are valid reasons to reject the "vote against the jerks" method, not least that being a jerk doesn't always mean you're wrong. But you have to admit it has a powerful attraction, and those who hope to persuade their fellow citizens should perhaps seek first to avoid offending them.
