A friend told me a couple of days ago that she avoids political blogs because most of them are less about dialogue than about spitfire opinion. She is right, of course; most political blogs are online opinion columns. Of those I read (the "Blogs and Friends" roster at left will give you an idea), my favorites are those where the writers think hard about issues and where readers and commenters do as well, whether there is agreement or not.
I think my own trajectory about discourse has moved, over the past 10 years or so, more and more toward trying to muster the energy of people of good will toward the pursuit of progressive (generally leftward) social change and away from the notion of more purely even-handed exchange, which is where I think I was when my first book, the original
Race Manners, came out in 1999. I guess, like a lot of civil rights and racial justice advocates, I reached a point where I felt my energy was better used in service of those ready to carry out actual social change than in trying to pull in those who are invested in resisting it. To be blunt about it, I think history gives us pretty vivid evidence (abolitionism, women's suffrage, black and gay civil rights) that there is generally a majority that stands around watching while a committed minority doggedly pursues change until it is achieved.
Anyway, just after I had this conversation about blogs and discourse, I received an email from my friend Rob Levy pointing me toward an October 15
manifesto by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, a fiercely liberal church reformer and author of, among other works,
Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Spong's new manifesto, "
The Time Has Come!", is a scathing critique of Christian homophopia, and it basically argues that the time has passed for debating, engaging or even responding to the Christian Right on issues of gay rights, because those rights are on an inevitable path toward victory and there is no longer any moral, religious or political argument to be had.
Spong declares, in part, that:
"...it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church. "Don't ask, don't tell" will be dismantled as the policy of our armed forces. We will and we must learn that equality of citizenship is not something that should ever be submitted to a referendum. Equality under and before the law is a solemn promise conveyed to all our citizens in the Constitution itself. Can any of us imagine having a public referendum on whether slavery should continue, whether segregation should be dismantled, whether voting privileges should be offered to women?"
And he goes on to say:
"The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. ...I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the "Flat Earth Society" either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union."
I challenge the idea that the battle is won, but I also get it that Spong is speaking of the engine of spirit more than the machinery of politics. I suspect he knows very well that there are many more lawsuits yet to be filed, more gay family tragedies and triumphs to be played out, more wicked voter propositions to be fought, more insults and awful injuries to be endured. But at the heart of it, Spong is telling advocates of gay rights that it is now time to act victorious and to stop stooping to bicker with bigots who have already lost to the inertia of spiritual advancement. History has already spoken on this issue, Spong is saying, and it is time for progressives to act like it.
We could apply this idea to other fronts on which it has become an article of faith for progressives to exhaustively rebut the hard right: abortion rights, the socially supportive role of government, racial justice. What if we were to confidently wield the moral triumph of these ideas instead of yelling about them on
Hardball or
Crossfire? What would the progressive movement look like if we steadily affirmed the inevitability of meaningful reform of health care and campaign financing? How much time did the black civil rights movement spend debating with the sworn enemies of human rights? How much of their energy did Cuban visionaries of economic equality devote to shouting matches with the Batista regime and United Fruit Company?
I'm simply asking questions here. But I think
Spong is trying to tell us something. Maybe argument isn't all it's cracked up to be.