I'm tired of all the talk about 'values' because that's all it is - talk. Values are principles, which according to my dictionary, are rules of behavior, laws from which other laws are derived, theoretical and fundamental ideas about right and wrong. They can be all talk and no action, except the action of telling others what to do by means of law and lecture. The actual venality, hypocricy, and double-standard mentality of televangelists, of right-wing Representatives and Senators, and of Joe Righteous himself are beside the point because we are all sinners at birth thanks to Adam and Eve. Blaming his split of word and deed on the Fall allows them to believe they are on the side of good simply because they spout holier-than-the-rest rhetoric.
An example is Jim West, the Mayor of Spokane, Washington. He has a history of being rabidly anti-gay. Then he got caught offering a city internship over the interenet to someone he thought was a young gay man and who turned out to be a reporter. Then West whined he was losing his job because he was gay. He ignored the uncomfortable detail that offering jobs for sex is not something any mayor, gay or straight, was supposed to do.
Values plus the doctrine of Original Sin means that 'uncomfortable details' in behavior can be ignored.
West is not an anomaly. I remember living in Maryland when State Representative Bauman, a staunch foe of homosexualty, was caught soliciting a male prostitute in Washington, DC. These guys and others reveal what I think is really behind all the values laden language of the far-right. Like serial killers who leaves messages pleading to be caught and punished, these folks hate something about themselves that they cannot pray away, so they try to blame it away. They make laws to punish the behavior they themselves wish they could stop but cannot, and hope the sacrifice of others will burn away their own self-loathing. Their targets are folks who do the same things as they, but do not feel guilty. This hatred of those free enough to have no shame when they themselves burn with it is the root of their enraged and vicious hypocricy.
Language being what it is, you can say one thing and do another. So I am interested in values only to see if a person's words and actions are aligned or not. When they diverge, I feel their actions speak louder, and lose respect for the speaker. This is why integrity is a primary value of mine.
Whether it is also a virtue of mine can be seen in my behavior. You cannot really challenge my values, but you can call into question my virtue if my actions fall short of my ideals. Virtue is the practice of a value. But the right has waged an attack on virtues, since what they want is the easing of their concience in scape-goating without actually having to change their own behavior. So tolerance they have labeled homosexual. Honor they have labeled judicial activism. Fairness they have labeled partisan politics. Charity they have labeled treason.
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Virtues Not Values
Monday, May 16, 2005
Bored of Education
As a pluralist, I'm okay with a school board adding things to the curriculum. As a writer, I'm not at all happy with a school board taking it upon itself to redefine a whole field of study because they don't like its conclusions.
I may be a secular humanist myself, but I know science doesn't have all the answers, and many of the answers it does have are not the final answer. I still remember my 7th grade geography teacher scoffing at the idea that the shapes of Africa and South America made it look like they had broken and drifted apart once upon a time. When it turned out that satellite data revealed continental drift, I knew that contemptuous scoffers can be proven wrong.
But it is this being able to be proved wrong that keeps science's feet to the fire. If we eliminate that from the definition of science, we get a new idea of science.
The new science of Kansas lets you teach things that sound good and never have to be corrected because they cannot be proven false. The existence of God? No way to prove false so it could be true. But the law doesn't simply add teaching "God's plan" to the neo-scientific mix. It says any "systematic method of continuing investigation," The way I read it, this would include ghosts. Witchcraft. Astrology. Tarot fortunetelling.
So I say to the teachers of Kansas, start looking for fun stuff to teach that used to be relegated to the backwater of superstition. Wicca incantations will probably become a big hit given the popularity of Harry Potter. Whole sophomore classes could learn Transcendental Meditation and then visualize world peace for credit. Poltergeists and boggarts could become the new thing to look for instead of quarks and superstrings.
