The content of this blog post has been removed at the request of Pastor Jenny. The reason for her request is that it was found by some to be "offensive".
Out of respect for Pastor Jenny, I am honoring her request. But I do so with serious misgivings ...
This blog was begun in 2007 under the title CUCC News and Chat with the subtitle News and dialog shared among members and friends of Community UCC, Raleigh NC. The blog was not created as the official news organ of CUCC or as in any sense representing the opinion of CUCC. At present there are 26 CUCC members or friends who have authorship status for this blog. Any of these contributors can at any time hype their church event, ask if somebody wants to go with them to a Durham Bulls game, or publish their own grocery list.
For most of the past 22 years I served as church webmaster. Not once when acting as church webmaster was it ever suggested that I was using the church website as a vehicle for my own opinions. The News and Chat blog was always accessible from the church website, but the practice that is followed is similar to the practice that is followed by the news media. The New York Times, for example, has its website. And it also has blogs that are accessible from the website. The website is the voice of the NY Times (or its chosen op-ed contributors), but the blogs and comments contain unfiltered opinion. When our niece recently had her major article on the vandalism of a mosque in Arkansas, her article attracted some 300 comments of every conceivable flavor. That's the way dialog works.
The first thing I had mentioned in my blog post was Mark Lilla's book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. Lilla comments on the crippling of free speech and open dialog that liberals have brought about via the focus on identity politics ...
Young people today on the left--in contrast with those on the right-- are less likely today to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas. They are much more likely to say they are engaged in politics as an X, concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness ...
"Speaking as an X" is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listerner that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identiy and expressed the most outrage at being questioned. So classroom conversations that might have begun "I think A", and here is my argument, now that the form Seaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything It means that there is no impartial space for dialog. White men have one "epistemology," black women have another. So what remains to be said?
One of the saddest characteristics (to me) of the iron grip that identity politics has on free speech lies in the concept of "safe spaces". Shelby Steele (an African American scholar at Stanford) has this view of safe spaces ...
The "safe spaces" for minority students on university campuses are actually redemptive spaces for white students and administrators looking for innocence and empowerment. As minorities in these spaces languish in precious self-absorption, their white classmates, high on the idea of their own tolerance, whistle past the very segregated areas they are barred from.
A question that I have raised several times within various CUCC dialogs is the question of whether CUCC is moving in the direction of becoming a fringe church. One essential step in so doing is to restrict speech, since hegemony is hard to achieve if dissenting speech keeps surfacing. I pass that thought along to the congregation as food for thought.
With much affection,
Lavon
