Something between a semantic quibble and the end of the world

"I'd like to punch out that cocksure, know-it-all, holier than thou..."
"Why, exactly, Ellie? Aren't ignorance and error painful enough?"
"Yes, if he'd shut up. But he's corrupting millions."
"Sweetheart, he thinks the same about you."  

-From Contact, by Carl Sagan

I read the novel from which I took that epigraph in 1997, as I was just finally deciding for good that I was no longer an evangelical Christian, and probably not a theist at all. Looking back on it now, I'm really glad I happened to read a novel by this particular atheist right about that time. By emphasizing throughout the novel how important it was to imagine what your words sound like to someone who disagrees with you--even when you are certain that person is wrong--Sagan probably saved me years of becoming an obnoxious former-evangelical-turned-agnostic, thereby reducing the number of fedora-wearing Reddit atheists in the world by one.

I found myself thinking back to that passage a few weeks ago when a friend on social media posted a link to a story. I generally ignore the onslaught of news stories that revel in how some celebrity "trolled" or "owned" or "destroyed" a mean fan or another celebrity with a Tweet or comment. Media outlets whipping readers/viewers into a voyeuristic, masturbatory frenzy over a relatively minor and stupid fight using short words and short sentences just doesn't appeal to me. But a friend posted this story the other day, and I clicked:

First, a minor semantic note millions of others have already made

The short story is that a Cubs player, Daniel Murphy, has stated before he has objections, based in his Christian faith, to homosexuality. At a road game, the organist played songs celebrating diversity when he came to the plate.

The article often refers to Cubs player Daniel Murphy as homophobic. I realize many other people have made this point before, but homophobic isn't really an etymologically correct term. I don't think Daniel Murphy fears gay people. Here's a meme I've seen many times on social media making this point:

To be clear, Morgan Freeman never said this. He's one of the most misquoted people on the Internet. 

So if even the people who are angry at alleged "homophobes" realize they are using an inaccurate term, why do they keep using it?

My guess is that it's hard to come up with an alternative. The equivalent bias against women is referred to as "misogyny," coming from Greek roots for "hatred" and "women." I've tried to come up with a way to make a term like this for homosexuality, but "misohomo" and the other variations I've tried have not seemed likely to catch on. I think anti-gay would do. But like a lot of terms of this kind, we seem determined to avoid bluntly naming the thing being discriminated against. Still, I think it's worth trying to raise this point every now and again, in the hope that we'll eventually get to a more accurate term.

I know some have argued that the word doesn't mean "fear" of homosexuality, but "aversion" to it. But I can't think of another word in the English language where we use "phobia" in that way (except maybe xenophobia, which I think has a similar explanation for why we settled on it as a word).


But whatever word we use, is Daniel Murphy that thing? 

Evangelicals believe homosexuality is a sin. It comes from a pretty straightforward reading of a lot of passages in the Bible, none of which is probably more relevant than Romans 1:26, 27: "Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error."

Yes, a ton of people have argued against reading Romans 1 that way, as well as other passages evangelicals use to support the belief that homosexuality is a sin. (I was going to list some, but there are just too, too many examples.) But a vast number of American evangelical churches continue to believe it is a sin.

Evangelicals have evolved how they speak about homosexuality in the last thirty years. Most evangelical pulpits in America today will say something like this: "Yes, some people are born with a predilection for homosexuality, just like all of us are born with biological traits that make it harder for us to resist certain sins. That means we should be compassionate of those who struggle with homosexual attraction, but that is not the same as condoning it. We can also differentiate between attraction and acting on the attraction--a man need not feel he is sinning for feeling attracted to another man, only for acting on that attraction. Even if someone does act on homosexual impulses, Christians should learn to separate hating the sin from hating the sinner. And we shouldn't think that the way someone else sins is worse than how we ourselves sin."

You might disagree with all of that. I certainly do. But it's at least an evolution from thirty years ago, when I first started attending evangelical churches. They have at least moved a little bit in the direction of recognizing reality. And there is a big difference between saying you disagree with someone but you still think you can work together on a practical, day-to-day level and saying you think homosexuals should be outright shunned in all things. We liberals used to preach this same pragmatism--you don't have to agree with us, but that shouldn't get in the way of us working together where we have a common concern.

Daniel Murphy has tried to echo that basic line. He hasn't been perfect about how he's phrased everything, but he's a baseball player, not a professional preacher. I think we should assume he meant a better version of whatever he's tried to say over the years.

Speaking of pragmatism, by the way, I might point out that about one-fourth of Americans are evangelicals. They are the reason Donald Trump is president. We might want to think about that when we consider how to talk about them.

How to deal with conscientious beliefs of stupid things 

When I started to write this post, I was going to just shame the people who piled on Murphy, say our democracy won't survive this kind of reductionism of whatever the other guy believes, and call it a day. But as I thought about it, I realized it's not that simple. It is important to distinguish between a wrong belief held for deeply held reasons and your garden variety stupidity. And even with deeply held beliefs, we treat one deeply held belief differently from others.

For example, we realize that if everyone were to embrace pacifist beliefs, the country would probably fall to an invader that didn't have such qualms. Society has a vested interest in enforcing a non-pacifist ideology. But we also recognize the importance of recognizing a deeply held belief that violence is morally evil. So we make exceptions for it, even though those exceptions would, if held by everyone, undo our way of life.

Let's consider a belief that is much more obviously misguided than pacifism. Let's consider the person who won't get her child vaccinated because she thinks there is a vast conspiracy to cover up the dangers of vaccination. By doing so, she puts the entire community at risk of diseases that have no business plaguing the modern world. Clearly, there can be no accommodating this mistaken belief. (Although we do. We don't currently force immunizations in most cases. In my son's school, for example, you can get a waiver for a religious belief if you don't want to get your son vaccinated. The point is that we OUGHT to treat these two deeply held beliefs different because of the relative threat they each pose.)

We have to treat these two cases differently, in other words. In both cases, when dealing with them, it would, of course, be good to recall Sagan's words. The person with the heterodox (heretical?) view is going to think WE are the ones misleading them. For both, we need to treat them with respect and discretion, understanding that everything we feel about them they feel about us. We can't give them both the same protection under the law, because a few people believing in pacifism isn't the immediate threat to us all that a few people not getting vaccinated is, but we should treat them both with the same respect.

The question of where Daniel Murphy and other evangelicals' beliefs lie on this spectrum of wrong beliefs is the question that made me take over two weeks to write this post. On the one hand, if evangelicals vote to deny homosexuals marriage rights, then the belief itself is a threat to the community. (Not all evangelicals vote this way, by the way. There are libertarian evangelicals who separate individual sin from government enforcement of private vices.)  But to the extent that Murphy is just saying that he thinks the Bible still says the same thing most Christians thought it said a long time ago, I think we ought to give the guy a break. There is a difference between some idiot who "hates fags" and a person who believes homosexuality is a sin as part of a much deeper held world belief.

What this has to do with another athlete 

We're in the middle of another stupid killing of a black man who didn't deserve to be killed. (If you're reading this at some period in the future, the dead black man who didn't deserve it this week was Botham Shem Jean.) Colin Kaepernick, as you may have heard, was a quarterback who stopped being welcome in the NFL because he didn't stand for the national anthem to protest police treatment of black Americans.

I didn't realize how strong the feelings of some people I knew were until I posted about Kaepernick after his Nike commercial was released:

I got a flood of messages from people who said all kinds of things that had nothing to do with what I'd posted, namely, that his beliefs seemed deeply held enough, and costly enough to himself, that they seemed worth respecting. You didn't have to agree with them, but they seemed to fit that category of beliefs deeply held enough not to hate the man.

I couldn't believe some of the responses I got. Some shocked me with their off-topic rants on "reverse racism" and how it's okay to be proud of everything but being a white person.

A lot of these reactions came from folks in Ohio, the people we can all thank for our current president. I'd like to hate on these people for what they wrote, but when I see the kind of glee liberals take in something as stupid as an organist playing Lady Gaga for at-bats by an evangelical baseball player, I wonder if our own reactions don't play a role in how Kaepernick is treated.

To be clear, I think Kaepernick is right that police behavior in America doesn't do right by black Americans. I think he has also been wrong about how he has expressed that. I think police have been unfairly demonized, when in fact their mistakes are the result of a society trying to deal with deep social ills on the cheap by leaving the outcomes of those social ills to the police to deal with. Police are understaffed, overworked, and expected to be far more perfect in their jobs than most of us are. All for a salary that puts them somewhere in the uninspiring middle of the middle class. Bad police behavior is our fault as a society. Kaepernick was wrong to wear pig socks.

That being said, Kaepernick was a lot righter about his beliefs than Murphy was about his. But they're both coming from a place of equal reflection, with the conclusions of the reflections being dependent on the relative cognitive abilities of the athletes involved. It's worth pointing out that Murphy's beliefs, while they haven't lost him his job, have had a cost to him. Anytime you express a belief that is no longer a majority belief, you're risking a fallout. The Cubs had to think about it before they took Murphy on their roster. Murphy's fallout comes when he is continually pointed out as a bigot for expressing a belief that millions of Americans who don't play baseball express every Sunday.

Murphy's and Kaepernick's costly ideologies are not equal, but they do have similarities that are worth considering. It's worth it for us, as a society, to consider how we treat those we believe to have beliefs we think wrong and even dangerous, but which are held to in good faith by their adherents, even when those beliefs cost them something.

It is especially worth it for us liberals to consider how we treat those we disagree with. Evangelicals are the reason we have a President Trump. So is the way we deal with them working?