This I Believe

 

This I Believe

Americans are still racist. We celebrate in the face of our first half-black president, thankful to finally conquer racism. But we’re not over it just yet. Why say that a black president makes us clear of racism when, no matter his color, he was just another presidential candidate? Simply people noticing that fact is racism, even if it is a good thought. If he had lost the election, critics and the media would have jumped at the possibility to call us racist, but his loss wouldn’t have been racist, just America having differing opinions from his.

The only time I think we’ll eliminate racism is when no one says that we’re no longer racist. I think that people will stop being racist when they ignore color. Obama’s win wasn’t because people thought “even if he’s black, I’ll give him a sporting chance because I’m a good person”, but it was his values and opinions that made him president. I try not to acknowledge the fact that we’ve a black president, just a bad one. People think that we’re no longer racist, but they see just a black president no matter what he believes.

I’ve even seen examples of people creating racism when there is none. In 1997, there was a Barbie created to support Oreos, who just happened to be black. The toy company was immediately called racist and most likely sued. All the company was doing was supporting cookies with a doll. They weren’t purposefully using the old slang term for blacks with a black Barbie. Would I have taken offense had they used a white Barbie for advertising Vanilla Wafers or crackers? No, I wouldn’t have, because they didn’t intend something racist.

Americans should stop feeling bad about the fact that black people used to be treated badly almost half a century ago. Everyone is psyched that they can claim that, since they voted for a black man, they aren’t racist. I find that racism isn’t saying another race is bad, but thinking even something good about all people of that race is. Ask the American Heritage Dictionary: They say that racism is “discrimination or prejudice based upon differences between ethnic groups.” Prejudice is pre-judging, and can mean thinking someone is going to have a characteristic because of their ethnicity. Discrimination is to treat a person differently based on the assumed characteristic. Obviously, this happens every day with stereotypes against every single ethnicity.

Some treat another nicer because of their ethnicity. Maybe it’s the guilt over happenings from long ago, or the dread of being dubbed racist. The most common interaction seen as racist is having bad feelings towards a stranger because of their background. I agree, that’s a very prejudiced thing to do, but not the only way someone can discriminate as I just said.

There are very small, outside differences between myself and a Hispanic or Asian girl, but we’re both just people, not black or white, but grey. Grey palettes at the beginning until splashes of color show our personalities. I think that everyone should be seen as just a mannequin, faceless, without a characteristic, until you know them and befriend them. That’s how all people need to see one another, and how I hope to grow to, as well.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that racism will be over when people stop simply noticing skin color. I’ve heard stories where someone is called racist for disliking another who just happens to be black or a different race that their own. If Americans can finally figure out that Obama is just another president and we’re all just human beings, racism can be diminished. This is what I believe.

Copyright (c) 2009

Samantha Shoemaker

Abortion and the Beginning of Life

Abortion is wrong. It is sinful. It is just plain wrong.

But a woman has a right to choose. Who are you to tell me what to do with my own body?

Honorable right thinking men certainly disagree on the whole abortion issue.

In the good old days when I was young, things were simple. They were black and white. Abortion was wrong. Life begins at birth. Some things we didn't question, and these were among those things. It's not that we weren't curious or questioning or stupid or ignorant; it's just that some things were obvious. Just plain obvious. Matters of abortion and the beginning of life and even sex outside of marriage were among those things that were just obvious, and everyone knew it.

Oh, sure, some folks did the sex before marriage thing. Probably lots of folks. But it didn't creep into the mainstream of acceptability. The struggle between morals and youthful hormones has been around since morals were invented. Sex, of course, has been around for a lot longer than that. I know this tome is titled Abortion and the Beginning of Life and does not mention sex, but without sex, the other issues don't really present themselves.

Before we discuss abortion, we really have to understand the question and possible answers to “When does life begin?” Historically, the legal answer has always been that life begins at birth. To be sure, the life of a pregnant mother-to-be always seemed somehow to be “a bit more valuable” than the life of the rest of us, but the expectant life still began at birth.

Some believe and loudly profess that life begins at conception. I think that this position emanates from a need for simplicity.

Earl Franklin © 2009

Fairness

Pssts! Hey, you wanna lose an argument? I got a sure fire approach. All you gotta do is read this!

What? You don't wanna lose an argument? Read on anyway. If you learn how to lose one, you're probably smart enough to figure out how to not lose one.

The surefire secret to losing an argument is to let your opponent define the terms of the argument. If your opponent defines the terms of the argument, your opponent wins. See how simple it is? Oh, by the way, if this is the first time you've ever read this, it means either I am a profound genius, or maybe you aren't very well read. And nobody, not even me, thinks that I am a profound genius.

Let's look at the argument about economic fairness. Some people earn a hell of a lot more than others. The top 2% of the income folks pay some 50% (or whatever the number today is) of the income taxes. Some people live in austere poverty, while others bemoan their difficulties in hiring good help for staffing their (fill in the blank: yacht, private airplane, house servants, gardeners, etc.). Our system just does not work, because it obviously is not fair!

There probably isn't much of an argument about income disparities, because they are there for all to see. We could argue about the fairness of some people paying a disproportionate share of taxes, but you would probably have to be “one of them” to make that argument. For the sake of income fairness, we have removed about 50% of the citizens of this great country from the income tax rolls. Now that's fodder for a fairness argument!

But wait. Don't we live in a capitalist country? Aren't people supposed to be rewarded for working hard, taking risks, and investing wisely? Doesn't that necessarily mean that some folks are gonna make more money than other folks? Are there limits on how much more before things get unfair? If so, who is wise enough to define those limits?

So, do you see what I mean? If the “fairness” argument is defined in terms of income, socialist liberals win and capitalist conservatives lose. It's just that simple. I cannot answer the unfairness questions in the previous paragraph, and neither can you. No one can.

Now let's suppose that we redefine the fairness argument from one of income to one of opportunity. Let's suppose that everyone is given opportunities that are equal to those of everyone else. Do we still care that those who pursue a good education, work hard, and risk and invest wisely earn more than those who do not? Should we really strive to give the high school dropout the same income opportunities as the PhD who spent 7-10 years pursuing his education? Should the guy who risks his home, his car and his savings have his income pared by taxes or whatever to have an income on a par with that of another guy who sought the risk-free safety of a job at the corner store or factory? Of course not.

So, if we frame the argument about fairness in terms of equality of opportunity rather than in terms of equality of outcome, we wind up with a totally different set of solutions. We can view the vast disparity of incomes as a natural result of our capitalist system, not as some evil that must be remedied. We can look at the vast disparities of opportunities with alarming disdain and strive to resolve those disparities.

If we pursue fairness as equality of opportunity, we would really change our priorities. Rather than taxing the hell out of the “rich guy” to mitigate income differences (someone please really, really define “rich”), maybe we should focus on the really crummy education that our society offers inner city and many rural kids. Maybe our values of protecting our failing public schools and its teachers’ jobs, we should be looking out for the customers of our education industry; you know, the students and their parents.--- All in the interest of fairness. --Fairness of opportunity. Maybe our values on charter schools and education vouchers might change.

I focus here on inequality of education as a fairness of opportunity issue, because that is where we see today's primary inequity. While job opportunities are not as fair as one would wish, tremendous strides have been made in the past few decades. Strides have also been made in entrepreneurial lending, housing, and other areas.

I am not suggesting that we sit on our laurels with a sense of achievement, but I am suggesting that we recognize where our obvious shortcomings lie. We then need to resolve then act to do something about those shortcomings.

Fairness today does not mean that we need to address inequality of outcomes (or incomes). Fairness today means that we need to address inequality of opportunities. It's really simple when the argument is framed properly.

Earl Franklin, © 2009

Truth! What Happened to it?

I have been an avid comics reader since my youth. When the newspaper arrived, the first thing I read was the comics. Now, I still read the comics on 5 or 6 websites.

I remember well a Calvin and Hobbs comic. I think I read it in the 80's. According to http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/calvinandhobbes.html, the conversation went like this:

Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn't they have color film back then?
Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It's just the world was black and white then.
Calvin: Really?
Dad: Yep. The world didn't turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Calvin: That's really weird.
Dad: Well, truth is stranger than fiction. ...

I grew up in the 40's and 50's. Back then, the world was still black and white. Oh, physics didn't change and Calvin's dad wasn't wrong. We could see color. But mores were black and white. There was right and wrong. There was good behavior and there was bad behavior. There was Truth.

People knew good from bad. I don't know how, we just did. People who engaged in bad behavior knew they were doing so, and they generally felt appropriately guilty. Well, most of them did. Lutherans knew that if they prayed for forgiveness, they received it and didn't have to do the guilty thing, but that wasn't very common. Generally speaking, people didn't like the guilt. It was uncomfortable. In fact, guilt avoidance is what kept most folks on the straight and narrow.

This is probably not news to you, but the 50's were followed by the 60's and then the 70's. The marvels of technology brought us birth control. The Supreme Court brought us Roe vs. Wade. Mores began to change. Women's Liberation emerged, or perhaps took the country and the world by storm. Mores changed a bit more.

People started openly living together even though they were not married. This previously “bad” behavior became so pervasive that their numbers alone forced societal mores to accept this behavior as OK. Women's Liberation preached equality of the genders, but construed this equality as “sameness” that permitted them to engage in the same promiscuous behavior that they thought all men enjoyed.

Permit me a news flash digression. Men and women may be equal, but we are not the same. I have a Y chromosome and women don't. I personally celebrate that fact. My daughter, whom I dearly love and adore, is among other things a fitness buff. Despite her thrice weekly weight lifting and other exercises and despite the fact that I am 30 years her senior, eat and drink too much, and have never been physically fit, I still have a lot more muscle than she and am noticeably stronger. It's not my fault, and it's certainly not her fault; it's just that one chromosome that makes us delightfully different. Different, but equal. Neither is better than nor inferior to the other. Too many advocates of women's liberation have confused equality and sameness, and that is just plain sad. Here ends the digression.

After the heterosexual couples living together thing became rampant, indeed common, people of the same gender began the same open behavior. They began a big political campaign to convince or force society to treat their behavior, previously considered abnormal or aberrational, as normal. Indeed, in large measure, they have succeeded. Societal mores once again changed.

Now, let's look at the Church and its reaction to these evolving progressive behavioral norms. When I use the term “Church”, I include the Episcopal, United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), United Church of Christ, and others. I exclude the Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Synod, and other biblical literalists.

Historically, the Church has been a societal rock. It has been a rock for not only our spiritual lives, but also for our behavioral norms. Our mores have been constrained by the teachings of the Church. These teachings have largely emanated from scripture. The Church has been a societal leader.

But the Church's response to these galloping societal moral standards has not been one of leadership. It rather has assumed a position of following. In abdicating its historical role of leadership, it has instead embraced a policy of inclusion. The problem with inclusion is that the Church by definition must change its beliefs to include those beliefs of the people whom it is including. And simple observation shows us that the Church now either remains silent or openly embraces values and behaviors that it once renounced and that are scripturally wrong. The Church, the historical standard bearer of Truth, has abdicated its role.

CS Lewis observed that in the absence of Truth, there will be anarchy. Since there is no Truth, each individual is free to define his own truth. He is free to define which behaviors are acceptable and which behaviors are not acceptable. He is also free to change his mind as his situation changes. Situational ethics is now OK, because there is no standard of Truth against which to measure ones own personal definition of truth.

In the interest of trying to include people whose values and beliefs differ from those of the historical Church, the Church has sold its own soul. The Church's motivation for this inclusion was purely selfish in that it did not want to limit its membership opportunities and therefore its membership, revenue and power. Paradoxically, this policy of inclusion has failed, as is evidenced by the declining membership of all church bodies that practice inclusion.

We as a society today find ourselves in a state of anarchy. Each of us firmly believes that we are individually free to choose and to change our values, ethics, and behaviors as we see fit. We are free! Do we not believe wholeheartedly in freedom? How could freedom possibly be wrong?

Freedom without law or without truth is not freedom. It is anarchy. In this anarchy, you are not free to express your beliefs without fear of offending others, who surely don't share some portion of your belief system or your truth. Without shared Truth, you are vulnerable to those who hold different truths. This vulnerability may be spiritual, emotional, and even physical. This vulnerability inhibits or precludes openness in relationships and makes one suspect in nearly all relationships.

But then, that's what anarchy is all about. Every man for himself. I am right, you are wrong.

The 10 commandments have become the 10 suggestions. If my behavior does not conform to the commandments, then my choice is clear; I must reinterpret the pesky commandment(s). Now each of us has his own set of interpretations of commandments and other biblical imperatives. We each have our own definition of truth. Did I mention anarchy? Is this anything but anarchy? Should the Church be promoting Truth or anarchy? It can do one or the other; it cannot do both.

If the Church is hell-bent on this pernicious policy of anarchy inducing inclusion, is there hope? Can the Church resume its historical and rightful role of standard bearer of Truth? I am happy to report that yes, there is hope. That hope, believe it or not, is rooted in politics.

The United Methodist Church stands out in its political organization. Whereas other churches have their country based organizations, the United Methodists do not. There is but one world-wide organization. As a result of the evangelical missionary work by the Methodists in Africa, the African arm of that church now wields considerable political clout at the Methodists' quadrennial conventions. The African Methodists are concerned with matters much more basic to daily living than the anarchists views of their American counterparts, and they have little to no tolerance for the American liberal or progressive views. The liberal American Methodists are trying to extricate themselves from this world-wide organization, but the Africans, who need the Americans’ money and are new Christians whose beliefs are still very scriptural, are effectively exercising their political power to prevent the church from splitting or from going very far astray. Since the number of African Methodists is growing and the number of American Methodists is shrinking, the balance of political power will continue to shift.

So, hope for the future lies with the Africans leading us Americans out of our wilderness of anarchy through the United Methodist Church.

Let us pray that the other churches follow our African Methodist leaders.

Earl Franklin, © 2009

Another 11th Commandment

Another 11th Commandment

My wintertime pastime has been ripping vinyl LP 33 1/3 RPM records onto my computer. For the geek-impaired reader, ripping an LP means copying the music onto a computer and including album and track information associated with the LP. Unlike ripping a CD or DVD which can be done in minutes, ripping an LP means actually playing the entire record while the computer digitizes the music.

My wife and I are products of the late 50's and early 60's, and we came into our marriage in the 1965 with a lot of LP records. These aren't just records; they have the music that we listened to and enjoyed during our youth, and they elicit tons of pleasant nostalgic feelings from both of us. My pastime of ripping these records so we could play the music on our 7.1 sound systems was designed to be one of my Christmas gifts to my wife (and to me, if truth be told).

Alas, I was ripping and listening to one of my favorite albums from The Four Lads. Among the songs they were singing was an old favorite mine, “Standing on the Corner, Watching All the Girls Go By.” Of course, I was hit with a bunch of those nostalgic feelings.

But I was really struck by the times the lyrics represented. Standing on a corner, watching all the girls go by was considered, oh, let's call it a bit of a risqué behavior in that time. Now, many years later, we live in a society where we don't talk of risqué behavior anymore; no, we don't, but we do talk about risky behavior.

Wow! How our societal boundaries of mores and moral behavior have changed! And they have made these monumental changes in the space of what, a generation? One and half generations? Risqué behavior, risky behavior, what a contrast!

How could our standards of socially acceptable behavior have possibly changed so much in so short a time? We now think little to nothing of unmarried couples, homosexuality, promiscuity inside and outside of marriage, illicit drug use, … topics that were rarely discussed, much less accepted, “in my time.” Boy, am I an old fuddy duddy or what?!!

But, wait. Doesn't our behavior and our acceptance of behaviors stem from our values? Don't our values come from our beliefs? Of course they do. They always have. They always will.

But this relationship works both ways. If we change our behavior, then we must change our values and then we must change our beliefs so that our behavior is acceptable within the context of our personal values and beliefs. If we do not change our values and beliefs to embrace behaviors that we find acceptable, then we must be living in a state of hypocritical conflict. While we all have our personal hypocritical peccadilloes, I believe that we as a society have, in fact, changed our values (that's pretty obvious) and our beliefs (that's harder for us to accept.) Oh, and those changes have been monumental.

The bedrock of our values has historically been our society's Judeo-Christian beliefs. One can certainly argue that we as a society have become more accepting of other religions and their values. One of these alternative religions is no religion. This is but one explanation of society's evolving beliefs.

But the significant observation is the acceptance of these new societal behaviors by Christian churches. The Christian church, like the rest of us, cannot accept these behaviors without changing its beliefs. But, how can that be? Are the church's beliefs not founded upon and based upon scripture? Does the church follow societal norms? Isn't the church supposed to be a bedrock of leadership? What made the church change?

I believe that we have a new instrument of change. This is an instrument that has become a giant lever that permits a small number of people to foist upon our society values that we as individuals and as a society would otherwise not accept.

This new lever of change is what I shall call “Another 11th Commandment.” The commandment is simply stated: Thou shalt not offend.

So? What's wrong with that? Thou shalt not offend sounds compassionate and Christian. Somehow it just seems sort of right, good, OK.

The problem is that it turns things upside down. The world of psychology has taught us for decades that we are each responsible for our own feelings; we are not and cannot be responsible for another's feelings.

“To take offense” is the proper perspective. That is, we each choose where we wish to take offense and where we wish to not take offense. Thou shalt not offend makes it incumbent upon the speaker or writer to be aware and mindful of all of the choices or even supposed choices that his audience has made regarding their personally taking offense. When the speaker or writer understands that taking offense is an individual and personal choice, he is freed to express his beliefs as our founding fathers intended in the 1st amendment to our constitution. He is free to ignore the Thou shalt not offend 11th commandment.

I personally refuse to accept the legitimacy of this 11th commandment. To do otherwise would mean that I must suppress expression of my own beliefs. If you accept this 11th commandment, then you cannot express your own beliefs in any but the most familiar of environments without risking “offending” someone, or, heaven forbid, lots of someones.

This 11th commandment has given rise to and provided cover to a new body of “politically correct” restraint on speech. If the 11th commandment disappears, so too does political correctness. If the 11th commandment disappears, then a whole body of socially acceptable behavior which otherwise would be unacceptable becomes once again unacceptable.

If the 11th commandment disappeared, we could say all kinds of things that are now considered politically incorrect. For example, I could say “scientific evidence does not support the homosexuals' claim that they are born that way” without fear of recrimination. I could say “meteorological measurements have shown that the Earth has not warmed during the past 9 years” without fear of offending adherents to the Religion of Global Warming.

The 11th commandment is an insidious and evil lever that has been used very effectively by minority groups to gain acceptance of the majority of their behaviors, values, and beliefs. There is a big difference between my accepting your freedom to believe as you wish and my accepting your belief. Thou shalt not offend has been and is being used to force me as an individual and us as a society to accept your belief, not just your freedom to believe, and that is just plain wrong.

The churches have bought into this new commandment in a big way. They neither say this nor even believe this, but when you look at their policy of “inclusion,” their acceptance of Thou shalt not offend becomes obvious. In a recent planning meeting at our church, my wife Linda stated that their policy of inclusion would affect the churches beliefs. Oh, my, was this met with vociferous denial! But when she subsequently stated that the church should express from the pulpit its disapproval of unmarried couples or premarital sexual relations, the assistant pastor's thinly veiled body language reaction screamed “That train left the station decades ago, Linda, get with it!” Clearly, the church has already changed its beliefs, beliefs that are supposedly based upon scripture, not contemporary values and behaviors.

Mainline churches have adopted policies of inclusion ostensibly from a position of Christian love and acceptance. You know, Thou shalt not offend. In fact, churches have adopted policies of inclusion so as to increase the population pool from which they can draw members and believers. Statistics show that the inclusion strategy has backfired; the churches are not growing, rather they are losing membership. They have abdicated their responsibility of leadership.

So, who invented this 11th commandment? Why was it invented?

Well, this new commandment didn't come from modern psychology. As I mentioned earlier, we have been taught for years that we are responsible for our own feelings; we are not responsible for another's feelings. Just as I am not responsible for your feelings, nor am I responsible for your choices, or behaviors, or values and beliefs. You are. You're responsible for all that stuff that you yourself decide.

The church certainly didn't invent this Thou Shalt Not Offend commandment. It isn't scriptural. In the Old Testament, I suspect that the Canaanites took offense when the Hebrews moved into their land, killing and subjugating their people. In the New Testament, lots of people and groups took offense at Jesus teachings. The marvel is why the church has chosen to accept this commandment.

The First Amendment to our United States Constitution forbids Congress from making any law “abridging the freedom of speech”. While many believe that our government has taken too much freedom in their interpretation of the Constitution, I don't think the government can be stuck with the responsibility for the creation of Another 11th Commandment.

The Thou Shalt Not Offend Commandment came to us courtesy of the world of politics. The commandment was promulgated by and is promoted by those special interest groups that stand to gain from the widespread acceptance of the commandment and therefore the widespread acceptance of the beliefs that are protected by the commandment. I could give you a list, but I am sure that you have your own list of these special interest groups. There is no reason to suspect that my list is any better than yours.

This new commandment is insidious, because it has been accepted by our society without the questioning that it deserves. It hasn't been questioned because for the most part it hasn't even been recognized. It just quietly became culturally acceptable and then moved to a cultural imperative with most of us not even knowing what was happening. It is insidious because it appears innocuous at worst and even good, considerate, and obviously beneficial at best. It is evil because it subliminally encourages us to accept behaviors and beliefs that conflict with our own beliefs. Accepting another's freedom to believe as he wishes is a whole lot different that actually accepting his beliefs.

I do believe that it is important that we first as individuals and then as a society recognize what a powerful lever Thou Shalt Not Offend has become to suppress our freedom of expression. Once recognized, it is then important to understand that our individual acceptance of this commandment is a personal choice; I can ignore it, you can ignore it, everyone can ignore it and we can relearn to express our beliefs and our opinions within the bounds of old fashioned good taste, not new artificial commandments.



February 3, 2009

Racism and Elitism

Racism and Elitism

He's a racist!! He is a racist!!

Wow, what an epithet. What's worse, being called a racist or being called a terrorist? These days, it's hard to say. We as a society have demonized the term “racist” so effectively that it has become difficult to think of something even worse to call another person.

Now, don't get me wrong. I do not defend racism. But I would like to begin by defining racism. According Merriam Webster, racism is “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” To be sure, race is a primary determinant of some human traits, such as skin color, hair, and eyes. Racism exploits these obvious differences to impute other perhaps real differences and certainly imagined differences so to claim that “my race is superior to your race.”

Simply stated, racism is an obvious mechanism whereby I can claim that I am superior to you. I am better than you. You are inferior to me. It is spun in many different ways, but it always comes down to the perception that some folks are better that other folks and I, of course, belong to the group of better folks.

The members of our society that have been particularly virulent in their demonizing of racism are the elites of our society. They are, after all, our natural leaders, are they not? Referring once again to Merriam Webster, the elite is “the choice part, the best of a class, the socially superior part of a society, a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence.”

The elites of our society lead us because they are our social superiors, because they are better educated and by inference are therefore smarter than the rest of us. From my observation, one becomes an elitist through education, position, and ideas.

There are two real requirements to admission to the world of elitism. The first is that I must define myself as an elitist through my own self image. The second requirement is that my fellow elitists also regard me as an elitist colleague. Of course, there are many groups and subgroups of elitists, some of which are superior to others. Position, power, and influence are used to rank elitist groups. Most elitist groups accept their pecking order ranking. Many elitist individuals work hard, sometimes very hard, to move themselves into a superior elitist group.

In summary, some elitists are better than other elitists, but all elitist are superior to you and me. Furthermore, as a function of their elitism, elitist are duty bound to lead and even take care of those of us, who by definition, are inferior. We certainly are not as smart as they.

Putting all this into perspective, it is evil for one group of people to claim superiority over another group of people when the differences between the groups are obviously physical and racial. But it is OK for one group of people to claim superiority over another group of people because the superior group views themselves as actually being superior by virtue of their own perceived superiority.

Racism is evil, elitism is good. If the logic of that statement escapes you, it is perhaps because the statement is illogical. Placing oneself above others is evil. Period.

There is no difference between racism and elitism. Each seeks to elevate oneself and ones colleagues above others. Although racism and elitism use different proxies for their self perceived superiorities, the proxies are equally bogus. They are moral equivalents.

Since racism and elitism are moral equivalents, elitists have condemned themselves and their elitism through their demonizing of racism. It is too bad and very sad that they are not smart enough to have yet figured that out.

In fact, “some folks are better than other folks” just ain't so. You are not superior to me, and I am not superior to you. It's really very simple. Just because you and I are different in some way or another does not make either of us superior to the other. We're just different. It doesn't matter whether you and I are individuals, groups, or nations. We are still just different.

February 3, 2009