On Friday's week-in-review segment on NPR's All Things Considered, New York Times columnist David Brooks -- the so-called balance to NPR's liberal bias -- tried to sound moderate in balancing religious freedom and the gay-left agenda, but ended up comparing the leftists to Lincoln and the social conservatives to slavery proponents.
NPR anchor Audie Cornish raised the latest Brooks column. The moderate began with an absolute: "If denying gays and lesbians their full civil rights and dignity is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. Gays and lesbians should not only be permitted to marry and live as they want, but be honored for doing so."
On NPR, it came out like this:
BROOKS: Well, the Indiana law, Jonathan's right, it goes further than the others. And if that was the argument that was being made, that it goes too far; we should scale it back, I'd be fine with that. To me, the issue is progress. It's like Abraham Lincoln. I'm not drawing the parallel. But Abraham Lincoln knew when to push abolitionism. It was clearly a moral right. But sometimes you got to push it gently. Sometimes you put your foot on the brakes, sometimes on the gas. It's a matter of, pragmatically, how do you move forward and make life easier for gays and lesbians who happen to grow up in rural conservative areas?
Subbing in for Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne on the liberal side was his Post editorial-page colleague Jonathan Capehart, an openly gay activist...but that went unmentioned in this chat. He responded to Brooks by pointing out the activists in Indiana were the large corporations like Apple.
Brooks didn't make this clunky sound in the newspaper:
A movement that stands for tolerance does not want to be on the side of a government that compels a photographer who is an evangelical Christian to shoot a same-sex wedding that he would rather avoid.
Furthermore, the evangelical movement is evolving. Many young evangelicals understand that their faith should not be defined by this issue. If orthodox Christians are suddenly written out of polite society as modern-day Bull Connors, this would only halt progress, polarize the debate and lead to a bloody war of all against all.
As a matter of principle, it is simply the case that religious liberty is a value deserving our deepest respect, even in cases where it leads to disagreements as fundamental as the definition of marriage.
Morality is a politeness of the soul. Deep politeness means we make accommodations.
