This morning, I was reading in the Book of Acts about how the folks in the primitive church, except Ananias and Sapphira, had all things in common. Small groups have been able to make communism work until the system is exploited. It would be magnificent to be able to wake up in the morning and work with friends to do the things we thought would please God and build His kingdom. We could look after the poor, help the sick, work on defending ourselves from outside attacks, look for cures for disease, and invent things to reduce labor and make us more productive. If what we contributed to the pot did not go toward our pet project, we’d shrug and concede, “It’s all good.”
Not so today. We live in a country where we tolerate different views. Everybody is aimed in different directions, toward different gods and purposes. The same government that lets the Amish run horses and buggies on the Interstates wants to pay to abort fetuses and otherwise promote promiscuity. When we pay our taxes, we don’t know if we’re paying to protect the right to pray in churches or to commission some dude to display a crucifix in urine. We pay the federal government to pay groups like ACORN to undermine our literal diversity and pave us with homogenous progressivism. We are more like a fractionally distilling melting pot that refines communism by evaporating off traditional ways. We tolerate and embrace edgy, redefined diversity while silencing old-fashioned standards.
Which leads us, by corollary, to today’s news, where the local daily had a piece on gay rights. In the old days, rights were bestowed upon all men by their Creator equally. Granted, words like “rights” have been perverted to mean everything, but in the technical sense, I ascribe to the argument that there are no special interest rights because that would imply inequality. That is, we wouldn’t be modifying “rights” with meaningless adjectives as in women’s rights, gay rights, etc., for no reason, would we? By way of review, old-school rights are things people can do without imposing on other human beings. Re-restating, we can’t have different rights for different groups unless they are viewed as unequal under the law, a concept we still reject. If this is a new concept to you, please ponder it in the context of current events.