I thought about writing this well before Christian Schneider wrote about the seemingly odd friendship of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
After the shocking news of Scalia’s death spread, CNN, the New York Daily News, Yahoo, BuzzFeed, and the Daily Mail quickly posted stories about how “unlikely” Ginsburg and Scalia’s friendship was.
True, Scalia once called the duo of New Yorkers the “oddest of couples.” But for those on the outside, there’s nothing at all “unlikely” about a friendship that spans ideological differences. If someone thinks having a dear friend of a different political persuasion renders that relationship “unlikely,” that person would be best served to go out and make some new friends.
Ginsburg herself has said her relationship with Scalia was often difficult. Following a 2004 death penalty case in which Scalia savaged the Court majority in a typically aggressive dissent, Ginsburg said, “I love him. But sometimes I’d like to strangle him.”
Most of us have people in our lives that we’d often like to pile-drive, but who we deeply revere. That doesn’t make our relationships at all “unlikely,” it makes them the norm. Granted, there may be added stress on ideological opponents whose job it is to publicly take the bark off one another in written opinions. But my newspaper’s editorial board often writes pieces that make my eyes roll out of my head — and yet there has never been a terse word spoken between us.
I certainly don’t want to hold myself up as any kind of standard of purity on this measure, however — I often fall short of this bipartisanship standard. Sometimes, I’ll hear an acquaintance say something so backward, so outright false, that I mutter to myself, “how can I ever be friends with someone who believes something like that?”
Clearly, Ginsburg wrestled with this in her relationship with Scalia. “I was fascinated by him because he was so intelligent and so amusing,” she once said. “You could still resist his position, but you just had to like him.”
That doesn’t mean one has to adhere to this standard when others aren’t being intelligent or amusing. When I heard of Scalia’s death, I was at one of my kids’ basketball games, and when I let the nearby parents know, one pumped his fist and yelled, “this is great!” The news already had me feeling like I had been punched in the stomach — his antics made me want to reciprocate the sensation.
I’d like to think, however, the parent’s celebration was a matter of personal boorishness and not ideology. Just last week, the Capital Times in Madison, Wis., ran a story about what it’s like being a conservative in heavily liberal Madison, and how people frequently adapt their relationships to preserve comity. In anonymous corners of cities all over America, Scalia-Ginsburg relationships blossom without the glare of media coverage.
The bottom line is, as real people wandering around and bumping into each other in the world, we share about 98 percent of the experience of being humans. If the remaining political 2 percent forces you out of a friendship, then you are the one that’s poorer as a result.
My opinion based on my own experience is that there are far more liberals like Schneider’s boorish acquaintance than conservatives — that is, people who express political opinions whether or not others want to hear them. My own experience is based on being part of communities where I’m pretty sure people of my own political worldview are outnumbered by those with a leftish view — living in college towns, being a member of a so-called mainline Protestant denomination, and being a fan of “Star Trek.”
This doesn’t particularly bother me, because with one exception — I was born in Madison — my membership in those groups has been by my own choice. I have the ability to express my own opinions and, when needed, find the flaws in others’ opinions, but I can also let my own political thoughts go unexpressed. The phrase “the personal is political” was not created by a conservative.
The last group first: Those who have watched as much Star Trek as I (and that might be not very many people) know that by the 23rd century the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, and those who followed him believed we would have evolved into a socialist universe in which to quote U.S.S. Enterprise Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, “we have eliminated need,” money, desire for worldly possessions, etc. If you believe some members of Facebook Star Trek groups, by the 23rd century we will also have eliminated conservatives, or at minimum shunned them.
This amuses me because we are, after all, discussing fiction written during the 1960s (The Original Series) and 1980s (The Next Generation), and as we all know fiction reflects the views of its writers and original audience regardless of its setting. (Current TOS viewers sometimes find TOS retrograde in its views of women, forgetting that TOS predates the equal rights movement, and Roddenberry had an eye for the ladies, as did most of TOS’ male viewers. There are also those who criticize the lack of openly gay characters, people unwilling to acknowledge that possibly in the 23rd century our dating practices will be no one else’s business but our own.) I find it interesting that people think that human nature that has been part of the entirety of human existence will disappear in just 300 years.
Others have written that mainline Protestant denominations are dying because they are less about God and more about being part of popular culture. That could certainly be said about Protestant churches’ rush to approve same-sex marriage, which, whether you agree with same-sex marriage or not, cannot be said to be Biblical by any reasonable reading of the Bible.
A former priest of ours liked to say that Christianity was countercultural, a contrast to the secular culture. (He also said the Episcopal faith was neither Catholic nor Protestant, which I like.) I sometimes feel countercultural within my own church, though not to the point of leaving, because (1) I like the fact that our church elects our leaders, in contrast to the Roman Catholic Church (Catholics have no say on their pope, their bishop, or even their congregation’s priests), but (2) I also feel free to ignore the national church leaders when I believe they are wrong. (Or more often, because our duty as Christians as stated in the New Testament doesn’t necessarily include obeying or defying national church leaders.)
I’ve lived in what I would define as college towns most of my adult life. (I define a “college town” as a community whose identity is defined by the college within it, as opposed to cities with colleges. Ripon and Platteville, and from what I’ve seen at least Whitewater and River Falls are college towns; Milwaukee, Appleton, Oshkosh and Fond du Lac have colleges, but none of them are college towns.) College towns have more to offer than towns of similar size because of the college’s presence — arts events, college sports, and expanded retail offerings.
College towns are also bastions of liberal, or at least more liberal, thought than their neighboring communities. I’m fine with that as long as that doesn’t reach the level of, for instance, the foreign policy of the Madison Common Council. (Madison’s general idiocy may or may not come solely from the UW campus.) At least from what I’ve seen, Wisconsin college towns, perhaps because of the students within those colleges, haven’t reached the politically correct depths of my hometown or other universities. At least where I’ve lived, even though I’ve run into more people than I can count who felt the need to push their viewpoints on me without the reverse happening, there still seems to be some respect in person (as opposed to on social media) for opposing views. So far.
The unfortunate thing is that too many people are intimidated into silence by those who can express their political views more forcefully. The other unfortunate thing is that politics has infested so much of our lives, when it shouldn’t.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 