[Vision2020] responding to Neo-Confederates

[Melynda Huskey]

I've read Rodney's message twice now, and bits of it are still escaping me.  
I'm perfectly willing to concede that my reading, not his writing, is at 
fault there.

What I did understand, though, still puzzles me.  How many 
lefter-than-Rodney persons are required to make a "left-wing clique"?  Is 
everyone who goes to the Farmers Market in the clique?  If I don't go for 
three or four Saturdays in a row, do I revert to membership in a right-wing 
clique, or am I just a social outcast?  How do I know if I'm really and 
truly in, or if I'm just on the fringes, tolerated because my folks have a 
big rec room and don't watch the beer too closely?  Do I have to have my own 
Maypole?

Now about this NIMBY/NIOT business. . . I recall the minister of Christ 
Church saying that in a Christian town, all the gays would be run out on a 
rail (in a Christlike spirit, of course). His friend George Grant is made of 
sterner stuff:  he's written that the only right a gay person has is the 
right to a fair and speedy trial.  Wilson has also said that he expects to 
convert everybody in our town to his way of thinking.  I'd call that the Not 
In My Zion agenda, and I'm not going to praise it, or sit still for it.  
Doug would just as soon not have glbt people, feminists, Jews, Catholics, or 
public schools in our town.  I'd prefer that we have all of those things, as 
well as cowgirls, Republicans, punk rockers, conservative Presbyterians, 
hydrologists, and gadflies like you and me--even if that diversity comes 
with some conflict.

There's room for both of us in Moscow, Rodney.  Room for lots of worldviews, 
theologies, and lives, room for dissent and disagreement and conflict. But 
when one of those groups declares that theirs is TRULY the Only Way, and 
that the rest of us are discriminating against them by not letting them 
govern all of us, we've got to find a way to talk about it.  When one of 
those groups decides that members of another group aren't fit to 
live--either here or at all--, we have to talk about it.  And that's the 
conversation we've been having . . . not necessarily in a very productive or 
healthy way, mind you.  Is it possible to oppose ideas without opposing 
people who hold those ideas?  It's tricky, but I think it can be done.  We 
might even be able to do it without calling each other names.

Melynda Huskey

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