Mortal Remains
Alas, Average at Best
by S. M. Hutchens
Once again, this time in a story covering the pending liberal/traditionalist division over homosexuality in the United Methodist Church, I have encountered a journalist's assurance that religious conservatives are less educated, accomplished, and culturally sophisticated than their liberal antagonists. The implication is that those in the churches who oppose what used to be universally acknowledged in them as sexual sin are, on the whole, inferior human beings by the most meaningful indices of personal worth—they are, as Michael Weisskopf alleged in his infamous 1993 Washington Post story, "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command."
This observation, now more often insinuated than so flatly stated, is not uncommon. Fear not—the journalistic mandarins assure readers who may hesitate before the idea that religious traditionalists might be right about perversion and all that—superior people like us agree against the inferior sort that this is progress, and not "going
bad."
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S. M. Hutchens is a Touchstone senior editor.
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more on sex from the online archives
33.1—January/February 2020
Speaking Truth About the Sexes Is Not Optional by Anthony Esolen
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
more from the online archives
29.3—May/June 2016
A Deathbed Reflection on Catholic Social Teaching & Our Future Prospects by Karl D. Stephan
30.2—March/April 2017
The Education of Children Takes Generations of Fidelity by W. Ross Blackburn
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