In this week's New York Review of Books, there is a substantive article about guns in America by David Cole, professor of law at Georgetown. The NYRB is ultra-liberal by almost any standard, yet many of its essayists work hard to be respectful and to analyze issues fairly, in depth, from various perspectives. Cole is reviewing two books, one favorably, one not so favorably. He takes author Tom Diaz (The Last Gun) to task for "liberal hyperbole." The book that he praises, and describes at some length, is Gun Guys: A Road Trip by Dan Baum. Baum, a Jewish Democrat from New Jersey and a former staff writer at The New Yorker, plays against type in his essay; he's always liked guns. He has gone to considerable lengths to understand the gun culture. He travelled around the South and Southwest wearing an NRA cap and carrying a gun (for which he obtained a license), meeting and schmoozing with gun enthusiasts, trying to empathize with them and deconstruct their political views.

The first thing that he wants to say about his subjects is that they have been on the receiving end of  a good deal of truly awful stereotyping, dished out gleefully by the liberal media. This would not have been tolerated for a minute if the subjects had been black, gay, Hispanic, Jewish (fill in the blanks).  Here are some examples that Cole quotes from Baum's book:

Newspaper editorialists called gun owners “a ridiculous minority of airheads,” “a handful of middle-age fat guys with popguns,” and “hicksville cowboys” with “macho” hang-ups. For Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, gun guys were “bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.” Mark Morford of SF Gate called female shooters “bored, under-educated, bitter, terrified, badly dressed, pasty, hate-spewin’ suburban white women from lost Midwestern towns with names like Frankenmuth.”

Baum rightly concludes, “It was impossible to imagine getting away with such cruel dismissals of, say, blacks or gays, yet among a certain set, backhanding gun owners was good sport, even righteous.”

What was also coming through again and again was that gun guys felt insulted. They had something they liked to do—own and shoot guns—and because of it they suffered, they believed, a continuous assault on their hobby, their lifestyle, and their dignity…. At precisely the moment they were sensing their numbers shrinking, gun guys were experiencing what they perceived as a nonstop attack on their very worth as human beings.

I am going to start compiling some of the testimonies to Will's importance that I'm receiving in response to my efforts to pay tribute to him (read parts one and two, immediately preceding on this blog). Here, for instance, is what Phil Ziegler wrote from the University of Aberdeen:

I remember what a revelation it was to discover a full run of Katallagete in the Emmanuel College library in Toronto when I was a student there in the 1990s. Reading in it helped to break things open for me – that a radical biblical theology of grace and radical politics were related was a thought I couldn’t have formed in the United Church before that encounter. Somebody with access to them should scan a full set of these and offer them as a kind of digital archive.

Setting aside the discussion about same-sex weddings, let's take a look at what's happening on the male-female front. The New York Times for Sunday, June 2, 2013, has notices of 34 such weddings. The overwhelming majority of them were held at "event spaces." The Roman Catholics are holding their own, as usual; three of the weddings were held at a Roman Catholic church with a priest presiding. Several rabbis presided at weddings held in various secular "venues." There was only one wedding held at a church with the church pastor presiding, and that one--wouldn't you know--was held in the South.

Most remarkable, though, is the long list of non-denominational officiants. They include numerous "Universal Life" ministers and "American Marriage Ministries" ministers ("a friend of the couple became a Universal Life minister for the event"), 2 ministers of the Church of Human Spiritualism, and a minister of the World Christianship Ministries (Google that one to get a shock).

Granted, the list of couples chosen for the New York Times is hardly representative of the rest of the country--or even the city itself. But given all the beautiful New York City churches that used to be the scenes for weddings, and all the hard-working clergy of this city, one would think that we could do a better job. Such is the power of the cultural trends. How did these Universal Life "ministers" achieve this status all of a sudden? How can anyone take that seriously? Wouldn't you think that would be a joke?

During the 14 years that I was on the clergy staff at Grace Church in New York (1981-1995), I started counting the number of married couples who had met at the church. I stopped counting at 50. Most of them were married at Grace Church and all of them at a church somewhere. All were married by a member of the clergy (need I say legitimate clergy). Most--though, granted, not all--are still married. Am I bragging? not really, since the circumstances at Grace in those years were truly remarkable and God-given. However, I think a case can be made for the help given to couples by a strong grounding in the church.  This business of do-it-yourself weddings speaks volumes about the unmoored, self-created ethos of the institution of marriage today. This is a very serious matter for families and for our society as a whole. May God bless all those who are working hard to strengthen marriages in the context of religious faith and Christian community.
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