Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Gleichheit - Egalitarismus; Unterschied: Menschenrechte, Hautfarbe - Gender-Rechte, sexuelle Orientierung

Kurzinhalt: Precisely at this point at which gender and sexual orientation were declared to be as insignificant as skin color, equality turned into egalitarianism... that all human beings are equal turned into the belief that all differences among human beings ...

Textausschnitt: EGALITARIANISM

85a Belief in the equality of all human beings is one of the foundational principles upon which this country was established. This equality, transcendent in origin ("all men are created equal"), had one enormous implication for this nation founded upon the rule of law, namely, that all men are equal before the law and in the rights and protections they can claim from the law. Unfortunately, transcendent equality (before God) failed to translate into civic equality (before the law) for those whose skin was black. It took a civil war to right this wrong, at least in theory, yet a century later, as the civil rights movement of the 1960s attested, equality before the law had yet to be achieved very well in practice. (Fs)

85b One of the most important and, at the time, unintended consequences of the civil rights movement was that it inspired two other political movements, the feminist movement and the gay rights movement. Each of these movements bears at least a superficial resemblance to the civil rights movement, in that each speaks for people whose rights to equality before the law are thought by them to have been ignored or violated and each claims that the basis upon which such equality has been denied (gender in the case of the feminists, sexual orientation in the case of the gays) is as inconsequential or insignificant as is skin color. Precisely at this point at which gender and sexual orientation were declared to be as insignificant as skin color, equality turned into egalitarianism. For this was the point at which the belief that all human beings are equal turned into the belief that all differences among human beings are also equal—and equally trivial. This was the point at which the equality of all human beings started to be defended specifically on grounds that all people are fundamentally identical and interchangeable, inasmuch as all differences among people are fundamentally insignificant. (Fs)