{"id":95580,"date":"2022-06-29T18:13:01","date_gmt":"2022-06-30T00:13:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=95580"},"modified":"2022-06-29T22:01:17","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T04:01:17","slug":"of-rainbow-flags-and-anarchy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2022\/06\/of-rainbow-flags-and-anarchy.html","title":{"rendered":"Of Rainbow Flags and Anarchy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Where<\/a>
A 2013 photograph of the United States Supreme Court building, taken from the dome of the U.S. Capitol in Washington DC
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Interpreter Radio Show \u2014 June 5, 2022<\/a><\/p>\n

In the first hour of the 5 June 2022 episode of the Interpreter Radio Show, Neal Rappleye, Jasmin Rappleye, Hales Swift, and Stephen Smoot discussed the Mormon History<\/a> Association and ancient trans-oceanic crossings.\u00a0 The second portion of the Show was devoted to a roundtable discussing the upcoming Come Follow Me lesson #29 (2 Kings 17\u201325). The weekly Interpreter Radio Show can be heard live on Sunday evenings from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640.\u00a0 Alternatively, you can listen to it live, uncensored, and without a safety net on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Owing to the fatal illness of a long-time friend, Michael Lyon, who was a hospice patient there, my wife and I visited Utah Valley Hospital yesterday afternoon.\u00a0 Obviously, the most important thing that weighed on our minds was the condition of our friend.\u00a0 (I received word just minutes ago that Michael has now passed away, as was anticipated.)\u00a0 Still, I couldn\u2019t help but notice a couple of rainbow flags festooning the pedestrian bridge that links the hospital campus to other medical buildings across Fifth West and, even more, the trio of flags \u2014 American, Utah, and rainbow \u2014 atop the flag poles at the main southern entrance to the hospital complex.\u00a0 (There may well be other rainbow flags elsewhere but, if so, I didn\u2019t see them.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was struck by the presence of these flags, and I wondered, frankly, why they were there.\u00a0 Yes, I know it\u2019s \u201cPride Month\u201d \u2014 doesn\u2019t everybody<\/em>? see \u201cExplorers Discover Remote Island Untouched By Pride Month\u201d<\/a> \u2014 but still I wondered.\u00a0 (Wondering is, I believe, still legally and ethically permissible.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

If the rainbow flag is taken simply as affirming the value of treating all people (including those who experience same-sex attraction, gender dysphoria, and related matters) with kindness and respect \u2014 and I assume that many take it in much that way \u2014 then I see no problem with its display on government and quasi-government buildings such as Utah Valley Hospital.\u00a0 Notwithstanding the strenuous daily efforts of a tiny group of anonymous online detractors over the past fifteen years or so, I\u2019m very much in favor of charity and mutual respect.\u00a0 But I\u2019m not sure that that is all that the rainbow flag represents.\u00a0 I may be mistaken, and I\u2019m certainly open to re-education on the matter, but it seems to me that the flag frequently and perhaps, in a sense, primarily represents a particular ideology or complex of ideologies and a broad but specific and insistent political agenda.\u00a0 In which case, I think it quite inappropriate for the rainbow flag to be displayed on any government or quasi-government building.\u00a0 State institutions should not be publicly taking partisan, political, or ideological stands.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In that light and with the heightened awareness induced by my having seen those flags yesterday, I found this article of considerable interest:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cDraping Yourself in a Rainbow Flag Doesn\u2019t Help Me Feel Loved\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been remiss in calling your attention to new entries on the sadly necessary Neville-Neville Land<\/em> blog.\u00a0 So here are links to the most recent articles there:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHeartlanders expect the apostles\u2019 views to change\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cElder Quentin L. Cook is a member of the citation cartel\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cSpencer Kraus\u2019s devastating review of Jonathan Neville\u2019s A Man that Can Translate\u201d<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cSpencer Kraus\u2019s trenchant review of Jonathan Neville\u2019s Infinite Goodness\u201d<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Finally, I hereby designate the comments section for this blog entry as a preserve in which the reader who calls himself \u201cThe Last Danite\u201d should feel himself completely at liberty to post his notions about democracy being merely a tyranny of the majority, about disdaining the Constitution of the United States, and about how everything would be wonderful if we just lived under stateless anarchy.\u00a0 \u201cThe Last Danite\u201d should not feel free, however, to take other threads over for such, umm, ideas.\u00a0 I will try to resist the urge to interact with him here regarding his curious views \u2014 I\u2019ve wasted too much time on them already \u2014 but any others who care to engage with him should feel entirely free to do so in comments appended to this specific blog entry.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll get things started here by saying that there has never been a society in human history in which nobody has exercised authority over anybody else.\u00a0 Moreover, pending the Millennium and the Second Coming, if even then, there will never<\/em> be such a society.\u00a0 In my view, the wholly voluntary society that TLD affects to favor \u2014 that is to say, an anarchic society \u2014 would very soon resemble that described by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan<\/em>: \u201cNo arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.\u201d\u00a0 Or, as Sir Isaiah Berlin put it, \u201cFreedom for the wolves has often meant death for the sheep.\u201d\u00a0 Seriously advocated anarchism is, in my judgment, quite unserious fatuous utopianism.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

TLD points out that much of my life \u2014 within my family, among my friends, and in the Church, to choose three areas that are vitally important to me \u2014 is actually lived, right now, under conditions of \u201canarchy.\u201d\u00a0 (I would prefer to say that I live within networks of voluntary relations.)\u00a0 And, of course, most of my financial or economic life is also, happily, a matter of freely entered transactions.\u00a0 As a free-market-oriented, limited government, federalist conservative, this is as I think it should be.\u00a0 (I like the great George Will\u2019s response when he was asked whether he is a libertarian.\u00a0 \u201cLibertarianish,\u201d he replied.)\u00a0 But my largely voluntary and free life is lived within, and to at least some degree structured and made possible by, a framework of laws backed by the state.\u00a0 When I sign contracts, I expect them to be enforced \u2014 if need be \u2014 by the law.\u00a0 I rely on the fact that, should my property rights be infringed, the courts will defend them.\u00a0 Should I be threatened, the police power of the state will be there, in principle and I hope in reality, to protect me, to deter the person making the threat or to punish the offender after the fact.\u00a0 I\u2019m especially happy at this time that abortion is not a matter of lawless anarchy, and that, to some degree or another in the fifty United States, the lives of unborn children will be protected rather than be exposed to the untrammeled free choices of people who don\u2019t value such lives.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I recognize that, as Mao famously said, \u201cpolitical power flows from the barrel of a gun.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, government power rests, ultimately, on the power to coerce.\u00a0 That\u2019s what distinguishes state power, ideally, from the power of Microsoft or that of the American Federation of Teachers:\u00a0 The state claims a legal monopoly on force.\u00a0 That is why I firmly believe that the scope of government should be strictly limited.\u00a0 Force should be minimized in human life.\u00a0 But force cannot realistically be expected to simply go away.\u00a0 I cannot agree with the notion that there should be no government at all.\u00a0 For, if there is no state at all to exercise force through its police, military, and judicial functions, force will nevertheless be employed within a society.\u00a0 I would far rather have a government that seeks to prevent and to punish rape, for example, than a state of anarchy in which the powerful freely rape the weak when and if they choose.\u00a0 The state should never have enforced slavery or segregated buses.\u00a0 But it needs to exist in order to protect against lynch mobs.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nor can I see how an American Latter-day Saint can disdain the Constitution of the United States while apparently claiming to be in harmony with the scriptures.\u00a0 For, in Doctrine and Covenants 101: 77-78, 80, given in mid-December 1833 in Kirtland, Ohio, the Lord himself speaks of<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

the laws and constitution of the people, which I have suffered to be established, and should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles; that every man may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment. . . .\u00a0\u00a0And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

There.\u00a0 That should be enough bait to bring \u201cThe Last Danite\u201d to this blog entry\u2019s comment section.\u00a0 And, as I say, anybody who wants to engage him here should freely jump in.\u00a0 I myself hope not<\/em> to do so.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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