Fred Clark Digs Deeper

Fred Clark, the Patheos Progressive Christian who delivered himself of a bizarre rant against a column I wrote on the history of Christian sexual ethics, perseveres.

I responded to his rant by pointing out that nowhere in it does he actually engage with anything I actually wrote. In his followup, Clark’s point is, essentially, that he doesn’t have to, because I am a fundamentally dishonest person and, therefore, I guess, don’t deserve the basic decency and ground rules that all civilized people expect of public debate (like, for example, “don’t strawman,” “don’t make baseless, ad hominem accusations”).

Note the wonderful circularity, here: I can’t mean what I say I mean, because I am dishonest; how does he know I am dishonest? Because I can’t mean what I say I mean.

It’s very clear that Clark is either unwilling or unable to actually process anything I actually wrote. For example, he writes that I “[insist] that he had no idea that the word “urban” had any such [i.e. racial] implications.” What I actually wrote is that while I am well aware that the word can have those implications, it is ridiculous to believe that it has such implications in the context in which I used it.

He writes that if I didn’t intend to flash the race card by writing “urban” I would have written “urbane”. Of course, the word “urbane” refers to a type of character, not a sociological category.

Anyhoo… I am content to let things stand where they are and let readers come to their own conclusions.