Yesterday, I hosted our friend Matthew Franck at my university . It would be no understatement to say that his appearance caused some consternation , both on and off campus.
But it is a credit to our students that they listened politely to his talk, attempted to argue vigorously with his position, and, in the end, left wanting more. I doubt that he persuaded many of his listeners to change their minds about same-sex marriage, but that wasn’t, strictly speaking, his intention. It was, rather, to show proponents of same-sex marriage that “the other side” is reasonable and that their arguments are worth engaging, rather than dismissing out of hand as irrational and merely or privately religious. This was a prologue to a full and frank discussion of same-sex marriage. In that respect, Matt struck a modest blow on behalf of religious liberty and of reasonable public discourse.
At least in my little part of the world, there’s now room for conversation, for which I’m grateful.
If I were to say that this was all Matt’s doing, however, I’d be giving him too much credit. However easy it is to demonize and to hate from a distance (I won’t provide links, but, trust me, the demonization and the hate was quite evident online), it’s a bit harder to do so in the context of a small college, where habits of conversation are encouraged, where people talk the talk (even if—sinners as we all are—we don’t always walk the walk) of fairminded openness to the truth, and where Others (not “The Other,” which, as a colleague rightly suggested, is too abstract) are people we encounter day in and day out.
He was the right man in the right place.
I’m grateful to him and I’m also grateful for the place. Some might share my gratitude for him. I hope and, yes, pray that even more share my gratitude for the place, and do what they can to preserve it and others like it.
Update : Here’s a story by someone who certainly didn’t present his press credentials before covering Matt’s talk. Had he done so, Matt might have been willing to talk to him and correct a misquotation in the article. He attributes a statement to Matt that demonstrably is not his. I would also have been happy to parse this post for him.
So far as I can tell, his quotations from Matt’s talk are accurate, indeed so accurate that he must have been recording it. My experience with reporters is that they’ve asked my permission before using a recording device. Is this standard journalistic practice, or were my quite limited experiences anomalous?
In the end, however, he’s probably no worse than this reporter from the Atlanta paper, for whom “unavailable for comment” seems to mean “not sitting next to me while I was writing the story.”
