Dwyer Writes to the Gazette

We first became aware of Maryland Delegate Don Dwyer when he delivered a rousing rant at the Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum's March, 2005, town hall meeting. You can read the text of his speech and hear it HERE.

It was something else. Several of us had gone, we sat in a row, one of us had a tape recorder. Dwyer was shouting, waving his hands -- oh, he was angry about those homosexual activists!

You wouldn't have known that such a thing would exist in twenty-first century America, or in the civilized world at all. Dwyer appealed to the lowest instincts of the audience, to their fear of God's retribution if they should fail to battle evil as it is defined for them, he appealed to that uneasiness audience members might feel about people who are different from them, to their paranoia that the "homosexual agenda" intends to destroy their way of life. It was unbelievable, he pressed ever button except the one that says "Think about it."

This week, Dwyer and DefendMarylandMarriage.com sidekick Caleb Griffin wrote a letter to The Gazette. Seems another delegate had argued in that paper in favor of allowing marriage between gay people. Now Dwyer can't have that, so he's going to make the case against it.

Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the Bible would have identified the inaccuracies in Del. Doyle Niemann’s commentary (‘‘Marriage and God’s will — according to man’s interpretation,” Feb. 10).

It’s almost humorous that a man would use the Bible to justify behavior that the Bible condemns. How can he suggest that God might call homosexuality ‘‘love” when the Bible calls it ‘‘confusion” and ‘‘an abomination”? He denies any responsibility to craft biblically sound policy in one sentence and appeals to the authority of Jesus in the next. ‘We cannot escape the moral and spiritual underpinnings of our law’

Hey, there is some dispute about the correct interpretation of 1 Samuel 20:30-31, and I would be interested to hear from our readers who can look at this in the original Hebrew and perhaps tell us what it most likely means. Is Saul saying that Jonathon is "confused" and is having a love affair with David?

I think that's where the "confused" thing comes from.

Now Dwyer and his understudy go into some philosophizing here about morality:

There are two popular moralities today: man-centered and God-centered.

Man-centered morality says that right and wrong, to the extent they exist, can only be defined by each man for himself. If any man does what the majority of us feel is wrong — such as murder or pedophilia — then he is sick. Somehow, we have failed him. He needs our help, never our judgment.

There is a form of arguing called the "straw man" strategy. You want to make a case, but there is no argument against your position. Here's an example: everybody is against terrorism, therefore your position against terrorism is just like everybody else's. So you invent a straw man, you might say, "Liberals think that terrorists need psychotherapy." The straw man is a fictitious being who holds the position opposed to yours, and who you can ridicule easily. In fact, nobody said that terrorists need psychotherapy, any more than anyone ever said that murderers and pedophilies "need our help, never our judgment." In reality, everybody agrees that murderers and pedophiles need to be locked up.

But Dwyer can use this kind of fiction to make his own meaningless position stand out against a background.

The letter is kind of long, and I'm not going to reproduce the whole crazy thing here. Here's a little more straw-man stuff -- never trust someone who tells you what their opponent believes:

Such concepts as the human soul and spiritual redemption are either old-fashioned or have no bearing on our lives. God is private. Only human wisdom will save us from our broken society. We are all one big family; the greatest virtues are tolerance and equality. The ultimate good lies in everyone doing what is right in his own heart. Anything that divides the human family, such as Jesus’ exclusive claim to salvation, is evil.

God-centered morality says that there is a timeless universal truth, which man did not create and man cannot adjust. Man must look to an external source for guidance because he did not design life nor is he wise enough to write its instruction manual. This morality says that all men are created equal but not all behaviors. God’s love allows us the freedom to make bad choices but shows us the right ones.

Here's the problem. Dwyer -- and he's not alone in this -- creates a division in our society, and then argues that only those on his side of the division can make correct moral decisions.

Consider the origins of the Western discussion of ethics and morality, going back at least to the Greeks, to Plato and Aristotle, who analyzed the many difficult questions of ethics -- hundreds of years before Jesus' birth. Dwyer's argument asserts that all that important contemplation of right and wrong was, on its face, false, because Plato and Aristotle were not Christians and did not subscribe to the biblical authority that he recommends.

Dwyer'sconclusion that only evangelistic and fundamentalist Christians can know right from wrong trivializes the lives of good people around the world who subscribe to beliefs not approved by his particular sect.

The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, and I suppose we will see someone here criticize the Hellenistic Golden Age as a failed, immoral period. I see our historical age as one that is still crawling out of the Dark Ages, by way of the Enlightenment, we are a people still trying to open our eyes in the brightness of reason. And people like Don Dwyer are trying to pull us back.