I note here what is to me a mystery. It is that people with lower IQs somehow tend, in our age, to have a greater apprehension of the meaning of things and the reality of life, than do our high-IQ professionals, who often seem, in areas outside their immediate field, startlingly dim. I don't know why intellectuals--or cerebralists or eggheads or IQ hegemonists--seem to miss the most obvious things, floating on untethered by common sense. If you talk to a brilliant scholar at a fine university about social policy, chances are he will say with honest perplexity that he cannot understand--really cannot understand--why people would not want men to marry men, or women women. I wish there were a name for this, for the cluelessness of the more intellectually accomplished, the simpler but truer wisdom of those who are often less lettered and less accomplished.. . . and considerably more humble.
It is always a delight when you're a writer not to write things you later judge to be idiotic, or, to be charitable to oneself, flawed. But last week I'd no sooner seen my column online than I disagreed not with its assertions and arguments but, I suppose, with its tone. And not only tone, but its incompleteness.What can I say? I like her. Read the whole piece here.
I was just listening yesterday to Peter Kreeft talking about what it meant to "become a little child" when Jesus talks about it ... which is just the point you and Ms. Noonan put your collective fingers on. How blessed is it to not overthink everything but just look straight to the heart of the matter. I try to remember that often, being an overthinker by nature! :-)
As a red Canadian (U.S. equivalent: a very, very blue American, probably a "pinko"), I rarely, if ever, have found Ms. Noonan's arguments on any topic to be invulnerable.
As for same-gender marriage, it's not for ALL men or ALL women. It's for those who were born gay and who wish to have a deeper relationship with their beloved.
Gays and lesbians who are my relatives and dear friends are in relationships in which love is evident. They are committed to each other and their families.
I am no intellectual, but neither am I stupid or deluded. Ms. Noonan leaves me cold, as do her arguments.
To be fair, I would expect this outcome anyway. I have stopped reading or watching her simply to save myself the aggro.
At my age, life's too short to waste on what will always be an endless argument.
God, kind and caring, will decide.