The sine wave approach
One of the interesting things that strikes me about life when rights clash is the way that some people assume that you can deal with the issues around rights as though they were sine waves.
"All we need," they think to themselves, "Is to introduce something that is 'anti-phase' (that is 180° out of sync') with the prejudice and that will solve it all." So that's what they do, they look at a situation and try to introduce something that will result in a flat line where prejudice is concerned. Where one class were perhaps oppressed they are now favoured and those who were favoured (or perhaps merely just dominant) are now oppressed such that their views count for nothing. Not only that but we take them, their attitudes and the society they stand/stood for and mock them, labelling them whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself as 'dinosaurs' and generally engaging in the art of the ad hominem to press home our point (so we redress the balance, reward the previously oppressed and 'teach the bigots' a lesson too!).
Of course this isn't the reality when it comes to prejudice because we can't inject a pure anti-phase component. In fact what we do inject when we try to cancel out the prejudice in this quasi-scientific manner is what we call in science/engineering (and maths too) is 'harmonics' and these result in lots of incoherent noise such that the initial issues are not resolved and no one can hear anything the others are saying.
Seems that the world (and the Church which in so many cases these days is not different) can learn from the wonderful world of science - see, you don't even need to reach for your Bibles (which is probably a blessing because when I engage in discussion with people and 'rights' it seems that (even when they claim to be 'Christian') this is the last place they'd be caught looking.
Pax
