Walking the Talk
If Diogenes couldn’t find an honest man 24 centuries ago in ancient Greece, it’s hard to imagine his search would prove more fruitful in modern-day Washington, D.C. or, lamentably, in modern-day America.
It’s not hard to understand why. In our age of personal gratification, truth has become more than merely inconvenient. It has become an utter nuisance.
Conservatives have been eager – and correctly so – to shine the light of hypocrisy on Sally Yates, the acting Attorney General fired by Donald Trump last week for refusing to enforce his recent executive order on refugees. Ms. Yates might have argued against the order’s constitutionality; instead, she based her decision primarily on personal bias.
Celebrated by the left for her stand on principle, what Ms. Yates really did was to violate her oath of office by failing to fulfill her duties. It’s her job to uphold the law, not her individual values. If conscience prevented her from performing her duties, she would have resigned in protest. But that would have required true principle. So much easier to merely participate in another round of partisan gamesmanship.
This brings us back to Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples back in 2015. She too claimed to stand on principle by refusing to honor her oath of office.
So why are the same voices that castigated Ms. Davis hailing Sally Yates as a hero? And where were the critics of Ms. Yates when Kim Davis was making herself a martyr in name only?
Jedediah Bila posed that very question on The View, prompting Whoopi Goldberg to go ballistic and invoke the popular refrain, it’s not the same thing.
Nowadays, principle is just a synonym for equivocation.
Excuses
If I were a tadpole, and you were a fish,
If the South China sea were a licorice dish,
If the King of Siam staged an off-Broadway play,
If the Man in the Moon weren’t afraid of the day,
If phones were not busy and lines never long,
If Fay Wray were a dozen times tall as King Kong,
If gators wore shirts with men stitched on the breast,
If the head of the pack could escape from the rest,
If the dark could be pierced by a single white flame,
If Professor Bob Knoll could remember my name,
If the sea didn’t swell and the ship didn’t rock,
If naive good intentions could turn back the clock,
If each moment could stretch to the end of our lives,
If bees came in gaggles and geese lived in hives,
If the hare beat the tortoise by less than a mile,
If the face in the mirror would give me a smile,
If the northern lights migrated south with the birds,
If my fluttering heart could be calmed by your words,
If I’d show you my heart, and you’d show me yours, too,
We’d have no more excuses.
Then what would we do?
Yonason Goldson 