St. Thomas More Society of Richmond Red Mass and Dinner featuring Ryan Anderson

The St. Thomas More Society of Richmond hosted our annual Red Mass and dinner yesterday evening.

The homily closed with an invocation of Mary, Mirror of Justice. I would be surprised if our enterprise here at MOJ had anything causal to do with that. But I took the homily as a renewed call for all of us present to imitate Mary, not as our own sources of light, but as better reflections of God's grace illuminating the world. 

Our keynote speaker at the dinner was Ryan Anderson, whom I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time. His speech, together with an earlier presentation at the University of Richmond Law School, enabled me to appreciate just how courageous and effective he is. No wonder so many people don't like him!

It's uncomfortable to be challenged. But as John Cavadini said in connection with Pope Francis's visit, we need to be challenged and made uncomfortable.

Introducing Ryan to a student audience earlier in the day reminded me of a quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr. that my college pro-life group put on our t-shirts when we restarted the group and became more visible: "There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right." We thought we were taking unpopular positions, but positions that needed to be taken. As it turns out, we probably overestimated the unpopularity of our views. But we were at least willing to put ourselves out there in order to tell the truth about the value of unborn human life. 

Researching that quotation yesterday to make sure it was an authentic quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr. (unlike the one that circulated after the death of Osama Bin Laden), I came across another quotation attributed to King that seems particularly apt in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges: "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

I have not nailed down the source for this one and cannot vouch its authenticity. But the basic idea definitely fits with King's letter from a Birmingham jail, in which he criticized too many in the white church who were "more cautious than courageous" and "remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows."

There is no one right way to choose what to blog about, write about, share on social media, say or not say in casual conversation with co-workers, friends, neighbors, and so on. But there are certain ways of going wrong. Indulging a spirit of self-censoring timidity is one such way.

So ... I am thankful for the thoughtful, forthright, and friendly witness of Ryan Anderson to the truth about marriage as the union of man and woman as husband and wife. And I hope not to remain silent behind online stained glass windows ... even if that means doing something that leads to a professional dead end, like taking Justice Kennedy's pronouncements about substantive due process seriously on their own terms. There's no there there, and yet here we are. It's not too late to stop where we are going.