Tuna With Good Taste

Zimmerman demonstrations will happen because they will happen, and they will happen until there’s worse news to report or until people realize they’re going to be late for work, whichever comes first. Opinions on all sides are valid to whoever is expressing them. The Castle Laws seem right to me, we may be wrong but within ethical bounds I agree with whoever said “If you enter my house unbidden, don’t expect to walk out: you’re going to be carried out under a sheet.” An extension, Stand Your Ground also seems right although you should not be able legally to shoot if you picked the fight in the first place, and juries should be able and led to explore that.

We are headed for parts known. It will be deja vu all over again, back to the Old West and the big decision for church vestries will be whether you must leave your firearm in the narthex. Which unfortunately will encourage people to come early and get a back pew, already a problem in the Episcopal Church. WWMDD, What Would Marshall Dillon Do?

If it’s poor taste to make light of something so serious, it tastes even nastier to take our own views with such dead certitude as many are doing. But it’s not about tuna with good taste, Charlie, it’s about good-tasting tuna.

Ethics and law are not always in synch. The key to Richard Nash’s morality play The Rainmaker is a scene after the Rainmaker has made love to the lonely spinster girl in a barn at midnight. The pathetic girl's outraged brother Noah brandishes a pistol, intending to right the girl’s honor and the family’s reputation by shooting the Rainmaker. Their father, an old Texas rancher, grabs the pistol away. “Noah, you’re so full of what’s right you can’t see what’s good.”

We’re so full of what’s legal we can’t see what’s moral. Christians should not be conquesting Canaan with Joshua but crowding around Jesus as he preaches the sermon on the mount.