I've been telling my daughter that since she was five: "Kids are not people."
She's gonna be 18 next month. And I tell her: "You're almost a person now."
In many of these cases, the behavior that is trying to hide behind tenderness is actually quite markedly untender. Buggery is a good example.
In cases like this we don’t need to suddenly hate tenderness — rather, calling the crypto-cruel out on their hypocrisy is what is needed.
I would boldly speak to the LGBT folks who make such a deal out of being anti-bullying, and challenge them to make it true.
Like quit carrying out a cruelty-based ritual in bed, and quit teaching it to our children, and quit being bullies yourself to further it.
We don’t have to be mean here; only forthright.
The author credits Christianity with the abolition of slavery (along with every other good result, apparently).
This claim is not supported by the facts.
For millennia, the amount of work done per day by one man roughly equaled the amount of work done by one horse. Slavery had a rational justification, at least when it came to farming (the occupation for 95 percent of every population); which labor force a practical landowner ought to keep, was a toss-up - horses ate more (but cheaper) food, but weren’t so great at understanding instructions. Neither were they given to staging uprisings, as human slaves might.
All this changed when the horse-collar was invented, circa AD 1000. Suddenly, the horse became far more valuable, at least in fieldwork; slavery was on the skids as the rational excuse for it evaporated. Nearly 1000 years passed before it was abolished in western civ: things moved slower then.