Thats kind of a cute turn of phrase. Maybe gutless too, but cute.
If we seem to have moved beyond “drama and moral clarity,” it is only because we no longer know where we are going.
I don't know about the drama, but we've moved beyond moral clarity and that includes this writer.
“the global divide” that splits the West from the rest on social acceptance of homosexuality... In a world where eight in 10 people identify with a religious group, and where conservative forms of all major faiths — Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism — are increasingly prominent and politically salient, the outlook for radical change in social attitudes outside the West and elite enclaves in developing countries looks bleak.
This upsets him because for him homosexuality is one of the great issues of our time. Like Liberty for the Founders, for the current generation of lost souls have found their righteous cause in homosexual couplings.
He tuts about Guantanamo but fails to mention the fact that the enemy saws off peoples' heads. We send them to Guantanamo to play soccer, their guys saw off heads.
Where strong faith meets human rights, the classic modernizing assumption — that secular rights trump religion — no longer holds.
Here again he is being cute. Which secular rights trump which religions? It this is code for his anger about the world's failure to unite and celebrate homosexuality, then again he is letting his obsessions rule his political and philosophical judgement. What he seems to be doing, correct me if I'm wrong, is comparing a 3000 year old judeo-christian moral code with Sharia law.
Keeping in mind that homosexuality is not outlawed in Christian countries but it can get you the death penalty in muslim ones.
conservative-religious backlash against the language and practices of secular human rights
Really, he keeps equating the Christian world that developed the whole notion of human rights in the first place, with the Sharia world simply on the basis of his obsession with homosexual couplings.
Then there is the frustrating disconnect from reality and the rewriting of facts found in a majority of the “comments” that follow the OpEd.