Yesterday’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ran a large feature article on the up-and-coming movers and shakers in city affairs, complete with color that made clear the bright and hopeful fact that these folks covered the gamut of racial, sexual, and ethnic persuasions. When faced with this kind of thing the mind with any experience in the world quickly poses two questions to itself: whether it is a lie, and if so, where the real power and influence lies, or, whether it is the truth and competence has taken back seat to the quota. Of course, it may in this case simply be a matter of selection. The writers, knowing what is good, honorable, and acceptable in the narrow little world of newspaper culture, and whatever it was they actually found, selected the rainbow for presentation. In which case it was a lie, but the paper’s rather than the city’s.
Along the same lines, several years ago there appeared an advertisement for General Motors automobiles featuring assurances of the mixed composition of its design engineering staff. Consumer Reports frequency of repair charts had long ago convinced me that comfort in this area would be represented by the faces of oriental males. (The far east, male-dominated and with vastly higher standards than the United States in mathematics and science education, produces far more engineers—and notably better cars—than we do.) Although I took some comfort in the probability that the advertisement was probably a lie, I took none in the competence of a management that relies more on the gullibility of its customers than the quality of its products to sell its wares.
Touchstone has had its share of wrangling with the quota-pushers, in our case mostly people who have thought that we needed more women at the top of the organization. Our response that Anita Kuhn, our managing editor, IS the top of the organization did not amuse them. What they wanted was balance—the peculiarly woman’s voice and view represented among the senior editors.
Well, they didn’t get it, and when we made it clear that we didn’t feel the slightest guilt about the way things were and had no intention of being enlightened, they pretty much gave up on us and went away. Nothing in our history was written in stone in this regard, but as things went on it became clearer to us that the organization had a “male head,” that this was its character, and a good thing. We found that we simply could not communicate on the point with the egalitarian (and hence quota-minded), with those who cannot conceive of a male-headed organization being fundamentally and devoutly pro-woman. In fact, we believe that thinking this way maldisposes them towards Christianity.
The Touchstone editors don’t give a hoot about race or ethnicity, since we don’t believe the qualities of spirit and mind that make the sort of writing we look for have any strong connection with these traits. They may have some significance in other spheres of life, but not in its deeper matters, not in what is most important to the Church, and therefore to us. Ignoring ethnicity, or at least seeing it as adding nothing more than a dash of flavoring to the dish, is one of the things we do in the service of truth, so that people will not have to look at us and ask themselves whether a Rainbow Touchstone is lying about where the real influence is, or subordinating quality to quota.
(Parenthetically, in the interest of full disclosure, I must add here that we would have some difficulties with the proposal of a Cretan senior editor. One of their own prophets has identified them as liars, evil beasts, and slow bellies, an assessment with which we are obliged by apostolic authority to agree. Also, I must say that Father Reardon flatly refuses to work in any way with Hittites. Other than that, we are completely open.)
Although I will only profess to speak for myself here, I will note that the differences between men and women are more fundamental, significant, and meaningful in the life of the church than those of race or nation. There is a sense in which men and women think, and therefore tend to write, differently. It is possible for men who understand women well, and women who understand men well (here I think particularly of the talents of writers like Barbara Howatch or Marilynne Robinson) to think and write in the persona of the other sex. In fact, the greatest writers must be able to do this. Shakespeare must be able to write Ophelia, Goethe Margarete. There is coming and going in this area. While the general style and flavor of Touchstone tends to be male, however, no good Touchstone-ish article has ever been rejected because the writer was a woman. Bethany Torode wrote a significant one when she was nineteen.
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