It's still important to argue against it, though few people are doing it. See here for an overview of some of the relevant arguments. And here's a post where I discussed how I expected the issue to develop after the Supreme Court's 2015 decision, given the nature of the American people. Much of what I said there is still applicable. But we've now had several more years of political developments, and the large majority of Republicans and Christians have shown themselves unwilling to discuss the subject much, if at all. Life consists of more than politics, though, and how people view marriage is important in non-political contexts, not just political ones. Changes outside of politics can, and often do, lead to political changes. But the arguments for a Christian view of marriage ought to be made, even if we don't get the political changes we want.
See here for some comments I made about the significance of holidays like Valentine's Day in this context.
Unfortunately, SCOTUS seldom goes backward. Precedent reigns supreme, and the societal fallout of switching back and forth can be heavy. We’d have to reform society to a significant degree, first.
ReplyDeleteIt may be easier to throw marriage itself outside the domain of law while still protecting children somehow. Except that that might play into the hands of those advocates of same-sex nuptials whose actual goal was the rejection of marriage as an institution altogether.
Perhaps we could reinstitute a distinction by other means, legally defining civil unions or covenant marriages in a way onerous to LGBT sensibilities. I have heard of (a very few) Christian couples technically divorcing but staying together to register their disapproval of the current system. If we were to no longer recognize “marriage” as ethically valid, maybe we could campaign to reinstitute another version of marriage that we did find to be spiritually acceptable. It would mean some sort of cultural apartheid. But if we kicked up enough if a fuss, we might be successful.
It does feel as if when the same-sex crowd gains rights, we lose some of ours. I no longer feel that to be “married in the eyes of the law” is particularly meaningful. They have tainted it, demeaned it, vulgarized it. Of course, no-fault divorce and the like had already started that process.
Many Western democracies seem amenable to accommodating Shariah law. Would they be amenable to doing something similar with Evangelicals?
Jason—
ReplyDeleteJust wondering. In your opinion, why won’t American Evangelicals stand by their convictions on issues such as this? They’ll go as far as voting for like-minded candidates but no farther. They’ll even give lip service to participants in civil disobedience or boycotts, but not participate themselves. Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue same-sex marriage certificates, was lauded by Conservative pundits but handily lost her bid for re-election. She was publicly backhanded by the current pope, who evidently didn’t want to deal with a major backlash, especially while trying to ameliorate LGBT status within the bounds of Rome.
Of course, many people stand to lose their livelihoods within this cancel culture. But if enough of us stood up, they’d think twice about shafting us. (In general, they don’t shaft the Muslims.)
Eric,
DeleteThe non-political aspects of the situation are far more important than the political ones, I know a lot more about the non-political aspects, there's much more of a need for more work to be done in the non-political contexts, and I don't expect much change in the political circumstances in the near future. I'm suspicious of making changes like the ones you've referred to, since most of the people I've seen proposing such changes don't seem to have even mentioned them, much less advocated them, until recently. The implications of the changes would have to be thought through. I haven't done that, and I get the impression that most of the people currently putting such ideas forward haven't done it. Somebody who's been more consistent on the subject, like a libertarian, would have more credibility, but I'm not aware of any consensus about an approach to take among knowledgeable people I'd be willing to defer to. Given how little effort Evangelicals and others have made to persuade people about issues like same-sex marriage, are we to believe they'll make much of an effort to persuade people about making changes like the ones you've referred to? If there isn't going to be much of an effort to persuade people about these matters, then how likely is it that the changes will take place and will be maintained over time? There may be some temporary measures that can be taken in various legal contexts to improve the situation, and it's good for some people to pursue that. But I doubt that much can be done in that context in the near future, and the large majority of Evangelicals and their allies in this context shouldn't be focused primarily on such efforts. Rather, there should be more of a focus on the non-political contexts.
Christians need to consistently build from the foundation upward. We have to start with God, with our own view of God and how other people view him, and go on from there. That means we should be discussing theology, priorities, time management, what people are trying to accomplish in life, apologetics, ethics, and other such issues more than politics. But the large majority of Evangelicals haven't thought much about such issues and aren't making much of an effort to persuade others about them. They're often looking for political leaders and sometimes other types of leaders to act on their behalf and bring about the changes they're not willing to do much to bring about themselves. There are a lot of reasons for those problems, which I've discussed elsewhere (see my posts on the state of the culture, intellectual immaturity, false priorities and poor time management, allowing the media to have too much influence on the issues you think and talk about, a lack of urgency about the most important issues in life, how to evangelize, how to mature as a Christian, etc.).
When a certain percentage of Evangelicals, Christians, or some other group claim to oppose something like same-sex marriage, I wouldn't assume that all of them are highly concerned about the issue. Most likely, a majority of them don't have much concern about it. I've mentioned before that most Americans think the homosexual population in the United States is nearly ten times bigger than it actually is. And as I've noted on other issues, we probably wouldn't get such results if groups like Evangelicals and Roman Catholics were discussing these issues as much as they should. Most likely, the ignorance of most Americans is partly a result of the negligence of the people who claim to be Christians, including most Evangelicals. The average Evangelical isn't some equivalent of Robert Gagnon or Michael Brown, nor does he even care enough about the issues to read or cite such sources. I've spent years documenting that most Americans and most Evangelicals are highly immature in their view of God, their priorities, their use of time, their moral views, what they're trying to accomplish in life, etc.
DeleteRegarding cancel culture and the potential of people losing their livelihoods, problems like the ones I've referred to above predate (by a long time) the recent phenomena commonly described as cancel culture. And not all jobs are put at significant risk by publicly commenting on the issues in question, there are ways for people to address the issues more anonymously if they want to, etc. I don't see many people becoming more active in these contexts once they retire. If career concerns are a large factor in how uninvolved people are, why aren't we seeing big increases in involvement once people enter retirement? And so many of the people who speak out on politics are saying so much less about religious and ethical issues. They're willing to speak out. They just don't care much about God, about his honor, about his kingdom, about other people's relationships with God, or the other issues that are most important in life.
There are some good aspects to the situation. Many people are immature Christians, but they are Christians, so there's a lot of common ground to appeal to with them and potential for them to mature. And even non-Christians are significantly persuadable on these issues. But Christians have to make the effort to persuade them, which few are doing. We can't expect those few to keep bearing such an inordinately heavy burden.
If I can throw my two cents in here, I think a big reason why conservative Christians aren't willing to take a robust stance against homosexuality is that they don't believe that secular people *should* know that it's wrong. The Apostle Paul in Romans 1 makes it clear that, in fact, people without special revelation are nonetheless to blame for homosexual acts, because the law written on the heart shows that these are unnatural and wrong. But in our contemporary milieu, Christians have internalized the idea that the only way to know that homosexual acts are wrong is by special revelation, and that the only *reason* that they are wrong is divine fiat, rather than the way that God has created us--an actual law inscribed in our bodies that makes this unnatural. Tacitly, they think of it as on a par with the purely ceremonial Old Testament law--it's just wrong because God says so (who knows why?), but God could have said otherwise, and may say otherwise at some later time (for all we know), and then it won't/wouldn't be wrong. This then makes them feel somewhat guilty for letting this purely "religious" rule have any role in public policy. They feel, even if they don't say this out loud, like it would be analogous to Jews attempting to outlaw pork for all non-Jews.
DeleteThey also feel guilty for their own feelings of disgust about homosexual acts. They believe having such feelings shows that they are unloving. They also believe that all sins are equal. (They don't think about how all of this would apply to pedophilia if it were true. A reductio is that we should also feel no disgust about pedophilia and should not treat it as worse than any other sin.) So they work hard, and often unfortunately successfully, to suppress all such feelings of disgust and to treat homosexual sex as entirely equivalent to heterosexual sex with someone who just happens not to be one's own spouse. But then they feel bad because this means homosexuals can never have sex with the "person they love," so they can't offer them any "hope," such as we would offer to a single heterosexual person. This makes them feel guilty, so they start looking around for some loophole through which to affirm homosexual sexual fulfillment--voila! Homosexual "marriage" comes to seem like a good idea, and they get very intellectually tempted to try to Christianize it.
All of this is tied in with the initial intellectual problem: Denying that there is a real category of unnaturalness that is something more than, "God said you shouldn't do that."
Yes, but Lydia, hasn’t Robert Gagnon (and plenty of others) clearly shown that homosexuals almost universally “receive in themselves the due penalty for their error”? I mean, the list of problems faced by this demographic is quite lengthy: AIDS, STD’s, depression, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, bullying and being bullied, as well as a significantly shortened life expectancy. This is not a healthy, happy lifestyle! For anyone to believe such a thing would require a goodly amount of willful ignorance.
DeleteFor some reason, the more recent generations have almost wholesale substituted indulgence for actual mercy and compassion. Anything resembling “tough love” is not in their ethical vocabulary.
We also don’t offer “hope” to those whose marital partners are sexually incapacitated through illness or physical disability or emotional dysfunction. Life is difficult, and the number of people sexually unfulfilled is legion.
I don’t have a major problem with showing homosexuals some practical compassion: allowing them to visit their partners in hospital, giving them a mechanism to equitably divide property after a split, or protecting them from unreasonable forms of discrimination (for example, in housing). What I do object to is the coercive attempt to normalize their behavior, and not only to normalize it, but to embrace and celebrate it. And, then, castigate and humiliate those who won’t go along with you high-handed social engineering!
Eric
Delete"the list of problems faced by this demographic is quite lengthy: AIDS, STD’s, depression, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, bullying and being bullied, as well as a significantly shortened life expectancy. This is not a healthy, happy lifestyle!"
1. I think what Lydia said is consistent with what you've said. And for what it's worth, if anything, I think both Lydia's and your points are very good ones.
2. Of course, Lydia can speak for herself, but perhaps Lydia is alluding to natural law theory arguments against homosexual marriage? This in turn addresses a more fundamental question: what is marriage? (I'd like to do a post on what marriage is someday, in part because that might help address the sorts of attitudes, sentiments, and so forth among Christians that Lydia is referring to, which I've likewise seen.)
3. What I have in mind when I say a natural law theory argument against homosexual marriage - very roughly speaking because I have no philosophical training whatsoever - is something like the following. It's immoral to misuse our bodies or our body parts because our body parts have a proper function and misusing our body parts would undermine their proper function or keep them from fulfilling their function. For instance, it's immoral to miuse our sexual organs in homosexual sexual activities because our sexual organs are directed or oriented to procreation as well as union (cf. "one flesh") and misusing our sexual organs undermines the proper function of our sexual organs for procreation and union.
4. If this or something like this is what Lydia is suggesting, then I think it's a very good and very reasonable argument to use against homosexual marriage. At least to my knowledge, it has a reputable pedigree among conservative Catholics philosophers and ethicists such as John Finnis, Robert P. George, Patrick Lee, Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, Ed Feser, J. Budziszewski, etc. Among conservative evangelicals, Tim Hsiao takes up this argument too.
Lydia McGrew wrote:
Delete"I think a big reason why conservative Christians aren't willing to take a robust stance against homosexuality is that they don't believe that secular people *should* know that it's wrong….They also feel guilty for their own feelings of disgust about homosexual acts. They believe having such feelings shows that they are unloving. They also believe that all sins are equal. (They don't think about how all of this would apply to pedophilia if it were true."
Eric wrote:
"I mean, the list of problems faced by this demographic is quite lengthy: AIDS, STD’s, depression, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, bullying and being bullied, as well as a significantly shortened life expectancy. This is not a healthy, happy lifestyle!...For some reason, the more recent generations have almost wholesale substituted indulgence for actual mercy and compassion. Anything resembling 'tough love' is not in their ethical vocabulary."
Those are good points, and they illustrate the diversity and significance of the comments Christians and their allies can make on these issues if they're willing. Some have been doing it, but far too few.
Hawk is right, that's what I'm alluding to.
DeleteEric is also right, and both Gagnon and (even more harshly) people like Joseph Sciambra have shown openly what a dysfunctional lifestyle arises from homosexuality. Gagnon is one of the only people willing to say that this arises inherently from the unnatural abandonment of what Gagnon calls the "male-female binary."
But unfortunately we have an entire society determined to ignore all of this, and it inevitably spills over into the Christian world. I can think of many homeschool graduates from my own conservative homeschool community who now have accepted the pro-homosexual worldview. My purely anecdotal evidence indicates that it may even be a statistical majority from my own community. I hope I'm wrong about that. I'll be frank: I'm inclined to blame the kids. It's easy to blame parents or "the Christian community" for not doing "a good enough job," but these were parents who tried if anyone did. At some point young people have to decide whether or not to go with the cultural flow on something like this. Unfortunately, most of them decide to do so.
It's perfectly legit to point to the social dysfunctions as indicators, signs, of the unnaturalness, but there is a mantra for that--"That's the result of discrimination." This is obviously false. The empirical evidence is all against it. E.g. More accepting societies have at least as much of these problems among homosexuals. But anymore, people aren't listening to the evidence, and unfortunately this includes too many Christians.
I wanted to say a little something about discrimination: I think we actually do need enough of a social taboo that some discrimination would arise. For example, take housing: I think it's totally legitimate for a property owner not to want to rent to an open homosexual couple so that his rental house is becoming the center of their life together. Even though an unmarried heterosexual relationship is not physically unnatural, it is societally damaging and wrong, and I would also say the same there. (In fact, many heterosexual relationships could be at least as disruptive for a landlord and neighborhood--e.g., a woman with multiple boyfriends who fight among themselves.) But the idea of non-discrimination on the grounds of marital status or "orientation" is pretty ingrained in our society, so it sounds a little shocking to say something like this: People don't need to be engaging in same-sex sexual activities. They can just stop doing so, and they should. And for owners of housing to want to have either sexually moral singles or normal roommates or married couples in their housing is not such a bad thing and shouldn't be penalized.
Visitation in hospital and disposal of property have always been able to be arranged by documentation. There's certainly no reason why a homosexual who dies intestate should have it set in common law that his property goes to his long-time same-sex sexual partner more than to (say) the wife he divorced to go and live with the same-sex partner. If he wants the latter to happen, he should make a will. Most people should make a will anyway. So I'm willing to take a pretty extreme stance on some of these things, and they used to be thought of as common sense not all that many decades ago. But I think that's part of the problem--once we really recognize how completely abnormal these same-sex relationships are, the things I have just said become thinkable. And I fear that's something the younger generation isn't prepared to handle, psychologically.
Lydia—
Delete1. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and I certainly wouldn’t give the kids a blanket absolution. But isn’t it the parents’ responsibility to guard and empower their children? Isn’t it the churches’ responsibility to do the same for their parishioners? I have four elementary-school-aged progeny, and I am making it my mission in life to protect and equip them to go out into the perverse society that awaits them.
It’s extraordinarily difficult for young people to go against the flow of their nascent culture, to go against the consensus of their peers. I’m guessing we need “Benedict-Option” subcultures to plant our charges in. And a studied plan in place to guide them away from (or redemptively into) social media.
I don’t know many homeschool families with the kind of expertise, patience, and grit required to successfully navigate the current gauntlet. We must fiercely band together and fiercely engage the enemy.
2. I agree with you that discrimination does not seem to be the cause of any homosexual ills, at least not to a significant extent. If you look at the numbers in gay-friendly urban areas (places like Berkeley, Austin, or Key West), they don’t have lower rates of depression and suicide and substance abuse. Their problems don’t appear to stem from lack of acceptance.
3. I understand the desire to discriminate in housing. If I had property, I’d probably price it and outfit it to suit only certain demographics...for no other reason than to protect my investment. I’m not sure how right that would be though. In a pluralist society, there has to be some amount of give and take, or we as Evangelicals may find ourselves on the outside looking in. We’ll find ourselves having difficulty finding decent housing, what with no one wishing to rent to us or live near us.
As an addendum, here's another thought that becomes thinkable if one takes seriously what's wrong with homosexuality: There are situations where it's right and proper, maybe even important, to discriminate even solely on the basis of homosexual impulses. For example, a residential college should probably not allow those with homosexual drives to live in residence halls unless each person has a separate room, the bathrooms are lockable for privacy, etc. This is just basic privacy. Just as we shouldn't house women in shared bedrooms with men, we shouldn't house men together who have sexual feelings for one another. It needn't at all be a matter of considering the homsoexual person a predator but merely a matter of appropriately separating people into non-sexualized groups, which is the original purpose of same-sex rooming arrangements. The same should apply to the military, given the lack of privacy in going to the bathroom, sleeping, showering, etc. Even to say that we *should* discriminate in certain situations purely on the basis of "orientation," aside from behavior, is pretty shocking.
DeleteAs far as having us on the outside looking in, of course we are and will be. But that ship has sailed. We stand to gain nothing now, certainly not a place at the table, by not saying what we really think. In fact, in a sense, that could be seen as a point of the o.p. We're at least a decade or more, maybe two decades, past the point where saying, "I oppose housing discrimination for gays" is going to get us the slightest credit or peace unless we go much farther than that. These things are substantive. It's ridiculous to discriminate against evangelicals in housing. There is no reasonable point to it (unless it's a matter of a roommate or sublet situation, where one understandably wants to room with friends who share one's p.o.v.). On the other hand, because homosexuality is perversion, there can be a very reasonable point to someone's taking that into account if that individual recognizes the perversion and owns property. That's just how it is, and we might as well say it. Social norms can never be substantively neutral in such areas. I'm not arguing for laws *forcing* everybody so to discriminate.
Thanks, Lydia!
DeleteNo, there’s no RATIONAL reason to discriminate against Evangelicals. But the Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion for a reason. People do it.
When Irish Catholics immigrated to this country, they were herded into ghettos. Jews have been discriminated against wherever they have gone. Would you or I deny housing to Jews? Is there any rationality for doing so?
Virginia Heffernan, a columnist for the LA Times, recently waxed eloquent on why she wouldn’t be thanking her pro-Trump neighbor for plowing the snow from her (upstate NY) driveway. She didn’t feel like being grateful to someone like THAT! Point-of-view bigotry is rampant these days.
A traditional Catholic teacher at the “Christian” (Episcopalian) school where my wife works was fired for refusing to address a transsexual student by her preferred male name and pronouns. My wife is extremely careful not to divulge her own Evangelical identity for fear of losing her job.
I believe Biden has, with the stroke of a pen, made it illegal to deny LGBTQ folks a chance to rent one’s property by extending the provisions of the Fair Housing Act to include sexual orientation. I don’t know exactly how that’s legal, but when one wields all the reins of power, there is no one left with enough standing to question it.
Right, and I'm all in favor of using laws against religious discrimination as they are relevant. The fact is that current non-discrimination laws do not form a coherent whole, especially when one considers the "hostile work environment" aspect. A work environment that is made strongly welcoming to homosexuals will be hostile to Christians (or even Muslims and orthodox Jews, for that matter). And a work environment that is made strongly welcoming to Christians will probably give rise to situations that are at least *deemed* "hostile" to homosexuals, especially since homosexuals demand not just silence or tolerance but affirmation. With the trans agenda, this is all the more so. If you force a Christian employee to use preferred pronouns, that's a hostile work environment for the Christians. If you don't force all employees to use preferred pronouns, that's deemed a hostile work environment to the trans.
DeleteSo it's a zero-sum game. The upshot is that basically every place secular is indeed a hostile work environment for conservative Christians, so the rules against religious discrimination are a joke. In some particularly blatant cases, though, one might be able to win a case.
Jason—
ReplyDeleteYou paint a depressing picture. Are the bulk of Evangelicals really that shallow? If so, perhaps we deserve our lot!
Then again, I’m not particularly disputing your gloomy assessment. At times, I’m just as gloomy. But maybe there are believers out there somewhat like me, who would jump on a band wagon if someone got it rolling. I don’t see myself as having the initiating skills to set such things in motion.
Perhaps, in terms of non-political actions, you’re referring to the kind of one-on-one influencing which we can all engage in if we but put our hearts and minds to the task.
Eric,
DeleteThe work that needs done ranges across a spectrum. There's a large amount of it that's easily within reach of the average Christian, yet doesn't get done. When people are as ignorant of the issues as I've documented they are, they're culpable for that. When they spend more than five hours a day on leisure and sports while spending less than ten minutes a day on religious and spiritual activities, as the Department of Labor's research on Americans' time management has consistently shown, the people spending their time that way are culpable for it. And so on.
It's not just that the average person isn't publishing a popular book, founding a university, or running for Congress. It's that he's spending so much time on things like movies and sports, having so few discussions about significant issues with relatives and friends, saying little or nothing about important issues online, making such poor use of opportunities he has in the workplace, etc. If you look at my post linked earlier about evangelism, you'll see examples I've given of what people can do, yet frequently fail to do. I've given many other examples elsewhere, both by describing the possibilities and by carrying out some of them (what I've been writing about a large number and variety of issues on Triablogue and elsewhere for years; my databases of Easter, Reformation Day, and Christmas resources; my funding of the digitizing of the Enfield tapes; etc.).
Even when people are given platforms that have already been popularized by others, such as the ability to post book reviews on Amazon, they seldom take advantage of it. I can give you example after example of books on Amazon that should have been reviewed from a mature Christian perspective (or politically conservative perspective, etc.) shortly after the book came out, but instead went for a long time without any such review. Typically, only about ten percent or less of the people who watch a YouTube video will take the time and effort to click the like button for it. Somebody like Steve Hays will put a lot of time and effort into carrying out a discussion of an important issue on Facebook, but nobody looking on will join in to help him, only one or two people, if even that many, will click the like button for any of his posts, nobody will thank him for what he's done, nobody will link to it, etc. I can't count the number of times I saw that sort of thing happen when he was alive. Meanwhile, the same people who are so uninterested in his work will find so much time to tell jokes on Facebook, post the eighty-third photograph of their children that year, post photos of a meal they cooked the previous evening, etc. And those trivial posts will get far more likes than anything somebody like Steve Hays posts. There's so much Christians can be doing in missions, Bible translation, the translation of other important literature, philosophy, paranormal research, the local church, patristics, etc. Databases need to be built up online. The preservation and dissemination of relevant material needs to be funded. Arguments need to be responded to, and counterarguments already circulating need to be improved upon. I could go on and on about the options available. There's far more work to do than we can get to in a lifetime, yet so few are doing much about it. And I keep hearing from people about how excited they are to watch some trivial television program later in the week, how they don't want to retire, since they'd be bored and unable to find anything to do, etc.
People need to start by obtaining a high view of God, and a high view of life in general and the will and joy to do the sort of work I've referred to should follow. I made some recommendations about how to pursue these things in my post about growing as a Christian.
With regard to same-sex marriage in particular, here are a few suggestions, among many that could be made:
Delete- Familiarize yourself with the topic as well as you need to in order to address it in the relevant contexts. You'll have to decide how often the subject is likely to come up in your life at the initiative of others and how often you'll likely want to take the initiative to bring it up.
- Use discussions with people at church after relevant sermons, platforms you have online (a blog, Facebook, etc.), and other such opportunities to bring the issue up from time to time. For example, I deliberately timed this thread for Valentine's Day. And my first post in this thread links another post that I put up on this issue around Mother's Day in 2015. There are three popular holidays in the United States (and whatever other ones elsewhere) that provide good opportunities for bringing the subject up: Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and Father's Day. You could choose one of those holidays a year, two a year, one every other year, or whatever to make some relevant comments on Facebook, on a podcast you host, or wherever else. I often structure my work around holidays, such as my annual Easter, Reformation Day, and Christmas work. The three other holidays I mentioned above are good for discussing a subject like same-sex marriage (or pornography, transgenderism, etc.). People are thinking about matters like gender and marriage on those occasions, and the holidays underscore the fact that the issues are significant. If we're going to have such widely-recognized holidays in those contexts, holidays so many people participate in to some extent, it's harder for people to deny the significance of the issues and the appropriateness of your addressing them in that sort of context.
- If you've read a relevant book, and there's no significantly good review of it on Amazon, post one there yourself. Up vote the relevant reviews that are already there. Similarly, click the like button for good YouTube videos you watch on relevant issues, Facebook posts you read, etc. Things like up votes and likes often make something more visible. More popular reviews on Amazon appear more prominently, more popular YouTube videos will be seen by more people, etc. Given how much people are affected by the opinions of others, they'll often take something more seriously if it has more up votes or likes. You aren't just encouraging the people who did the good work in question. You're also making that work more likely to be seen by and, therefore, beneficial to other people.
These are just a few suggestions, and you'll have to decide how much to implement, when, and so forth. I don't do all of these things at every opportunity, and I don't expect anybody else to. But it would be good to try to implement at least some of them, to whatever extent makes sense in balance with whatever else you're involved with.
Jason—
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the thoughtful suggestions and insights. I’m going to take some time to sift through these and determine how I might apply them. Thanks.