One of the most frustrating things as a writer is when you have a good idea and then forget it. I had a thought this morning, and it was solid. But I was not in a spot where I could write it down (whether in a notebook or in Bear). The frustration I feel at this is hard to express, but here I am trying.

It is such a frustrating experience that I keenly remember the experience happening to me once before—back in 2016, for a post I have not yet finished writing because I continually find it beyond me. And since I cannot remember today’s good idea, and haven’t finished the last good idea, I’ll just share the notes I wrote down back in March 2016 about that idea in hopes that either I will actually run with them sooner rather than later, or that the act of putting it out there in this brief form will be enough to allow me to let it go:

American conservatives point to previous eras as if our nation were less sinful, less blemished then. It was not. It was wretched in different ways—but no less wicked than now. Centuries of slavery, and of Jim Crow, are not lesser sins than today’s sexual ills.

Conservatives have too often elided these essential questions: Whose “better” past? And in what sense “better”? It may have been less sexually perverse, but how is that “better” when it entailed at the same time massive oppression of whole groups of people—especially because that oppression was so often at the hands of people claiming the name of Christ?

There is a great deal to unpack there, and I continue to find it more than I am really able to unpack.