the friendship made her
realize respect and trust don’t
require agreement
“Wrong things bother her,” Mr. Perkins told me. “And wrong things bother me.”
So writes Farah Stockman quoting Tony Perkins (not that Tony Perkins) in the guest opinion piece, One of the Strangest Friendships in Washington (Jan. 29, 2023 – New York Times).
Ms. Stockman writes: Given their résumés, one might think that Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, and Anurima Bhargava, who worked in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department, would be adversaries — if they ever crossed paths at all. Yet, over the past five years, they have managed to forge a bond that transcends politics and proves that you don’t have to agree on values here at home to promote basic human rights abroad.
But they found common ground.
“Wrong things bother her,” Mr. Perkins told me. “And wrong things bother me.”
Ms. Stocmman quotes Ms. Bhargrava, “He’d treated her with respect from the first moment she met him, Ms. Bhargava told me. He made an effort to learn how to pronounce her name, even as another Republican commissioner refused to do so. They sat next to each other at a dinner retreat in North Carolina and started chatting.“
The friendship made her realize that “respect and trust don’t require agreement,” she [Anurima Bhargava] said.
Friendship.
Respect.
Trust.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, the Romans liked to say.
In its most common usage the saying is used to disprove an argument.
‘With this, therefore because of this’ is the translation and it usually means event B followed event A so event B MUST HAVE BE CAUSED BY event A.
But in this case.
Friendship.
Trust.
Respect.
Not only can they depend on each other, but the parts in the equation, they might be interchangeable.
Maybe it is better to say of three things, it is hard to have any of one of these three without the other two.
Perhaps the key here is that while all of these there things need the other, none of the three require agreement.
Ms. Stockman closes with the comment:
[Mr. Perkins’] friendship with Ms. Bhargava hasn’t changed his core beliefs, he told me.
He still fights for Bible-believing Christians, whom he views as under attack in the West. But he has changed how he expresses himself.
In an age when others write over-the-top tweets just to outrage their political opponents, he chooses his words more carefully and imagines his good friend is listening.
No Haiku For You 