WWWD?, egalitarian debates, etc.

OK --- so shaking hands with Walter Cronkite was hardly a formative experience. But I do remember it fondly. We were in New York and I had a friend who worked for The Associated Press. He got us into the CBS studios --- and there was Cronkite preparing for the evening news. We chatted, shook hands and that was that.

Somehow, with Cronkite at the news helm, it seemed as if fewer things were likely to go wrong. That probably wasn't the case, but no one's quite lived up to the reassuring example he set. And considering the state of the world and radical shifts in the way news is covered, I wonder sometimes, What Would Walter Do?

One thing he did do, as it turns out, was help shift the way major news venues covered LGBT people and issues --- from dismissive, suspicious and mildly contemptous to substantially more balanced. I discovered that while reading an exerpt from Doug Brinkly's biography, "Cronkite."

So I was interested in Mark Segal's post at The Bilerico Project, "Cronkite - An Early LGBT Ally & How It Changed Network News."

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My favorite recovering evangelical blogger, Rachel Held Evans, has devoted the last several days to what she called "A Week of Mutuality," devoted to discussion of varying views of the respective "Biblical" places of men and women in marital and other relationships.

Frankly, my eyes glazed over. I'm wrongly oriented to look upon women as anything other than, well, other people. Besides, I learned long ago to take the Bible with a massive dose of skepticism on the side.

But I was interested in what looks like it might be a final post in the series, "Is patriarchy really God's dream for the world?" Hell, no, I'd say. But there seem to be quite a few cranky men and "complementary" women who disagree.

That got me to thinking about the state of a patriarchy in Lucas County, something I'm not especially well equipped to consider --- somebody else needs to work on this one.

Just looking around, it seems like we're in fairly good shape. Our superintendent of schools and our hospital administrator are women. Women head up many businesses, run many of our most useful organizations. We've had women mayors and city councilpeople. We've got women preachers, although mostly in smaller congregations like my own.

I've worked fairly closely during the last year with all sorts of people on all sorts of projects, and not deteched the "little woman" factor at work at all. But maybe I just wasn't paying attention. Maybe I'm just wearing rose-colored glasses.

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Finally, this little clip that I understand has been moving around on Facebook and elsewhere. I assume the Crown Point referred to is in Indiana. But I'd not noticed it before, perhaps because I don't do much with Facebook other than glance through my Friends' posts once a day. If it's a repeat, sorry: