Map of the international community. Source: Terrible Maps
Have a look at this map. Is there anything missing from it? If you were Martin Wolf, the Chief Economics Commentator of the Financial Times, you would probably think that this is a map of “the world”—all of it. This is hardly a sarcastic remark, and I will prove it to you in this post.
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The only blog in the internet that I follow closely is Peter Berger’s, who is an American renowned sociologist of religion. Most of his blog posts revolve around issues related to the “culture wars” in the United States of America, in which religion is almost invariably strongly present. The culture wars cover a wide range of issues, such as creationism vs. evolutionism, pro-choice vs. pro-life, supporters of same-sex marriage vs. those who opposite, and the like.
In his latest post, Berger refers to the support given by some American large corporations, such as Microsoft and Starbucks, to a bill in Washington State to legalize same-sex marriage and the negative reaction against this support by some Evangelical pastors and conservative activists. Berger wonders about the real motivations behind such “political correctness”: Are they straightforward commercial interests (i.e. a desire to win more customers in a large “gay market” of, say, coffee drinkers or computer users) or is it a matter of class and cultural elitism?
