This is really kind of breathtaking. Despite what it looks like, Josh Barro is not a teenager; he is almost 30 years old. He graduated from Harvard. He works for the most prominent newspaper in the world. And … this:

.@jbarro again, I’m trying to elevate the discussion. can we talk about these things without the name calling. it’s not “anti-LGBT”

— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanT_Anderson) July 30, 2014

@RyanT_Anderson why shouldn’t I call you names when your view is that I should never have sex?

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) July 30, 2014

.@jbarro Do you call people names whenever they disagree with you? — Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanT_Anderson) July 30, 2014

@RyanT_Anderson about this topic, yes. — Josh Barro (@jbarro) July 30, 2014

.@jbarro that’s really unfortunate. You should try to make friends and be civil with people who have different values and beliefs.

— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanT_Anderson) July 30, 2014

@RyanT_Anderson don’t patronize me.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) July 30, 2014

.@jbarro I’m not. I’ve been educated at all liberal institutions, most my friends disagree w me on these issues. I value the friendships. — Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanT_Anderson) July 30, 2014

.@jbarro I wish you had similar friendships. Would be great if we could agree to disagree without being nasty about it.

— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanT_Anderson) July 30, 2014

Barro makes Maureen Dowd sound like Hannah Arendt. The thing is, it’s tempting to think that this is how the entire newsroom there thinks. Here’s what the NYT’s public editor Arthur Brisbane said about the Times‘s “hive mind” in his 2012 farewell column:

I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.

As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.

UPDATE: Ryan T. Anderson comments on this second exchange:

What Josh Barro says or does doesn’t really affect me. I’m not a victim, and I’ll keep doing what I do. But incivility, accepted and entrenched, is toxic to a political community. Indeed, civility is essential for political life in a pluralistic society.

It also has deep roots.

The Hebrew Bible tells us that all people are made in the image and likeness of God and have a profound and inherent dignity. Sound philosophy comes to a similar conclusion: as rational beings capable of freedom and love, all human beings have intrinsic and inestimable worth. And so we should always treat people with respect and dignity—we should honor their basic humanity. We should always engage with civility—even when we sharply disagree with them. Faith and reason, the natural law and the divine law, both point to the same conclusion.

Just as I think the best of theology and philosophy point to the conclusion that we should always treat people with respect, so I think they show that marriage is the union of a man and a woman—and that redefining marriage will undermine the political common good.