Fight fierce but fair; and practice at home.

Good family fights prepare you for the larger world of democratic conflict. If you learn to fight well and fairly at home, you can contribute to the civic struggle necessary to keep a pluralistic society moving. I'm constantly advocating my causes in public debate, but during family holidays I'm kept in fighting trim by late-night arguments with my adult children.

Home debating seems natural to me because I constantly argued with my strong-minded father, who came from good Southern prejudiced stock (lapsed Calvinist division). He refused to reform his racist, militaristic, atheistic, anti-intellectual views quickly enough for me. But as I married young (forty years this June so I was a bride of nine), my basic combat training and maneuvering skills in argument have come from frequent marital, martial engagements.

It's no secret that my husband Dan and I have had private and public disagreements on religious and ethical issues, as for instance over abortion. Dan takes a moderate prochoice position and I am more militantly prolife. At least we've produced a book and a few articles detailing those internal conflicts.

A magazine reporter once called to ask me how we could continue to stay married since we disagreed so vigorously over abortion. I replied that after so many decades we had so many deep and serious conflicts between us that we hardly noticed the abortion disagreement at all! When the young interviewer (unmarried) didn't laugh, I quickly explained that this was my attempt at a joke, as in irony. You know, like the comment of the obese Herman Kahn, who once said, "Inside this fat man there lives another fat man."

Thankfully, and not hopefully, Dan thinks these kinds of sallies are funny, and makes plenty himself. Obviously this marriage can be saved. A shared sense of humor is the best bonding agent or glue I know of to keep friends, spouses, and adult children sticking around.

Disagreements abound but agreement abounds more. Dan and I, and my children, friends, and relations agree about more things than we disagree. One of the most critical agreements that Dan and I share is our joint commitment to the Callahan guidelines for conducting civilized debate. If we could convince the larger world of these rules (painfully acquired from experience in public debates on abortion), we could make a great contribution to cleaning up our polluted public discourse.

Rule Number 1: Be obsessively civil, courteous, and charitable in your use of language. Words never are "mere words" (as Catharine A. MacKinnon, the prominent feminist theorist, has written). But those who regularly use words (including prominent feminists) should take care to be absolutely accurate in their facts and remain calm enough to argue sans hyperbolic thrusts issued with nasty sneers of contempt. (A list of all the known offenders against this rule would take up all of the space of charity.)

Rule Number 2 follows from number one: Always show respect for your opponents and assume their good will and sincerity (even if you might harbor a wee doubt or two in your heart). Address what your opponents say not what you infallibly detect to be their hidden agenda or underlying motives. After all, only the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the heart of men and women, so take the magnanimous high road, even if it doesn't heap coals of fire on your opponent's head, a la Saint Paul.

Rule Number 3 may sometimes conflict with the personnel available for debate: Try to argue against the best representative of your opposition, and not against a strawperson, or the other side's most repellent fanatic extremist--that's too easy, and "unsportspersonlike behavior unbefitting a gentleperson."

When attacked by an incoherent ranter, veritably foaming at the mouth, or when confronted by a cowed novice too inept to give his or her side's best arguments, present them yourself. If you can't state the opposing side's arguments better than they can, and then show why the position is unsatisfactory, you haven't done your homework. Why should serious differences be decided by which side has the most crazies roaming around its fringes?

Rule Number 4 demands the most intellectual integrity and honesty: Admit the price of following your own position. Every side in a serious disagreement has some weaknesses, otherwise all reasonable and intelligent persons of good will would agree already. Unfortunately, it's easy to see the looming drawbacks of your opponents' arguments but difficult to admit that your own solution includes risks and difficulties. A truly unflinching mind can confront a choice between lesser evils and say, "Yes, I am willing to say no to this or that demand, even at the price of legal coercion." Or in another kind of argument, "No, I don't think it wrong to let people abuse their freedom and make mistakes."

Americans are all too human. We hate to face dilemmas or scenarios which don't have happy endings. We want everything at the same time, even if the demands are logically contradictory. Perhaps more than anything else, we hate sustained argument and hard-focused thinking.

But the right sort of family training can produce people able to persevere in arguments and willing to confront, to persuade, to win through to a higher ground or a better consensus. As the British officer instructed his troops, "One, two, three, and repeat your fire--without rancor."

Friendly firefights or the learned ability to listen and "respectfully disagree," take practice. You must fully understand that those who disagree with you and have different positions in politics, sex, religion, or whatever, are not despicable people. (Or if they are despicable, it's not because of their dreadful opinions.)

We can resolve to play by the rules of civil and charitable debate. Who knows? By attentive, polite listening to all sides of conflicted encounters in and out of the family, you can learn new things. Your father sometimes did know best, your spouse has had a well-taken point or two, and even your adult children may be onto something you need to know. Let's keep the home fires burning for the greater good of the body politic. Or for the commonweal?