Quote of the Day II

Do no read if you suffer from high blood pressure-

"The meaning of evangelical leader Ted Haggard’s downfall needs to be well understood by religious conservatives, lest the tragedy be compounded. The pain that has befallen the man — now resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals — along with his family and church is the consequence of his poor decisions.

What would be worse than his personal destruction, however, is if the side of the culture war that Haggard ably fought against in his public life were allowed to define his sins as a final proof that religious conservatism itself is cruel, stupid, and morally corrupt. On the contrary, the Haggard story confirms some truths of the worldview he defended...

...The conservative case against redefining marriage is based on the observation of human vulnerability to temptation. Haggard confirms what we’ve said all along. It is pervasive moral weakness that makes such things necessary.

If everyone were in control of his appetites, there would be no need for the government to be involved in endorsing some sexual relationships while withholding endorsement from others. The more society undermines ancient standards of moral conduct, the harder it becomes to withstand temptation. This is why gay marriage threatens heterosexual marriage. When the awe in which people once held matrimony is diluted, by treating it as a man-made and thus amendable institution rather than a divinely determined one, heterosexuals find sexual sins of all sorts harder to resist.

So the experience of Ted Haggard strengthens the case for legally constituted social institutions like traditional marriage. Did the acceptability of gay love in today’s culture hasten Haggard’s fall? No doubt it did. It’s possible that the same man in a better time and place would have been beset by no such temptation.

But if even Haggard, this Christian fighter against homosexual culture, succumbed, doesn’t that prove that gay identity is natural, inborn, and therefore normal? Well, yes, in a way it does. But all temptations are natural, many are inborn, and to be called to fight against them in ourselves, according to a religious view, is the most normal thing in the world...

...In the Ted Haggard affair, then, we are confronted with questions not only of right and wrong but, more fundamentally, of moral responsibility versus biological determinism. Conservatives, not only religious ones, need to be very clear where we come down on this."

--David Klinghoffer, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, instructing conservatives not to take the 'wrong' lesson from Rev. Haggard's downfall.

Rather than seeing the revelations of Haggard's actions as a symbol of the larger hypocrisy of cultural conservative scolds (see also: Limbaugh and drugs, O'Reilly and sexual harassment, Bennett and gambling, Foley and child predators, etc) and realizing that maybe conservatives should not base their entire domestic agenda on trying to legislate their 'morality' until America goes back to being the Rockwell painting it never was... Klinghoffer sees all this as even more reason to keep up the fight and stop the gay demons from destroying God's country. After all, if even a true believer like Haggard could be tempted by the gay demons inside him, then the enemy is more powerful than they thought and efforts must be doubled to stop the gay!!!

Klinghoffer instructs gay Christians to repress their evil temptations, comparing it to the way a Jewish person who keeps kosher must avoid pepperoni pizza (the guys I have dated would be surprised to learn that they are merely the equivalent of a slice of pizza to the religious right). He also calls homosexuality the most 'extreme' of temptations, stating "another thing that makes a homosexual temptation difficult to resist is that, at least until the advent of AIDS, it produced no physical ravages". Thank God for AIDS, for now the sinners know the price of their weakness.

These people are delusional and they need help. They also need to be booted out of politics forever. Please realize that they currently are in control of a large chunk of our country's political discourse. This article, for instance, is published in the National Review, the top conservative magazine in the country. To me, this is the equivalent if The Nation ran editorials by 9/11 conspiracy theorists. But they don't. Because those people are crazy. As are these cultural conservatives... except these are the people who currently control the Republican party (note that the one Senator the National Review's cover spotlights as the top conservative in America is Rick "man on dog" Santorum).

People like Klinghoffer are the cultural version of the neoconservatives. The lesson the neocons learned from the Iraq debacle was not that the war was a mistake in both principle and execution-- a reputiation of their philosophy of preemptive war and American military dominance in every corner of the world. No, the lesson they chose to learn was that the President was a wimp who didn't fight the war as hard as he was supposed to (a frightening notion). They hope that they will get it right in the future (with President McCain?) with more wars.

It seems almost too easy and cheap to say that our national politics are controlled by people who are insane. But here we are. Our foreign policy has been controlled by people who view war as the norm and diplomacy as sign of weakness. Our domestic policy has been controlled by religious charlatans who preach hate and intolerance, even after their own hypocrisy is exposed. That so much of this is under-the-radar type stuff is how people have quietly accepted it as political reality. But it should not be. We have a duty to take our country back from these people.

Or I could just not pay attention, like everyone else seems to. But then people like Klinghoffer win. No thanks.