Yesterday our president hurled himself into a frothing maelstrom of flattery and praise by taking the astonishingly courageous step of endorsing gay marriage. Whoa. There have been other thoughtful interactions with this decision, as, for example, here, here, and here, but I have not asked for a moment of your time in order to thoughtfully interact with this little slab of damnation. I have asked for this moment in order to fisk it.
It would be paltering with the truth to pretend that this move is any kind of honest. It was about as honest as a Cook County election between two cousins with tight connections to the mob. The president spoke quite carefully, like a man trying to read a script and swallow a tennis ball at the same time. Give the man a minute. He’s evolving!
Of course he knew that his utterance would be the signal for a cavalcade of supportive nonsense in the media to start up, which of course it did. He is the big noise over at Slate and Huffpo, and Chris Matthews has to deal with chills running up his other leg. Across our fair Republic, a vast army 60-watt intellectuals have now banded together to flicker dimly in the gathering twilight, having mistaken themselves for the dawn. They want to applaud this presidential go-ahead for all those who want to go spelunking down deep in their own chthonic lusts. So to speak.
I also have a brief word of encouragement for those among the faithful who feel as though fighting this battle is like pelting a bonfire with cotton balls. Do you feel like you have found a layer of Babylonian gravel in your chocolate cream pie? Is this like dealing with ticks and blisters at the end of a hot August hike through the cheat grass meadows of craft and guile? Does watching the evening news remind you of somebody washing the garbage? Do you believe that Obama can’t be qualified to be president because he is clearly a Jebusite, whatever his birth certificate says?
Here is the encouragement. Sin doesn’t work. The history of the whole world is the history of people trying to figure out a way to make it work, but it never does. Sin doesn’t work. Neither does stupidity.
King Canute once tried to show his fawning courtiers how foolish they were by commanding the tide not to come in, and come in anyway it did. Imagine the shock over at the DNC.
“We have gathered ourselves together, the mighty of the earth, and we have settled that we can have our trillion and eat it, we can have have boys marry boys, for we have spoken from deep empathy, you haters, and we have determined that European math facts have nothing whatever to do with American math facts, being more like apples and oranges, and we have the resolve to fine your heavily if you don’t stop talking about the emperor’s whitey tighties.”
Suit yourselves. I’m just sayin’ . . .