he's not even funny

Last Friday I got poor Daniel's post sort of trampled under foot, and this Friday I hope we don;t go to that extreme.

I was reading this before breakfast this morning, and the question came up in the meta, "why is outing gay Republicans 'vile slander'?"

Let me paint a picture for you. On the one side of the picture, we have a political party which, as a right of passage, requires all of its members to have some kind of social defect -- either perceived or real. For example, some of them are soldiers who claim their country is, historically, a perpetrator of war crimes; some of them wear the badge that they are female and therefore are victims of historical injustice; some have ethnic roots which gain them access to the mantle of downtrodden and weary and representatives of a class of people who are owed something by this generation who never did any of those things. For that team, you must be an elitist jerk if there's not something wrong with you -- you must not have any way to relate to "the people".

On the other side of the picture, the other team wants people (allegedly, anyway) to be able to keep what they set out to earn, and frankly they want to fortify the country as a meritocracy -- so whatever you are able to achieve, you can achieve. And in that, the only shibboleth to membership is not even success, but instead an appreciation of success. So, for example, you don't have to own a chain of successful Christian retail stores to be a slam-dunk, but you can't look down your nose at someone who is willing to try to open a couple of those things but fails -- because they tried. The leaders of the team tend to be people who either have actually had some business success, or have supported policies which lean that way -- and they hire people not based on quotas or whether they are this superficial thing or that superficial thing, but whether or not they get the job done. In that, someone can be gay and be on this team and it not matter -- because they didn't take a test or sign an oath that nobody on the team would be gay.

The first team, it turns out, resents this. A decade ago, it was fashionable for them to call some ethic types who joined the second team "not really [ethnic]" -- and they still do it. Now, because of the stage homosexuality has politically (in their camp), the first team thinks "outing" gay members of the second team has some kind of relevance -- they think it's exposing hypocrisy.

Let me explain something to those on the first team: the second team isn't a church -- it's a political party. And frankly, this blog is on-record standing against the unsavory notion that the second team ought to be a church. But in that, you can't have it both ways. That is, it can't be a badge of honor to have some characteristics and at the same time be something that someone ought to be ashamed of. It seems to me that, if the second team has (for example) gay members, the idea that the second team hates gay people is clearly false -- in the same way that the fact that there are great ethnic Republicans dashes the idea that Republicans are, as a party, racist.

So the joke is actually on you -- on your party which tries to vilify its opponents with slander. And someday, you guys will actually have somebody funny to do your dirty work for you. Until then, you're stuck with Bill Maher and the boozy, self-absorbed Al Franken.

The rest of you: spend the Lord's day in the Lord's house with the Lord's people. And if you find out that your local precinct leader is gay, do yourself a favor: remember that you yourself are a liar, and adulterer, and a murderer. Then act appropriately.