Mark Morford, the sage of San Francisco who penned the famous theological pensee about Obama the Lightworker, has a new target:
Hey, remember the angry Jews? The quivering clan of militant Yahwoholics who ... seized the national narrative for a few terrifying moments about five years back, ran deep into the woods with it and rubbed it all over their naughty bits in a frenzy of fear and confusion and lust for all things homophobic and saccharine and spiritually denigrating?Dying. Nearly dead. Gasping their last. Very soon to be a footnote, a caricature, a gag, a punch line, blasted to the dustbin of history like dried housefly limbs after a sneeze. You should know this now.
Yes, you are right; they already were a caricature, a cultural pothole, a nasty rash in the armpit of society. But it wasn't all that long ago that they were, through a bizarre series of sociopolitical machinations still being parsed by baffled historians, a powerful rash, hugely newsworthy, as dangerous and unstoppable as they were wrongheaded and sad. Remember?
A rash in the armpit. A disease. Let's exterminate them.
Stuff like this still gets printed in mainstream newspapers today? No, actually. Morford didn't write this about the Jews. Substitute the word "evangelicals" for "Jews," and "Christoholics" for "Yahwoholics," and you have the lede from his latest column.
Not that I'm outraged or anything, but hey, ain't it great that the good people of San Francisco aren't as intolerant as the Jesus-freaky troglodytes out here in flyover country?
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Oh, one more thing: even though the word "homosexual" is a ridiculous modern neologism that is essentially oxymoronic in the strict biological sense (ejaculate into any orifice you want- there's only one that could possibly result in sexual reproduction, and it ain't the male anus- basic fact of scientific (that is, natural) law, folks.)..
It still has to be said that the main threat to marriage in this culture isn't "gay marriage."
No, it's heterosexual divorce and extra-marital relations that result in illegitimate children.
Again, Mr. Morford & Co. are odious, bigoted tools. But until the "religious right" makes divorce and hetro sexual behavior it's prime talking point (and they never will, because that's political suicide) I cannot take them seriously.
Good points you make, Charles. When I read Morford's piece, my response was two-fold: "Geeze, what a hateful, bigoted, self-satisfied jerk"... and... "Too bad those Evangelicals have given him such great material!"
While I disagree with you that Hannity, O'Reilly, and their ilk are anywhere NEAR as vitriolic and scathing as this guy, sadly, I suspect it's due to a lack of wit, eloquence, and intelligence on their part. Ann Coulter would certainly be able to cross swords with Morford in terms of wit AND the piling on of contempt. I don't know who does more damage to Christian conservatives, the well-meaning, not-too-bright bloviators (Hannity's a perfect example) or the razor-tongued fame seekers (like Coulter). I'm a Christian AND a conservative, yet I loathe being associated with any of these folks. Thank God for people like Mark Steyn, Kathleen Parker, Peggy Noonan, Michael Novak, Michael Gerson, Thomas Sowell, and the late WFB, Jr and Tony Snow...
Well said, Charles Curtis and MargaretE!
I was thinking this morning about the upcoming elections -- both federal as well as state and local. Although I've given up long ago on the presidential election (as a devout Catholic, I see the presidential choice as between a rabid pro-abortion Marxist, and a somewhat less rabid, somewhat less pro-abortion, Republican warmonger). I'd long ago decided therefore not to vote in that race.
But the state and local races are still troubling me. Do I vote for my party (Republican) and thereby keep feeding this cynical and corrupt two-party duopoly? Or simply not vote at all (the choice that I'm leaning toward)?
I still don't know, but I am so disgusted with the entire charade that I could spit.
I think that the people who speak most hatefully about evangelicals aren't regarding evangelicalism as an identity that you're born into. Being an evangelical, in the mind of many people who usually go along with identity politics (NOT the Coulter types, in other words), is more like being a Republican than an African American or a homosexual or even an Irish Catholic. I don't blame them for thinking this way, since evangelical identity always does begin with a conscious decision by somebody at some time (that's why Billy Graham's magazine was or is called Decision). I can tell you, though, as a third generation evangelical that this FEELS like an identity I can't change, even when I find my own theology at odds with received doctrine. When I read attacks like this one, I don't feel that it's my theology or politics being criticized--I feel that my family and friends are under attack.
Strange how many comments are basically, there are people who hate other people and I hate people like that. We have met the enemy and he is us.
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