Hell, yes, it feels good to watch the Republicans squirm over whether or not they discriminate, or want to discriminate, against gays. As if there was really the slightest doubt about it.
Why can't we just stand back and let them squirm themselves deep into a corner where somehow they are affirming equal rights for all? And why is Nicholas Kristof trying to spoil the fun by apologizing for evangelicals and chastising liberals?
A response to Kristof and David Brooks, who similarly but less surprisingly oozes sympathy for the bigots, after the jump.
Here's Kristof, who never actually says that he is responding to the Republican meltdown in Indiana, on March 28.
Today, among urban Americans and Europeans, “evangelical Christian” is sometimes a synonym for “rube.” In liberal circles, evangelicals constitute one of the few groups that it’s safe to mock openly.
Yet the liberal caricature of evangelicals is incomplete and unfair. I have little in common, politically or theologically, with evangelicals or, while I’m at it, conservative Roman Catholics. But I’ve been truly awed by those I’ve seen in so many remote places, combating illiteracy and warlords, famine and disease, humbly struggling to do the Lord’s work as they see it, and it is offensive to see good people derided.
Really, Nicholas?
Anyone who has traveled to remote places has run into these evangelicals by the busload. They are not merely "combating illiteracy and warlords, famine and disease," but are simultaneously spreading their bigotry and intolerance. In fact, spreading the bigotry is, quite candidly, the real point of their enterprise.
Sympathy for bigots is par for the course for David Brooks, whose entire career is premised on the notion that liberals can and should be schooled in the pages of the "liberal" New York Times.
Here he tying himself into knots on March 31:
On the one hand, there is a growing consensus that straight, gay and lesbian people deserve full equality with each other. We are to be judged by how we love, not by whom we love. If denying gays and lesbians their full civil rights and dignity is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. Gays and lesbians should not only be permitted to marry and live as they want, but be honored for doing so.
On the other hand, this was a nation founded on religious tolerance. The ways of the Lord are mysterious and are understood differently by different traditions. At their best, Americans have always believed that people should have the widest possible latitude to exercise their faith as they see fit or not exercise any faith. While there are many bigots, there are also many wise and deeply humane people whose most deeply held religious beliefs contain heterosexual definitions of marriage. These people are worthy of tolerance, respect and gentle persuasion.
Hey guys, this is really not so complicated. Religious liberty means that we are all free to practice our religion, or lack thereof. It does not mean that the pious among us have a right to impose their morality on anyone else.
Kristof's noble missionaries are imposing their worldview on people who would agree to virtually any dogma for the food, water, medicine, and education they desperately need, and which is on offer only if they buy in to the proffered gospel as part of the bargain. What's so noble about that? How can Kristof write an entire column celebrating evangelical missionaries while ignoring that basic fact about their basic purpose?
And Brooks argues that to insist on basic human rights is to coerce the bigots who wish to deny them. And, of course, this coercion by liberals is equal to or worse than the very bigotry we profess to oppose.
Both Kristof and Brooks have bought in to the right wing lie that somehow it is the religious who are suffering discrimination at the hands of liberals.
But no. We are entitled to our schadenfreude, no apology needed.