The Enemy: The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress

This from a concerned Evangelical:

"You accuse Haggard of being a hypocrite? God will surely judge you on all your own hypocrisy. I'm not going to judge Haggard, and neither should you. What happened is between him and God. God already knows the truth anyway. Unfortunately, so many people are unaware of the truth that they are sinners every bit as egregious as Haggard".

Sister... if you only knew.

The same people who are now admonishing us for rushing to judgment, insisting we show compassion and understanding for a fellow sinner, are the same people who went bullhorn ballistic over Clintons (failed) college marijuana experiment. The same people who then proceeded to drag the entire nation through the impeachment process because they couldn’t get past executive spooge on an ugly blue dress.

James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, blasted the media for reporting a "rumour" based on "nothing but one man's accusation."

Can anyone imagine what the right wing would make of Haggard's "confession" if it came from the mouth of a prominent champion of left-wing/liberal causes? They continue to compound the hypocrisy with more hypocrisy--it’s nothing short of breathtaking.

You know, there’s a very good chance Haggard will eventually claim to have been molested as a child, and hence the real victim in all this. Homosexuals will be successfully recast as the evil predator villains of the story (again), the true source of all this woe. The Devils punks bring another good man down with their dark chemistries and tight jeans.

In a feat of cognitive dissonance the faithful will not only redeem, but exalt this disgraced man as evidence of God’s compassion. By extension restoring their own sense of righteousness through the act of forgivness––and fuck the rest of us hateful sinners with our snide remarks.

Or put more succinctly by David Frum on National Review.

"If a religious leader has a personal inclination toward homosexuality - and nonetheless can look past his own inclination to defend the institution of marriage and to affirm its benefits for the raising of children - why should he likewise not be honored for his intellectual firmness and moral integrity.”

Did you get that… moral integrity. This, children, is cognitive dissonance in action.

Of course he’ll have to do some penance. There’ll be the obligatory Rehab-racadabra before it’s off on the talk show circuit, new book in hand. Testifying loudly about the dangerous seductions and pernicious evils that are homosexuality, and bearing witness to the miraculous salvation that is God’s grace and the love of a good woman.

*****

Can we carve this new law of the cosmos in stone alongside Newton's laws of motion; Relativity, and the one about "the odds of bread falling butter side down are directly proportional to the cost of the carpet":

The volume with which a person proclaims his or her fabulous piety while denouncing others for failing to meet his or her standards of virtue and holiness is directly proportional to the likelihood that he or she is a child-buggering, cash-stealing, graft-grabbing, meth-snorting hypocrite.