Oh, honestly. The conservative ideology is so far spent that all they can think to do is throw out more sophisticated versions of school-yard taunts. In this case: "So are you!"

Critics of “Christendom” or “Christianism” vary widely. But the more left-leaning critics just got a bit of a blow with Obama’s newly-professed support of faith-based initiatives. Crunchy Con Rod Dreher points out the quandry in which this puts Obama supporters, like Andrew Sullivan.

It’s always been clear to me that liberals don’t really object to religion in public life; they object to conservative religion in public life. Church-state, “Christianist” talk is just rhetorical expediency. After all, how many liberals would have objected to the Catholic Archbishop of New Orleans excommunicating obstreperous segregationist politicians in the 1960s?

I think Dreher makes an excellent point. Christians who are concerned with establishing the independent polis of the Church have reason to be concerned about government-funded/faith-based initiatives. Because the present “conservative” administration first championed the movement, those on the left had an easy target. It’s easy to rail against the “Christianism” of a political movement you hate. But, really—American civil religion has always been championed just as much by the left. Perhaps even more so. The Victorian Social Gospel wasn’t exactly driven by proto-neocons.

No, it isn't an excellent point. It's more wanking from Dreher, who never met a facile point he could pass up. It's quite true that some folks on the left have problems with Obama's continuation of Bush's Faith-Based Initiatives (it's not a new position, by the way).

But for crying in the night, can you blame them? It's not like this program doesn't have a track record. It was designed to shovel money at religious conservatives, many of whom have no use for teh queer like Andrew Sullivan. The church-state concerns raised by faith-based programs may be justified, or they may not. But they're hardly beyond the pale, and they're hardly just partisan slings and arrows.

And since when does Andrew Sullivan get to represent the left? And since when do all liberals object to conservative religion in public life? They often criticize it, but there's hardly a widespread movement to disenfranchise Southern Baptists.

This is really just a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't logical fallacy. If liberals admit that they like Obama's position, then aha! They have to admit that Pat Robertson and his protein shakes weren't all that bad!! And if they say they don't care for it, then aha! Democrats are in disarray and if they get their way Richard Dawkins will teach your children to hate America!!! What a load. Burdening policy preferences with social conflict is the cheapest of cheap shots. Anybody who's read Rod Dreher (or Jonah Goldberg, or Michele Malkin, or...) knows that.

But to Davey Henreckson's point, aren't you forgetting the neo-orthodox challenge to civil religion? Obama is certainly aware of Niebuhr's critique of political overreaching, all the more reason to hold him up to high standards on his use of religious institutions as a tool of public policy. Because surely the only thing worse than governmental arrogance in thinking it can solve the problems of the world is to having the church conned into thinking it can do the same, given enough money and government direction. You don't have to be a "secularist" to think that might be something of a problem.

Shorter Michael Gerson :

I don't like Al Franken because he's mean to people I like!

I don't even know where to begin.  Okay, so, first:

Rather than lampooning the emptiness and viciousness of our political discourse -- a proper role for satire -- Franken has powerfully reinforced those failures.

Wrong.  Satire is, in fact, this:

Satire has been defined as a work "in which prevalent follies or vices are assailed with ridicule," 14 Oxford English Dictionary, supra, at 500, or are "attacked through irony, derision, or wit," American Heritage Dictionary, supra, at 1604.

• Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 581 n. 15 (1994).

So what does that mean?  How is what I just quoted different than what Gerson said?  To some minds, I'm sure, it's not.  I'm sure that there's someone here who will (quite reasonably) think that "ridicule" doesn't mean calling Karl Rove "human filth" or Ari Fleischer a "chimp," both examples of "vulgarity" that Gerson quotes.  Okay.  I can understand that.  The remainder of his examples (please, go look - I don't want to get a takedown notice from the Washington Post) aren't, in fact, vulgar.  Or even name-calling.  Hell's bells, we do worse around here - and I can't imagine anybody here being called "vulgar."  'Cept maybe me.  'Course, nobody around here is running for the U.S. Senate - perhaps the standards are different.

Which raises the second point: where the hell does Gerson get off telling us that Franken is vulgar?  Seriously, in a country where people like Michelle "I think I'm three-fifths of a person" Malkin and Glenn "Karl Rove without all the endearing qualities" Beck can participate in actual political activity, how is it vulgar to write for Playboy (a magazine for, you know, grown-ups) about how the Internet gave your son some effective visual aids for his report on bestiality (especially since we just learned that federal appeals court judges do the same thing?)  Is there anyone other than Michael Gerson who thinks that's a serious statement, or is in any "dehumanizing?"

Okay, so let's suppose, for a moment, that Gerson is right about the substantive content of Franken's former work.  Who cares?  Seriously.  Other than people who weren't going to vote for Franken anyway, why should anybody give two solid shits about what he said when his job was to make people laugh?  Now, his job is to make people vote.  If you want to know how this man really is, let me refer you to two chapters from his books.

One is from "Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them" - it's the one about Paul Wellstone's memorial service.  Franken was close friends with the Wellstones, and he saw the media reporting of their memorial as downright criminal - and regards it as a personal insult that Norm Coleman used that reporting to win Wellstone's seat.

The other is from "The Truth - With Jokes," and it's about his father and G-d.  I can't even describe that one.  But I hope I can someday begin to approach it.

Seriously, go to a library or a bookstore, and read either of those chapters.  I understand if you don't want to buy the books, or read the whole thing, but those chapters are necessary to understand Al Franken.

And then you'll realize that Gerson's the one who should be drummed out of public discourse.

Almost forgot: Bill Clinton.

Or, as I like to think of it, "Jim Dobson just woke up to discover he was forty years behind the times":

A record 70 percent of Americans believe divorce is morally acceptable, according to Gallup’s 2008 Values and Beliefs survey. That's an 11-point increase from seven years ago.

...

H.B. London, vice president of Church and Clergy at Focus on the Family, said he is discouraged by the demise of the traditional family.

“Divorce violates the condition of the marriage vows, especially for Christians, because we commit to each other and to God until death us do part,” he said. “Marriage is a commitment that God instituted, and it is not up to mankind to determine what constitutes marriage and what doesn't.”

McManus said the Church is not doing its job.

“The Church hardly ever preaches on the issue of divorce or cohabitation or marriage," he said. "It’s God’s first institution, but it’s often the Church’s last institution. The good news is that the Church can turn it around.”

While I wouldn't want to minimize the suffering or disruption of divorce, it's not a moral problem for two people to stop making one another miserable. It's even less a problem to stop making their children miserable or actually unsafe as happens all too often.

Yeah, Jesus "Moses gave you divorce for the hardness of your hearts." It's a blessing and a call to freedom, not a ball and chain.

Michael Gerson.

Bill O'Reilly and Newt Gingrich.

Loofa-abusing serial liar plus insane opportunist and lifelong hypocrite question the integrity of Bill Moyers and a man of the cloth?

The only thing sleazier would be greenlighting a biopic of Jesus by the director of Basic Instinct.

Aw, crap...

(Second place: ABC News for passing on McCain comments lambasting Rev. Wright for comments about US Marines without noting that Wright himself was a decorated Marine.)

Pat Boone.

"Isn't that a shame" sucks, by the way.

Seriously. The Pope's stadium mass was an "overweening and preening exercise in multicultural exhibitionism."?

Because he dared to represent American Catholics in all their divergent splendor?

Isn't that kind of the point of the Catholic church?

And before the language concern trolls come out, I'd ask them to consider a simple point. Is it worse to call Neuhaus an a-hole or to push borderline racist commentary onto a papal visit?

Hillary Clinton.

Illinois State Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago).

For the record, I am firm believer that any Religious Left worth its name must include a stout defense of the right of atheists not to believe. Freedom is freedom, whether or not you agree with me.

(Cookies to Big Orange user csquared.)

Update: Fred Clarkson alerts me to the fact that Rep. Davis is (or was) a member of Trinity UCC. You'd have to do some might jiu-jitsu to connect Davis to Obama, though:

State Representative Monique Davis, who attended the same church as Obama and co-sponsored several bills with him, also did not support his candidacy. She complained of feeling overshadowed by Obama.

“I was snubbed,” Davis told me. “I felt he was shutting me out of history.”

But of course the nutosphere will argue that she just figured out that he's a secret Muslim atheist attending a radical separatist church before anybody else did...

Michael Gerson, with a (unintentional, as far as I can tell) assist from Amy Sullivan. Less than five minutes of Googling uncovered Obama's votes on, among other things reducing teen pregnancies and hence abortions.

Actually, last Friday's, I've been a little busy, you know: Naomi Schaefer Riley.

About every other word is egregious bullflop (Jeremiah Wright is not a black supremacist, Howard Dean didn't leave the Episcopal church over a bike path, there's more to a primary than white evangelicals), but this in particular chapped my hide:

Trinity, on the other hand, belongs to the United Church of Christ, a mostly white denomination defined almost entirely by its social-justice agenda.

This is how the Rev. John H. Thomas, the UCC's (white) general minister and president, recently defended Pastor Wright:
"Many of us would prefer to avoid the stark and startling language Pastor Wright used in these clips. But what was his real crime? He is condemned for using a mild 'obscenity' in reference to the United States. This week we mark the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, a war conceived in deception and prosecuted in foolish arrogance. Nearly 4,000 cherished Americans have been killed, countless more wounded, and tens of thousands of Iraqis slaughtered. Where is the real obscenity here?"

It's easy to see Mr. Obama's attraction to the UCC, and it doesn't have much to do with faith.

It's so nice when the religious concern trolls dismiss the faith of over a million Americans in the name of...defending faith.