archy

Roy Moore is just like a gay marriage
After sighing and rolling my eyes at Ralph Nader’s latest attempt to completely piss away his legacy, I decided to check on our old friend ex-judge Roy Moore and see how his bid for the presidency is going. I didn’t find any new stories on Moore, but I did discover his name featuring prominently in mini-meme circulating on the right.

It goes like this: the liberal media elite is either celebrating, or shamefully silent on, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s act of civil disobedience in deciding to have the city issue same sex marriage licenses. Yet last summer this same liberal media elite couldn’t heap enough abuse on Judge Roy Moore’s act of civil disobedience in plopping a Ten Commandments monument in the lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court. You see, it’s all about hypocrisy. Liberal media elites have no moral grounding, so they can disapprove of civil disobedience one week and applaud it the next. That’s how evil they are.

Over the last week, Kelly Boggs of the Baptist Press, Brian O'Connell of Men’s News Daily, and Rush Limbaugh of Oxycontin have all made this comparison. Since none of them give credit to the others, I’ll assume that they all came up with this idea independently and thought it a just dandy skewering of the hypocrisy of the left. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that this is a pretty pathetic argument—who said our issue with Roy Moore was civil disobedience per se, opposing a law and opposing the constitution are a wee bit different orders of magnitude, and many on the left are not celebrating Newsom’s act—this seems to me a dangerous argument for the right to make. Equivalency swings both ways.

Try this out next week. The first time a wingnut friend/coworker/relative goes off on the San Francisco marriages, tell them Rush thinks they’re just like a public display of the Ten Commandments. You can even directly quote Rush. The title of his piece was “San Francisco Doing Exactly What Judge Roy Moore Did.” Demand the same consistency from them that Rush is demanding from the liberal media elite. If you condemn the marriages, you must condemn Roy’s Commandments (heck, throw in school prayer, football invocations, and “under God” just for good measure). If you approve of religion in state sponsored public spaces, you have to approve of gay marriage. The only relevant issue is civil disobedience.

Some wingnuts might be forced to take a step back and actually look at life as containing some difficult shades of gray. Other wingnuts heads' will explode. That’s a win-win outcome for us.