PERPETUAL INDULGENCE

Odd piece by Kathryn Jean Lopez (who she? – ed.) in the current National Review Online. She starts by asking why anyone should even care what James Hormel thinks of the Ashcroft nomination, and then proceeds to unpack the background of why Ashcroft and Helms opposed the Hormel nomination on the ‘totality of [Hormel’s] record.’ It turns out that John “Bob-Jones” Ashcroft opposed Hormel because he thought Hormel was anti-Catholic! Ashcroft’s evidence for this is that Hormel once commented on a gay pride parade and merely laughed at a group of drag queens called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. These drag queens are mildly offensive, I’ll grant you. I’m on record criticizing them myself. But they’re drag queens, for goodness’ sake! Excess, hyperbole, and stupidity are part of the genre. Calling Hormel “vehemently anti-Catholic” (in NRO’s words) merely because he laughed at some silly drag queens is downright grasping at straws. (And it’s a little odd that a man like Ashcroft, who has an honorary degree from a college that calls the Catholic Church the “whore of Babylon,” should be casting stones in that particular direction in the first place.) The second accusation is that Hormel “donated a book” to a new gay and lesbian library in San Francisco that was a coloring book of female genitalia. This one is really hilarious. The idea that mega-bucks Spam mogul Hormel was singling out a vaginal coloring book as his one gift to a library as some sort of statement is absurd. The man bankrolled the entire library. Like most big libraries, this one is jammed full of material, most of it worthwhile and serious. But like most big libraries, especially one which is devoted to gay and lesbian topics, this library has its share of lewd material. So? Can we be grown-ups here? In the hoo-ha that was raised about the library a couple of years ago, it was revealed that every single questionable book in that library was also to be found in the Library of Congress. If Hormel can be held responsible for every single book bought with his millions, then John Ashcroft can be held responsible for the Penthouse collection lovingly stored at the Library of Congress. Lets face it: Ashcroft nixed Hormel because he was gay. My one question for the Kathryn Jean Lopez’s of the world is: why don’t they defend that on its merits?