The Dish

A reader writes to the Seattle Times:

A letter published May 29 ["The domestic bond is strengthened by traditional beliefs," Northwest Voices], urging passage of a constitutional amendment against gay marriage, was not the work of the woman who signed it, Elisa Baggenstos, of Renton. It actually emanated from Focus on the Family, a far-right-wing political organization purporting to espouse "Christian values" in America.

Baggenstos assembled "her" letter from a form that she accessed over the Internet. Then she changed a few words and sent it to The Seattle Times. It is an example of "astroturf," the faking of grass-roots political sentiment by special-interest groups across the political spectrum.

In recent years, newspapers have been deluged with this sort of fakery and propaganda. "We’ve made it easy for you to compose a letter advocating for the Marriage Protection Amendment ‚Äî by pulling together some talking points you can assemble into a completed whole," says the Focus on the Family Web site. "Just use the tool below to select one paragraph from each of four sections ‚Äî be sure to select the one that reflects your own views. No matter which paragraphs you select, the result will be a letter of fewer than 200 words."

It is especially ironic that so-called "conservative Christians" who spend so much of their time parading their devotion to eternal truth would engage in willful deception. It would seem that, in their world, the Commandment against bearing false witness was intended to apply to everyone but themselves.

It wasn’t your letter, Ms. Baggenstos. Why did you tell us it was?

— Charles Pluckhahn, Seattle

Just keep flushing these hysterical phonies out.

It was a little trippy last night at the 92d Street Y. Sitting with an old friend, Dan Savage, and a seventies icon, Erica Jong, talking about sex in front of a few hundred Upper East Side denizens is not something you do every day. I said the f-word first, I’m happy to say, and after that, it was all downhill. For me the interesting point came when Dan and I agreed that moderate hypocrisy – especially in marriages – is often the best policy. Momogamy is very hard for men, straight or gay, and if one partner falters occasionally (and I don’t mean regularly), sometimes discretion is perfectly acceptable. You could see Jong bridle at the thought of such dishonesty. But I think the post-seventies generation – those of us who grew up while our parents were having a sexual revolution – both appreciate the gains for sexual and emotional freedom, while being a little more aware of their potential hazards. An acceptance of mild hypocrisy as essential social and marital glue is not a revolutionary statement. It’s a post-revolutionary one. As is, I’d say, my generation as a whole.

It’s a match made in heaven. There is, however, a serious point here. America’s long experience of religion as essentially suspicious of government power is an anomaly in the Western world. For much of European history, religion and government have always been interwoven. And as European governments have grown, European faith has withered. As a Catholic growing up in a country where the state church was Protestant, and where I attended Anglican services and listened to the Book of Common Prayer as an integral part of receiving a government-financed education, I saw this first hand. And, as an immigrant, I found America’s religious life a contrasting marvel. In America, faith seemed unconstrained by the compromises of government power and enmeshment, more alive because it was less enfeebled by the temptations of Caesar. 

So much of that is now being lost, almost casually. We fight over faith because we disagree over politics. And one response has been to construct a religious leftism that also appeals to one political party – compounding the problem. The result is not simply the corruption of religion, but the inevitable expansion of government. If good is to be done, and government can do it, why limit the government at all? And so we drift from the wisdom of the founders, and risk losing something uniquely, quintessentially American. It’s called limited government, and the individual freedom that has made this country such a refuge for those who look beyond this earth for meaning and beyond their government for salvation. It is becoming less of a refuge for those types; and more of a battlefield of phony certainties and expanding government. I wish I knew how to resist this better, other than pointing it out. But I’m afraid to say I don’t.

A priest writes:

Your link to the Guardian article on spam blockers not allowing the word "erection" through caused me to laugh. My parish is the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, in Manhattan. Our Web address used to be stmvirgin.org, but because we used the word "virgin," many spam blockers would not allow our messages to go through. So we have changed to stmvnyc.org, and now we have no problems.  Apparently Our Lady through her intercessions was not able to fix this problem related to the word "Virgin," even though we were referring to her!

Call it the web’s immaculate misconception.

"It’s difficult to have gay partnerships fully accepted by the Church, a Church in which evangelicals are a valued part, if they are so strongly opposed to it. There has to be a conversion to a new way to see that gay partnerships are not contrary to biblical truth. They are congruous with the deepest biblical truths, about faithfulness and stability," – the Rt Rev Richard Harries, the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, England, yesterday.

I forgot to mention in my reference yesterday to the new "Left Behind" Christianist video game that the Anti-Christ has an identity. (I was joking about the Democratic nominee.) In the novels, which have sold over 65 million copies in the last ten years in America, the Anti-Christ is one Nicolae Carpathia, a Romanian who, after the Rapture, becomes head of the United Nations. An important detail:

Marilena’s husband, Sorin, and his gay lover, Baduna Marius, provide genetic material to facilitate Nicolae’s conception.

So gay people literally spawn Satan. No wonder Christianists want us eventually wiped off the face of the earth.

South Union, Kentucky, dusk.

This feature is officially over, but I had so many sublime or touching submissions that I didn’t post I’m going to publish a few of the remainders over the coming weeks, every now and again. Please don’t send me any more. It took most of my weekend to download and organize just the hundreds I received. I now have one week’s worth of images from around the world – an astonishing display of the web’s power and diversity. When I get a minute, I’m going to find a way to gather them all together and publish them somehow – either on the web or on paper. So stay tuned.

That’s the caption Time Out New York put under my photo in the listing for tonight’s (sold-out) sex talk with Dan Savage and Erica Jong. Beast? What have I, what have I, what have I done to deserve this?

To cheer us up.

Not to be out-done, Hillary is set to unveil her own biopic tomorrow morning. Jake Tapper has the scoop.