What more can I say?
What’s really got me scratchin’ my head is the way some of this election stuff is goin down.
Now, I like a good joke as much as the next guy, maybe more, but for an affiliate of a faith-based organization to even joke like he’s calling for rain to interrupt the other political party’s convention…well, that’s just not funny. Especially in today’s contentious political atmosphere. Especially when it seems to require a special dispensation from above for said organization to say anything positive about the people on the other side. I mean, for real, that almost seems like something I would see on a Saturday Night Live or Mad TV skit about Focus On The Family, rather than something ostensibly funny that they themselves did.
(I guess that brings up a side issue I may have to fool with at some other time, which is humor in the church. Like, when is it appropriate to make jokes about religious ideas and institutions. Cuz I don’t know that I would have been bothered had if this had actually been a skit on a sketch comedy show. Given the degree of FOTF’s partisanship, I don’t know if I would be all that bothered. They come across as more of a political organization than a religious one, sometimes. That definitely makes them fair game. Putting them aside for a minute, though, it’s a subject that necessitates some thought. But that’s later.)
No joke, when I first heard about it, I thought the report was on that Timex Social Club.
Then the other thing that’s got me going is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-as-a-Republican meme. I’m really scratchin’ my head on this one. When I first brought it up the other day, I only did so because I was sure nobody would take that at face value. I just knew that only the most partisan operatives would give that announcement any type of credence. So either I was wrong about people not believing it, or I underestimated the degree to which partisanship rules the day. I’m thinking it was the latter. It’s one thing for the NBRA to make the claim. Well actually, it’s a really bad look for them, but they gotta do whatever they gotta do, I guess. Only thing is, it got picked up by others. With some of these blogs being all focused on exposing the truth, I’m flat-out amazed that they’re taking this at face value without putting even a drop of extra thought into it.
I’m generally loath to say what I already said, but in this case, it bears repeating. The truth is bigger than historical veracity. Even if Dr. King was a registered Republican and voted Republican in every single election he participated in, to conflate his down-with-Dixiecrat Republicanness with a 2008 ‘I’m-down-with-Bush ‘nem’ Republicanness is intellectually dishonest. What really gets me is that some of the people perpetrating this fraud are self-styled Evangelicals. Being that that’s the case, I think I’ll make a parallel they’ll be able to appreciate.
In the Bible, it says that David and Jonathan, his brother-in-law, loved each other. More than that, it says that their love for each other surpassed that of women. While some folks have tried to take that to suggest that there was some man-on-man action going on in the Old Testament, most biblical scholars would hold that the pro-homosexual reading is more esigesis then exigesis. However, the text says what it says. Which means that when questioned, the person defending the orthodox interpretation would have to include evidence from the societal context in order to justify his reading. Otherwise, if you just look at the words on the page, it means whatever you think it means. Same principle applies here. The word Republican is the same, but the 2008 Republican party is not the same as the 1958 Republican party. Especially for a Black man who lived in the segregated South. Come on.
There’s veracity and then there’s truth. If somebody’s gonna claim to be about the latter, they shouldn’t just rely on the former.
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