FRIDAY AROUND THE HORN.
Happy Labor Day folks. Take it easy, but take it.
• Rod Dreher's going on again about how the atheists are persecuting the Christians. (The casus bellow this time is, two years ago Vanderbilt University kicked a Christian student org off-campus because they wouldn't sign a non-discrimination agreement.) This is from Dreher's gloss on some other Jesus freak:
He goes on to say that Christians — the untame ones – need to learn how to deal with the coming scorn with “a disregard which quickly turns the pathetic instruments of stigmatization into jewelry and art.” Why were the martyrs joyful? Because they were confident that from their suffering, new life would emerge. So too should we be...
“Blessed are you when they persecute you and speak all manner of evil against you.” What if we lived as if that were true?
Dreher, as you may know, lives off writing and royalties and is always fucking off to Paris. Some martyr! When they send the lions after Dreher I can see him trying to throw them off the scent with a coq au vin. "But it's free range" will be his last words.
Believe it or not, though, there's someone worse on this subject. Well, we can't be too surprised, it's Erick Erickson in the tertiary stage of whatever's wrong with him:
A lot of Christians have long thought they could sit on the sidelines. Only the icky evangelicals they don’t much care for and the creepily committed Catholics would have to deal with these issues and the people who hate those deeply committed to their faith. They, on the other hand, could sit on the sidelines, roll their eyes, and tell everyone that they didn’t think it was that big a deal. They were, after all, on birth control or watching whatever trendy HBO series is on or having a cocktail or perfectly willing to bake a cake for a gay wedding.
Do conservatives never drink cocktails? Or are my cheap beers now rendered "cocktails" just because I, a filthy liberal, am drinking them? Well, I always suspected P.J. O'Rourke was full of shit.
...You may think you can sit on the sidelines. You may think you can opt-out of the culture war. You may think you can hide behind your trendy naked Leena Dunham t-shirt while you sip trendy drinks talking about trendy shows and writing columns demanding Christians be forced by the state to bake cakes, provide flowers and farms, and offer up photographs of gay weddings. But not only will you one day be called to account to your God...
Yeesh. Here's a serious question: Does this sound like a spiel you'd expect from a movement that was gaining adherents? (Also: Did someone actually show Erickson this shirt? Well, at least his friends have a sense of humor.)
UPDATE. In comments, right out of the gate, (the good) Roger Ailes: "I think Eerick Eerikson could pull off a trendy naked Leena [sic] Dunham tee-shirt. And by pull off, I mean masturbate into."
• But I thought conservatives loved it when businesses got tax breaks to promote job growth... oh, it's communist TV shows, nevermind. Key phrases from Dennis Saffran's City Journal article: "contemporary progressivism is an upper-middle-class movement that caters to the social libertarianism of coastal elites," "crony capitalism," "corporate welfare," etc. Key missing phrase from his article: "trickle-down."