James Kirchick has an excellent piece at Politico.com on the hypocrisy of the moonbatosphere and liberals in general when it comes to religion.
Open the pages of a liberal magazine or peruse the liberal blogosphere, and you’re bound to come across denunciations of the religious right, if not religion itself. The “reality-based community,” as self-satisfied liberal bloggers call themselves, was a term created in direct response to the “faith-based community,” what the Bush administration called recipients of money from its Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Given the religious right’s use of “faith” to justify hoaxes such as “intelligent design” and the ruinous attempt to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, the left had good reason to criticize, and sometimes mock, the absurdities that are the inevitable result of religion mixing with politics.
Yet the left, with its healthy skepticism toward religion, has shown itself to be cynically flexible over the past few weeks in response to the utter insanities emitted from the big mouth of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor, mentor and friend of 20 years. Suddenly, some liberals have discovered a newfound love for extremists who hide behind the cloth to justify their radical views.
The lunatic remarks made by Wright in videotaped sermons released in March — which, lest there be any doubt that these pearls of wisdom were taken “out of context,” Wright reaffirmed at the National Press Club last week — are indefensible, and it is beyond pedantry to quibble over whether a spirited defense of Louis Farrakhan is more or less offensive than blaming abortion doctors and gays for Sept. 11, 2001, as Jerry Falwell infamously did two days after the terrorist attacks.
But in the warped minds of some on the left, uttering such inanities is not only “understandable,” it’s laudable. That is, of course, if the person alleging that the government created AIDS to kill African-Americans is an aggrieved black man lashing out at the rapacious, capitalist and irredeemably racist United States. Wright, you see, is actually a “patriot” for speaking uncomfortable “truths” about his country.
I've watched with fascination as moonbats have tried to defend Wright's comments as unimportant or just "telling the truth." These same people have tried to tar and feather John McCain for accepting the endorsement of John Hagee, as if, in accepting that endorsement, McCain had spent 20 years in the man's church, gotten married there and had Hagee baptize his children. One can accept an endorsement without embracing every statement from a stranger, can't one? Evidently not to the moral equivalence crowd on the Left.
What's amazing is how far the lefties go to try to excuse bigot Wright's racism and indict the religious right. Yet, as Kilchick notes, the left's hypocrisy when it comes to religion is glaring.
Don Wycliff, former public editor of the Chicago Tribune, was perplexed as to what all the fuss over Wright was about. “I’m trying to figure out what it was that got everybody’s shorts into a twist,” he wrote in Commonweal magazine. (Wycliff’s bewilderment over the reaction to Wright’s lies and hyperbole does not speak well to his skills as an ombudsman.) The double standard some liberals have employed in response to Wright makes one seriously consider their oft-stated preference for rationality, reason and secularism over superstition and prejudice.
I've never seriously questioned their preference for rationality, reason and secularism. Conservatives have always known they are hypocrites willing to excuse any excesses on their side for a price.
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