From Pine View Farm

Loathe Thy Neighbor 2

The Republican subservience to the politics of hate has been on display this week as Mitt the Flip flipped off a newly hired aide for being gay.

Dick Polman calls the Flipper out:

It’s clear that the bigots in “the base” don’t know any better. And it’s clear that Romney doesn’t know any better; he has few fixed convictions and he quavers like a hunk of jelly. But what about Grenell? What possessed him to believe that he could be a foreign policy spokesman for a party that continues to aid and abet such toxic intolerance? That long tenure at the United Nations blinded him to the realities of the contemporary GOP. Now he knows.

Meanwhile, Leonard Pitts, Jr., citing this speech, skewers the notion that Jesus missed his word and actually meant to say, “Loathe they neighbor”:

Vines’ speech is a masterwork of scriptural exegesis and a marvel of patient logic, slicing and dicing with surgical precision the claim that homophobia is God ordained. So effective is the video that after viewing it, Sandra Delemares a Christian blogger from the United Kingdom who had, for years, spoken in staunch opposition to same sex marriage, wrote that it “revolutionised” her thinking.

Vines points out, for instance, that the frequently quoted condemnation (homosexuality is an “abomination”) from the Old Testament lawbook of Leviticus has no application to Christians, who are bound by the teachings of the New Testament. He explains that St. Paul’s admonitions about the “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” stem from modern mis-translations of ancient Greek terminology.

. . . and Eric Zorn muses on the Flipper’s subservience to bigotry, predicting he will have more opportunities to show his independence from the hate:

The good news for Romney, however, is that as this campaign season rolls on, the cranks and haters now grudgingly lining up behind him will offer plenty more opportunities for Sister Souljah moments.

Zorn left out this bit: pigs, wings.

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2 comments

  1. George

    May 4, 2012 at 3:29 pm

    You’re pessimistic, I know. But I’m optimistic Romney is going to be crushed in the general election. He has no principles and is a cowardly very wealthy man. He and his base will provide so many despicable perfect-for-video and impossible to ignore moments, even the most uninformed voters will be repulsed, or at least feel very queasy over him. So he’ll win the deep bigot southern states, maybe Alaska. West Virginia, the nothing states in the middle — Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, and the biggest and only prize will be Texas. He’ll have successfully pointed out that his party loathes women, sex, teh gays, people who get sick, people of different religion than extreme Christianity without being of it himself, everyone with other than white skin color, and everyone who’s not as wealthy as Croesus. If he does one, then we live in a corporate fascist old South Africa state permanently.   

     
  2. Frank

    May 4, 2012 at 5:40 pm

    I’m not so much pessimistic about the Presidential election–I don’t think Romney has much of a change, all things being equal–as I am disgusted at the cynical purveyance of hate and at the willingness of others to bend to it.

    If I’m pessimistic about the election, it’s more about the Congressional, state, and local races. Congress is currently under effective control of wingnuts and Republican state governments are doing vile and evil things.