Come back to shore

Oh Christian Conservatives.  You’re foundering. I can’t speak for the secular brood of conservatives.  And I’ll admit, I knew little to nothing about Mr. Milo Yiannopoulos.  I will go out on a limb and say I’m against pedophilia.  And if Mr. Yiannopoulos says he really didn’t mean it, I’ll take him at his word.

But here’s the thing.  At what point do Conservatives have even the slightest shard of credibility left when they defend someone who, if that person simply slipped into the “D” column, would be denounced as the incarnation of everything Satanic and wrong about our culture?

I’m not one to throw out condemnation of a person’s inner soul, but I can also judge actions.  Mr. Yiannopoulos, at best, seems to play the same game that Conservatives have decried for decades.   Goldberg is correct.   Yiannopoulos defends his offensive and deplorable (yes, I use that word on purpose) speech as ‘provocative.’  You know, just how the hippy generation flipped one to their parents.

Well, in all my years, I never heard a Conservative, Christian or otherwise, praise the counterculture warriors of the 60s for doing those things.  I don’t praise them either.  Too many babies went out with the bath water, leaving us with this mess.  And conservatives were right to condemn the notion that as long as you were for the great cultural rebellion, all bets were off and hoist the middle finger.

So guess what?  Consistency.  It was wrong then, it’s wrong now.  I have no clue if Yiannopoulos was really advocating pedophilia.  I don’t suppose he really pines for gas chambers or gulags either.  And yet, why wouldn’t I at least assume?   Sometimes humor is a way of disguising what we really mean.  Say it in a joking way, and use the humor to suggest you don’t mean it – but you darn well mean it.  It’s not something new.  And if Yiannopoulos isn’t guilty of being a discount Nazi pedophilia defender, he deserves at least a notch over on the suspicion meter for suggesting otherwise, whatever his reasons.  Words, as they say, mean something.

And Conservatives defending him?  For the love of dear God stop.  Don’t become the enemy you oppose.  Forgive?  Sure.  But stop defending the worst.  If you do that, then you deserve what everyone said about those who supported Trump.  You didn’t do it despite the rotten and sickening things he said and did, you supported him because of the rotten and sickening things he said.  And if you still insist you didn’t?  See my observation about Yiannopoulos above.  I’ll cut some slack, but you deserve to have the gauge moved over a notch on the suspicious chart nonetheless.