The Stupid Brigade

Max Blumenthal’s visit to the Value Voters Summit has to be seen to be believed:

Just when you think that the Rev. Lou Sheldon — “Remember, homosexuality could strike you” — is as whacky as it could get, Max introduces us to Star Parker. After stating that “abortion is the No. 1 killer of black women between 25 and 34” (i.e., the 76th through 103rd trimester), Parker says this:

“We want Sodomites quarantined.”

Besides demonstrating that she doesn’t know what Sodomite means,* Parker’s weird non-sequitur call for internment camps illustrates how full-gonzo loony religion can become once it lies down with authoritarian politics.

Neither politics nor religion is intrinsically authoritarian. Neither is compatible with authoritarianism — neither can survive it. The authoritarian impulse takes over, reducing religion and politics both to mere tools for achieving its ends. That is, after all, the nature of the thing — to reduce everything to a means for its ends.

The Stupid Brigade usually takes this as their cue. Religion, I have just said, is not and ought not to be authoritarian. Aha! cry the irregulars of the Stupid Brigade, “Here you are claiming that religion is not authoritarian and yet at the same time you’re telling others what they should and shouldn’t do. Your telling others not to be authoritarian is, itself, authoritarian!”

It’s not very nice to call them the Stupid Brigade, and it’s probably not particularly constructive. But then again nothing can be constructive with these folks because, well, they’re kind of stupid. They’re not open to persuasion, nor are they interested in trying to persuade others. All they’re really interested in is showing off what they consider to be their irrefutably clever wordplay and their semantic Gotcha! games:

Aha! You say you’re for tolerance, but that just means you’re intolerant of intolerance!

Aha! You say you’re opposed to authoritarianism, but that just means you’re trying to tell the authoritarians what they can and can’t do!

Aha! You say you’re for “love,” but that just means you hate hatred!

You can try to respond to such people, if you have the patience, but there’s nothing there to respond to. They offer nothing that can be engaged: No coherent argument; no apparent capacity for recognizing coherent argument; no sense of the ability to distinguish between sense and nonsense.

And anyway, they can’t hear you. After firing off one of their tail-swallowing semantic pretzels, they’re too preoccupied with their undeserved victory lap to listen to any attempt at a response.

So there’s really only one appropriate response to the Stupid Brigade and their triumphalistic illogic: Take that hypothetical rock of theirs, the one that’s so big that Almighty God can’t lift it, and drop it on their heads.

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* The story of Sodom and Gomorrah has to do with gang rape. And then there’s this, from the prophet Ezekiel:

“Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.”