Dreher does it again

(Note to readers: by oversight, a four letter word beginning with “f” was posted in this entry. It’s now been removed. My apologies.)

At his Crunchy Con blog Rod Dreher discusses Prof. P.Z. Myers of the University of Minnesota, who has asked people to acquire a consecrated communion wafer for him so that he could publicly desecrate it. The way Myers speaks about what he wants to do to the wafer shows him to be a very evil, very sick individual, someone who, at the least, should not be allowed to teach at any university in this country.

But then Dreher, in a comment following the main entry, goes overboard:

I am not asking unbelievers to accept the Catholic (and Orthodox) teaching about the Eucharist. I am asking you to realize that Myers’s wicked solicitation strikes us as worse than if Myers had asked someone to kidnap a child so that he could molest her on video to show his contempt for the child’s family.

Why does Dreher feel compelled to make such a gratuitous and revolting comparison? Why can he not simply say that Myers is evil, without also, to prove his point, arguing that what Myers wants to do is more evil than kidnapping and sodomizing a child?

As one of Dreher’s commenters shrewdly noted, Jesus can handle being desecrated; a small child cannot. A thought evidently beyond Dreher.

Dreher, as I’ve noted several times before, does not think. The man is a mass of ardent, confused, and ever-changing feelings. Not a good advertisement for Christianity, or for conservatism. But such is Crunchy conservatism.

- end of initial entry -

Mari, who sent the article, writes:

In other words, a priest can say, “Sure, I sodomized little Jimmy, but at least I didn’t desecrate the body of our Lord.”

Whatever the justification to slam Myers, I somehow think Jesus would put the child molested ahead of Himself as Communion wafer. Rod has slipped these moorings.

LA replies:

Because he operates purely by emotion. It’s as though his mission in life were to demonstrate how anarchic and destructive is emotion not guided by reason .

Harry Horse writes:

“Because he operates purely by emotion. It’s as though his mission in life were to demonstrate how anarchic and destructive is emotion not guided by reason .”

The molestation analogy makes any reasonable person wince. As one poster at his site has pointed out, Dreher’s histrionics are reminiscent of a Mohammedan. That Dreher issued a challenge to Myers to “put out a call for someone to send him a Koran so he could blow his nose and wrap fish in it,” prior to the molestation analogy is as deeply troubling as it is ironic. It is not that any of us wouldn’t like to hear a response to the challenge, it’s just that the naked, liberal emotionalism is grotesque. He has no compunction about embracing the lowest common denominator.

This is who we have for serious conservatives on our side? Sorry, but with the Robert Spencer issue and now this, how long before we have a Christmas DVD of “Conservatives Gone Wild,” in our stockings?

Bill F. writes:

Call me cynical, but I think Rod Dreher made that outrageous comment just to be that, outrageous, and that he has no compunction about what he throws in that sausage grinder of his as long as it pays him cash. All he’s doing with the Myers posts is playing the distributor of Myers’s vileness and then taking a juicy paid cut for himself for doing so, like a pornographer selling our children pornography and then suggesting having a family discussion of the filth he just sold them as he counts his money.

The man is a hollow thing, a carnival barker with no discernible principles either Christian or Conservative interested only in hooking the rubes in and collecting their coin for another shot at the weighted milk bottles.

LA replies:

Interesting—how do you know that Dreher’s income increases according to blog hits?

Bill F. replies:

I don’t, personally. But it’s common knowledge that Beliefnet is a contractual, paid blog, and I even think, now that you ask, that Dreher himself has mentioned in posts there that commenters who disagree or “hate” him only increase his income with their comments.

It certainly stands to reason that if anyone, as a paying sponsor, is trying to bring new sets of eyes to his site to see the advertising there so that you can then raise the ad rates according to the blog hits that you would pay those who do that better more than those that do that worse. Otherwise, what motivation does a paid blogger have to do more than just phone it in, collect his check, and go back to sleep? And why would Rupert Murdoch buy such a setup? Whatever else he is, he’s not stupid. I can’t understand how the situation could be otherwise.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 14, 2008 11:40 AM | Send