Message to self: Do not forget to insert references -- complete with video links -- to Reverend (???) Pat Robertson's and Rush Limbaugh's response to the deaths of perhaps 500,000 or more and the indescribable misery of millions. Not since the Nazi top-brass commenced the "final solution" have we witnessed such manifest execrable perfidy as we now have suffered via these two reptiles. Robertson asserted the Haitians themselves, by supposedly making a "deal with the devil," brought on the earthquake, and Limbaugh assailed President Obama's rush of US assistance to the struck population as a political hack stunt to curry cred with "the Blacks." First Limbaugh, then Robertson: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEnDOHMJznI&feature=related)
Back to my initially intended op-ed.
A few days ago I wrote "Justice Itself on Trial." (click here) It dealt with the issues of the genuine equal rights of a beleaguered minority in this country -- the LGBT community -- that have for too long been denied them (the right to marry whomever they choose), the hypocrisy of all who hold the withholding of those rights is premised on anything other than the ugliest of the most repellent hypocrisy, and the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case that entered the federal district court in San Francisco on Monday.
Even were it not for the unimaginable tragedy in Haiti, it's doubtful many in this country would have been following the recent sex scandal that has unfolded in Northern Ireland. Fifty-nine year old Member of Parliament Iris Robinson, who is married to Peter Robinson, Northern Ireland's prime minister, was caught having an affair with 19-year-old Kirk McCambly, the son of an East Belfast butcher. (Second message to self: Avoid at all costs, double entendre references to the various cuts of meat that well-into-middle-age wives can purchase at a butcher shop.)
The reference to a not at all joke, and not laughing, springs from who the Robinson's are, or rather what they screamed to the heavens they believed. The couple, sans McCambly, are "fire and brimstone," anti-gay, Evangelical Christians who demanded God's laws be upheld. Mrs. Robinson demanded "government had a responsibility to uphold God's laws" and that homosexuality was "an abomination to God comparable to pedophilia." Before the liaison gained public notice, the good, solidly upright -- but thoroughly cuckolded -- Christian prime minister fully supported his wife's staunchly moral position, "It wasn't Iris Robinson who determined that homosexuality was an abomination, it was the Almighty."
In fewer than 20 days I'll turn 64. I'm well aware of the facts of life. However I can summon numerous guesses, for whatever reasons the married Mrs. Robinson sought the ardor of a lover two-score and five years younger, none provoke in me howls of moral outrage. Neither the whats that she and young Kirk entertained themselves in, nor the whys are any of my business. Life, for even at those at the top, is a complicated, often messy, heartbreaking adventure. It's why it is frequently thought of as a "veil of tears." And when we begin judging others for trespasses that are to their consciences and their God's to sort through . . . Well, that's a stone that Jesus suggested that only those without sin should toss.
At a very early age, I began getting more and more sexually interested in the young ladies. By the time I hit junior high (today's middle school) and high school my fantasizing and manipulating to that glorious horizontal maneuver were exponentially more influential in my deportment than anything else. I was thoroughly amoral in pursuit of amorous adventures. Suzi, Joanne, Sharon, Beth . . . I'll tell you any lies I can conjure that seem to stand a chance of being believed. The fact that my pursuits were never directed to Tom, or Dan, or Bill, or Steve had zero to do with anything I had learned, or could ever have learned. My orientations -- like my eye color, race, programmed body type, and all the rest, I had nada to do with -- were established long before I hit the birth canal.
I trekked those few steps above to let all know I do not fault either Mrs. Robinson or Mr. McCambly. But I damn sure damn Mrs. Robinson for her deprecating, cherry-picking hypocrisy. (Personally, to me the entirety of the commandments in Leviticus and Deuteronomy are superfluous, meaningless wastes that have nothing whatsoever to do with personal and social morality. Only one commandment is necessary, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." And that one not only well predates Christianity, a version of it is also found in numerous other religions.) Yet, if anyone would claim some subscription to commandments in any of the Bible's or the torah or the Talmud or the Koran (Qur'an) as binding of their beliefs and conduct, vis-a-vis their God, then one must regard every commandment as binding. Or fall into the definition of a blasphemer; "God, ya sure got it right about them homo-sexuls, and I'm with ya' 150%, but I gotta tell ya, ya know, about some of these other things: yer full of it." As much as do Leviticus and Deuteronomy condemn homosexual conduct as an abomination, equally as much it does regard adultery and blasphemy.
This isn't so much about tossing a stone as it is about calling someone out, and calling them what they are: despicable, fear-ridden, hypocritical bigots.