Count Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck as the latest deserters in the culture war and in the battle for sexual normalcy. They have flinched at "precisely that little point which the world and the devil are ... attacking," and so have forfeited the right to consider themselves any longer culture warriors.
Glenn Beck's Minister Of Chauvenism
Of course, a laissez-faire attitude towards gay marriage will oppose Beck's most ardent promoter, Jim Garlow, pastor of Skyline Church in San Diego and one of the men who spearheaded Proposition 8.
An August 19th audio clip from one of Beck's most recent radio shows which can serve as a guide to what thought processes will be used during the two-day fete. It really bears listening to, because Garlow regurgitates all the points above with (unfortunate) sincerity and piety. His sermon is supposedly based on the book of Hosea (on which he so proudly says that he based his master's thesis). Garlow then uses the usual supposition that no one actually reads the Bible (let alone an obscure book like Hosea) and procedes to carve out his own fictitious story that Hosea forgave this wanton wife and she obediently followed him home. Look it up in the KJV (Hosea), and see if there's any way you can conceivably make out his story from what is written.
The above anecdote serves to tell us the kind of "honorable" men Beck has been surrounding himself with.
Beck's homespun demagoguery is at times reminiscent of Andy Griffith's character in A Face In The Crowd. In the clip below, Griffith gloats to the late Patricia Neal about his political power. The horror on her face looks familiar, because you can see the same horror in the faces of Beck's critics: here is a man who has is enraptured by his own effect on people. With Beck, the medium has become the message.
I ask that you would come and bring your family, bring your children, this is going to be a historic day, it is going to be a day that I think will shock those naysayers, those people on the far left, those people who think we are going to dishonor...it is about Restoring Honor.
So whose honor will Divine Destiny Beck restore? The country's? The Christian Right's? His own?
When musing on Glenn Beck's many scattered (and even contradictory) philosophies, someone used the old saw "a
broken clock is right twice a day."
That may be true. However, a broken clock is also wrong 1438 times a day. Whatever happens on Saturday, let's not give Beck too much credit.*
*After all, he'll have Palin with him.
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