Thursday, August 07, 2003

Lileks: The Secular Apostle of Common Sense.

In addition to being one of the funniest writers in the English-speaking world, he's also one of the most insightful. He gets to the heart of the matter on why the newly-minted Episcopal bishop is an unworthy jackass:

If he’d cast off his family to cavort with a woman from the choir, I’m not sure he’d be elevated to the level of moral avatar – but by some peculiar twist the fact that he left mom for a man insulates him from criticism.

Precisely! About time someone gets it. If he'd taken up with the blonde church secretary with the nice cans, he wouldn't be a priest now, let alone a bishop. The Enlightened Wombyn of the ECUSA would have had his scalp. But since his newly-discovered love object had the same plumbing he does, it's "You go, Gene! Where do I sign up?"

Now we know, a decade-plus later, that James Bakker's real mistake was to be interested in a Jessica instead of a Jesse.

But he's hardly done with that blast. Here, James the angry father really cuts loose on the Rt. Rev.:

This story has irritated me from the start, and it has nothing to do with Rev. Robinson’s sexual orientation. The guy left his wife and kids to go do the hokey-pokey with someone else: that’s what it’s all about, at least for me. Marriages founder for a variety of reasons, and ofttimes they’re valid reasons, sad and inescapable. But “I want to have sex with other people” is not a valid reason for depriving two little girls of a daddy who lives with them, gets up at night when they're sick, kisses them in the morning when they wake. There's a word for people who leave their children because they don't want to have sex with Mommy anymore: selfish. I'm not a praying man, but I cannot possibly imagine asking God if that would be okay. Send them another Dad, okay? Until you do I'll keep my cellphone on 24/7, I promise.

Who are you to judge? is the standard response, and I quote Captain James T. Kirk when asked the same question by Kodos the Executioner: who do I have to be? I’ll tell you this: my nightmare is losing my daughter. The idea of leaving her on purpose is inconceivable, and I don’t care if Adriana Lima drove up the driveway in a '57 BelAir convertible, tossed me the keys and asked me to drive her to Rio, it ain’t gonna happen. I made a promise when I married my wife, and I made another when we had our daughter. It's made me rather cranky on the subject of men who don't stick around. They're letting down the side. They're reverting to type. They're talking from their trousers.


Amen! Preach it, Brother James.

[Link via Mark Shea.]

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Be reasonably civil. Ire alloyed with reason is fine. But slagging the host gets you the banhammer.

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