Caveat lector

SCRIPTED THOMAS! Wondering whether to brake for Lassie, Cal Thomas sheds light on our discourse:

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3, 2004

SCRIPTED THOMAS: Cal Thomas is worried about what would happen if same-sex marriage were ever permitted. In this morning’s Washington Times, he explains where the whole thing would take us:

THOMAS: If same-sex marriage is allowed, it is going to be nearly impossible to prohibit the sanctioning of any other kind of human “relationship”—from close relatives of different sexes who wish to marry (that has been outlawed because of biological and incest considerations) and polygamists to adult-child “marriage.”

Why does Thomas reason so weirdly? According to Cal, it’s because he can’t reason at all—he can only react to Scripture. Early on, he worries about the things that occur when people don’t work from such sources:

THOMAS: Let’s put it this way. If you tell me you do not believe in God and then say to me that I should brake for animals, or pay women equally, or help the poor, on what basis are you making such an appeal? If no standard for objective truth, law, wisdom, justice, charity, kindness, compassion and fidelity exists in the universe, then what you are asking me to accept is an idea that has taken hold in your head but that has all of the moral compulsion of a bowl of cereal. You are a sentimentalist, trying to persuade me to a point of view based on your feelings about the subject and not rooted in the fear of God or some other unchanging earthly standard.

THOMAS: The mayor of New Paltz, N.Y., Jason West, recently performed same-sex “marriages,” saying it is the “moral” thing to do. Moral? According to whom? If only according to Mayor West, he is practicing moral relativism, not objective morality.

THOMAS: The idea of marriage did not originate in San Francisco or Massachusetts or even with the Founders. Like it or not, it came from the book of Genesis, where, after the fall of man, God said, “A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).

And that is why Thomas is fairly sure that gay marriage will lead to incest, and to geezers wedding 9-year-old girls. If we reject the Scripture as the basis for law, we would have no way of judging that such practices simply aren’t right.

Several thoughts can be derived from Thomas’ revealing column. First, we can see how deeply weird Thomas is on matters of ethics and morals. Imagine! Imagine a man who says he wouldn’t know that murder was wrong unless he could look it up in the Bible! Thomas seems to have no experience of moral judgment aside from what he reads in the Book.

Second, we can see how weakly Thomas reasons. Somehow, Thomas believes that accepting Scripture creates a “standard for objective truth, law, wisdom, justice”—creates a world in which judgments are made, not on the basis of “your feelings on the subject,” but on the basis of an “unchanging,” “objective” standard. But the decision to accept some particular Scripture is, of course, a subjective human judgment. So too the decision Thomas must make about how to interpret various parts of that Scripture. Somehow, Thomas thinks he describes a world from which human judgment has been removed. But it was human judgment by which Cal Thomas accepted the Bible’s authority in the first place. Earthly life always involves human judgment, though Thomas doesn’t seem to have heard.

Finally, we see from Thomas’ oddball column the growing shape of our national discourse. Increasingly, our discourse lies in the hands of the Thomases—people who want your public life run by what they find in their Bible. Should Uncle Festus wed his 9-year-old friend? Cal isn’t sure—till he checks with the Book. But while self-impressed pundits lambaste Mel Gibson, the Scripted Thomases have long run free. Reason? Gibson is easy—and Thomas is hard. Your pundit corps is afraid of the Thomases, even as they force their Scripture into your government. It’s easier—much easier—to sit and say nothing. So sit and say nothing they do.

Thomas’ column is deeply odd. Should Cal brake for Lassie? He isn’t quite sure. But people like Thomas have more and more power. Ain’t it time for the press to confront it?

SLIMING THOMAS: Apparently, there’s nothing in Scripture about sliming women who become public figures. That’s why Cal felt free, in December 1999, to throw a stink-bomb at Naomi Wolf:

THOMAS (Washington Times, 12/11/99): For Mrs. Wolf, only a government headed by Al Gore can do for women what they apparently are incapable of doing themselves. Mrs. Wolf’s children and our children are at risk if Mr. Gore isn’t elected, she tells us. Apparently, parents should have little say in the future of their own kids, and teaching them to get naked with one another in school and to masturbate, as she prescribes in her book, “Promiscuities,” are two of her recommended strategies to keep them so preoccupied they won't give their parents or the country any trouble.

THOMAS: The unofficial campaign theme song and dance of the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign was the Macarena. This time around, with Vice President Al Gore running for president, it appears the unofficial theme will be “Victor/Victoria,” with Al Gore in the lead role of a man playing a woman playing a man.

Remember: If it isn’t specifically banned in Scripture, Thomas has no way to judge it. There’s nothing in Scripture about Victor/Victoria, so what he said must be OK. And someone else had no way to judge—the sniveling wreck that we still call a “press corps.” They let this clowning go unchecked for two solid years—because they were engaged in the same clowning too! You lost the White House to Thomas’ fakery. Isn’t it time your “press” found its nerve and took on these fake, phony men?

MEL’S BELLS: Several readers have challenged something we wrote about Mary Gordon’s essay on The Passion. Gordon said this: “[T]here are two good Romans, Pilate and [Mrs. Pilate], to add a counterweight to our understanding of Romanness. There is no counterweight to the portrayal of the Jews.” Was that a strange thing for Gordon to say? One e-mailer said this:

E-MAIL: I have yet to see The Passion…But it’s plain silly, in examining how Jews are portrayed in the film, to use the depictions of those who believed in Jesus as examples of Mel Gibson’s perceptions of Jews and Judaism. Doing so would presume—as Mary Gordon did not in her New York Times analysis—that Gibson had a problem with people who were born Jewish, as opposed to those who continue to adhere to Judaism’s religious tenets. In other words, that Gibson has a race issue with the Jews. Not only does Gordon not allege Gibson is a racist, no serious critic of the film has done so.

What is wrong with critiques of this film that trash it as “fascistic,” “pornographic,” “anti-Semitic,” a “snuff film?” There’s nothing wrong with tough critiques—if writers reason fairly and sanely. But there are several things wrong with the hyperbolic, name-calling attacks that have countered simpering praise from the right. Let’s lay them out, then be done with it.

First: Gibson aside, most people going to see this film are doing so with the best intentions. They have described their reactions to the film—and no, they aren’t haters, fascists, porn-lovers or anti-Semites. But many critics act as if they haven’t seen a word that’s been said. (We thought Gordon’s essay suffered from this.) It may feel good to trash the film as “fascistic,” as Richard Cohen foolishly did in the Post. (Cohen’s reasoning was simply absurd; the film was “fascistic” because he found it boring.) But when millions of people are moved by a film—and writers flippantly call it “fascistic”—these writers are wishing the world of those people away. For ourselves, we don’t share these people’s response, but we wouldn’t treat their response with scorn. Monday morning, in our local bagel joint, we heard a bagel-buyer who had seen the film (a middle-aged African-American man) effusively praise it to a bagel-seller, who hadn’t seen it (also a middle-aged African-American man). The seller asked if the film was anti-Semitic; the buyer said he felt it was not. We don’t share this man’s response to the film, but we thought his good intentions were obvious. We trust his intentions much more than Cohen’s—and more than those of the feel-good bomb-throwers who have indulged themselves in loud, rude rants against a film this man found very moving.

Second, can we offer a point? To the extent that it’s hyperbolic and rude, this trashing is very bad politics for Democrats. Go ahead, liberal columnists! Put your contempt for average Christians on display, stupidly calling this film vile names! Indulge yourselves in massive hyperbole! Inevitably, you’ll draw these people into the discourse—and when you lure them out to the polls, they’ll vote against Dems, who they think you represent. This, of course, is not a reason to tolerate hatred or anti-Semitism. But it is a reason to show some judgment in how you write about a major event.

For whatever reason, The Passion is a giant event. Tragically, we regard its director as a bit of a nut—see Christopher Hitchens in Slate, for example—but when decent people are moved by a film, their world view deserves to be taken seriously. Throwing bombs can feel quite good. But it makes for a dumb, empty discourse.