Bull Connor Was Also A Victim of Liberal Intolerance
For better or worse, I got out of the boat on this one, and can assure you that Roy ain’t lyin’. Dreher does tell a story in which a mother refuses to have anything to do with her son because he comes out, and he really does think the son is the bad guy for saying so. In comments, when he describes certain actions as “cruel and wrong,” he’s referring to the son mentioning what happened to him. There’s also stuff about “honor culture,” which is apparently intended to be a positive description as long as it involves Southern Christian bigotry.
Lemme ask Rod about the saintly recently departed Orthodox Archbishop of Dallas, Dimitri, who he so idolized, and the allegations of child prostitution Dimitri engaged in in Mexico…
Jeebus, I can’t believe anyone takes Rod Dreher seriously anymore. Isn’t it about time Dreher converts to a new religion?
I can’t believe anyone takes Rod Dreher seriously anymore.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Doesn’t Sullivan still link to him regularly?
I mean, then we start having the debate about who takes Andrew Sullivan seriously, I guess. But still.
The best part is when Dreher sums up the writer’s sad tale of losing his close relationship with his mother as calling the mother “a hateful, homophobic bitch.” Ladies and gentlemen, Rod Dreher, devout Christian.
My favorite bit is that in comments, someone asks “who’s the editor”, because clearly the personal feelings of gays have no place in print. Rod replies that the editor wrote about his own gay marriage in the same issue. Clearly that’s all we need to know about his editorial skills.
Sex talk is reserved for Catholics, in Rod’s world. How dare a gay food writer dink a toe into Rod’s private waters. That would be like having women testify about the religious freedom to control their bodies. Learn your place!
Rod is Orthodox, not Catholic anymore. But give him time, I’m sure he’ll be off converting again soon.
I was reading NRO during Dreher’s little religious-wandering period.
Oh my goodness, those Catholic priests keep opposing the war and talking about the poor! I can’t stand all this Marxist radicalism!
What a poseur. I shut the door to my room and cried when Cardinal Ratzinger was elevated, but I’m still here. Meanwhile, this jackwagon, who always delighted in demeaning other Catholics’ commitment if they didn’t agree with him on politics, bolts because the priest sounds too much like Jesus.
Whatever.
Actually, I think he bolted because the priests were fucking too many altar boys. (At least that’s what he claims.) If, as Amanda has suggested upthread, Dreher’s new Orthodox clergy have been raping the kiddies as well, I suppose it’ll be time for him to give the Mormons the once-over.
Someone in a comments thread somewhere once said something to the effect of “Eastern Orthodoxy — all the bigotry and superstition of Roman Catholicism, without the universities and hospitals”. Sounds perfect for Dreher.
He may claim it now, but that’s not what he was writing about at the time. This was during the full on Bush-as-Churchill days, and Dreher was constantly griping about the apologies for America he was hearing from the pulpit.
A lot of Catholics who are pissed off at Dreher are pissed off because of his Catholic bashing over the sex abuse scandals.
That makes the story from Dallas – which you drew our attention to – that much more special.
Had Dreher actually sung that particular bishop’s praises?
Oh yeah, Rod (like an annoyingly large number of Orthodox converts) continually sang the praises of Archbishop Dimitri. There’s so much dirty laundry and shit in the Orthodox Church in America, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
*I was raised nominal Episcopalian, converted to Orthodoxy, briefly became Byzantine Catholic, then reverted to Orthodoxy, now am…pretty much don’t give a shitatarian.
There’s a massive cognitive disconnect between reality and a lot of the more conservative/traditional Orthodox in America.
I think he converted in…2005 maybe? A little bit after the whole RAR 9/11 schtick.
People like me and my wife who have followed Rod for a long time have come to realize he has finally made his final conversion, to Whatevergetsmeattentionism. He used to be a good Catholic like us, but his current blog is now nothing more than a cheap freak show. Popes from Kansas. Women behaving badly. Whatever he can scrape from the internet to outrage people. My wife used to be very fond of him, but he has long ago abandoned even the pretense of having any sort of principles. He’s nothing more than one of those lurid entertainment sites now, just dressed up pretending to be religious and conservative. I’m really very angry at how cleverly he played my wife for a fool.
Another loverly bit in comments is that, while it’s Rod who called the woman a homophobic bitch, according to at least one commenter this vile language is yet more proof of the left controlling the dialogue.
I can imagine what one of the mother’s gossiping friends said to her after she told her, “So, he came to you and said he was GAY? Well, bless his heart…”
“Bless his/her heart…,” is “WELL – F*CK HIM/HER!” in Southern, y’all!
I’ve always heard “bless her heart” as meaning “she’s too stupid to know better.” For example, I wouldn’t use “bless his heart” in discussing Dick Cheney, but I would David Brooks. YMMV.
(And while I’m here, what does “got out of the boat” mean in this context? I tried to google it, but all I came up with was references to Jesus walking on water. Sorry for my ignorance of some Internet traditions.)
“Get out of the boat” means “visit the website in which the original post appeared and experience its full horror directly.”
In return, can someone tell me what the B in GOBP stands for? I think I missed a memo.
“Get out of the boat” means “visit the website in which the original post appeared and experience its full horror directly.”
And comes from “Apocalypse Now,” which is why you’ll sometimes also see references to mangoes associated with this.
Internet traditions…
Thanks.
GOBP are our friends, the Republicans, who couldn’t apologize to and deflect blame from BP, fast enough, in the massive Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill in the Gulf, a couple of years ago. It seemed appropriate at the time; I’ve never seen a reason to discard it.
I’d always assumed it meant “Good ‘ol boy party”.
ralphdibny,
I lived down South for almost 10 years, and you’re right, there are other interpretations besides the one I gave.
But no matter what they’re meaning when they’re saying that, the last thing they’re actually doing is “blessing” anyone.
No no sweetie, that’s “I’ll pray for you”, “bless your heart” is “well, you ARE a dipshit!” :-P
Yeah, I loves me some passive-agressive southern bullroar, it’s so pervasive my grandmother does it, and she’s Swedish.
Dreher is an embarrassment to the faculty of his middle school, but The American Conservative’s Eunomia blog (http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/) is usually a decent read. It’s the rare example of “I don’t always agree, but” being worthwhile. There aren’t a lot of reality based conservatives left, but they aren’t extinct yet.
It’s not so much that Larison is reality based–he’s not, being a conservative and all–but rather he doesn’t have a faith-based abhorrence of reality in all situations and he’s not a congenital asshole. While that’s a lot better than the vast majority of conservatives, and it’s enough that he can often discuss things in a civilized, if too frequently irrational, manner, let’s not give in to the tyranny of low expectations. Reality based requires more than a failure to be a total dick and an occasional willingness to reluctantly concede that empirical results matter.
“let’s not give in to the tyranny of low expectations.”
Fair point. All I’m saying is that if you look at the topics he covers, they’re not the insane conspiracist soshalist crap that gets churned over by Limbaugh, Fox News, Drudge and their various imitators. Maybe that ain’t much, but it’s something.
That said, where issues of religion arise – and with the caveat that I’ve not read his blog in a year or more – Larison was typically absolutly balls-to-the-wall insane. It was striking because where issues of religion weren’t involved, right or wrong, he was typically so unusually sane.
He’s a paleoconservative who writes predominantly about foreign affairs and the unfortunately neo-conservative tendencies of the modern Republican Party. That does bring him into alignment with the anti-war left. And since he predominantly writes about those issues, it makes him seem more reasonable than he is. But at the end of the day he’s far more conservative than Dreher, or most anyone else. He attacks movement conservatives from their right.
That would be the same Southern “honor culture” which routinely produced honor killings through the 1960s, when a man basically could not get convicted, or even charged in some instances, for killing his wife if he caught her with another man.
Ask Emmet Till about honor culture, Rod.
I have a friend who is a defense attorney in Middle TN, and he’s gotten several acquittals using the “bitch/sumabitch had it comin’” defense. Honor culture is alive and kicking.
Doesn’t surprise me, though it is not as ubiquitous as it once was.
So I guess calling them American Taliban is not so far off the mark.
Not even a mild exaggeration.
That’s quit a leap from such a generalized assertion from an anonymous blog comment.
Ace, I have lived among these yahoos for most of my 60 years and, as a trained cultural anthropologist, they really are no different from the Taliban. Witness all the abortion clinic bombings and assassinations of abortion providers, for instance.
Well, it’s a good thing we don’t have Sharia law, where that sort of thing would probably be OK.
Haven’t you heard?
Obama’s bringing it here if he’s reelected!
Gay sharia abortions. Mandatory gay sharia abortions.
Wake up, America!
Mandatory gay sharia abortions, and we’ll force the bishops to pay for them! Oh Obamacare, is there anything you can’t do?
STOP THE TUBESOCK HOLOCAUST!
I don’t see the problem here – he’s criticizing the author’s airing of the family’s dirty laundry in a context where the mother has no way to respond or tell her side of the story. Dreher at no point defends the mother’s actual behavior – in comments, he even says “I doubt very much that Judy Mims did the right thing here.”
There are plenty of people throughout the range of the political spectrum who would broadly agree with this kind of “keep it in the family” ethos.
Dreher is completely inventing context. Saying that he’s reacting to context is a lie.
WTF does that even mean?
“For all we know, he flew into town and used a big family occasion to make this announcement, and caused a huge row. ”
Context…provided by Rod. For all I know Rod was masturbating furiously to man on dolphin porn while he wrote this…which is why it’s so fucking stupid.
Exactly. Anyone who didn’t manage to see through that wasn’t really trying.
I’m also prepared to say, proudly, that if it was anything other than a funeral, flying into town and using a big family occasion to out yourself is precisely the RIGHT time to do it. Everyone is all in one place.
If a huge row results, the fault is with the bigots, not the guy leaving the closet.
Upstaging a wedding would be pretty awful too.
“My brother had confessed he was gay
It took the heat off me for a while
He stood up with his sailor friend
And made it known upon my sister’s wedding day”
I gave myself to god
there was a pregnant pause before he said OK. . . .
For all I know, you’re doing the same thing right now. This proves…?
that dolphins are sluts??
No, you’re thinking of sheep. Pervert.
That Rod created context. Also that you’re rather dim.
No doubt he was deeply hurt about his mother’s reaction to the news and rightly so. Very odd time and occasion to air it, however, and we don’t know her side of the story.
It also appears that relations between the two have not broken off entirely – the phone calls aren’t happening as frequently but the silence is not total, at least at the time of writing.
What could her side possibly be?
Is there anything that she could say that would in any real sense redeem her? I certainly cannot think of anything.
Even Dreher acknowledges this.
But since we do not know her side of the story, we also can’t assume that his is true. For all we know, she’s been admiringly supportive, and he’s using the occasion to get even with her over some other grievance.
For all we know, he was sending secret messages that, when decoded, indicate the victim of a mob hit. What a monster!
So your mocking tone says what, now? That everything we read should be taken at face value if we’re sympathetic to the author’s story? That all allegations are true?
Come on, man. I expect to hear this kind of thing from
Denny’sLoomis, but not you.So we’re supposed to give Dreher’s pulled-out-of-his-ass suppositions the same amount of credit as the story of the guy whose story it is?
Hokay then.
I never expected strannix to so openly acknowledge that he, like Dreher, is a lying lying who’s making shit up, but I’m pleasantly surprised. Of course it’s kind of sad that he doesn’t realize that he’s acknowledged himself to be a liar, but that’s another issue.
You’re acting like the author said his mother cast him out of the house and said she never wanted to see him again. All he said was they haven’t talked as much after he came out, and that makes him sad. That’s hardly some kind of horrible slander.
I give up.
A wise thing to do when you have no rational argument.
Ha ha, “rational”. Good one! As if there’s any of that in this thread devoted to willfully misunderstanding what Dreher said and divining the food critic’s family situation from a single (fairly vague) paragraph.
But yes, let’s pretend that this thread of high moral scoldery is all about being “rational”.
The hilarity of someone defending Dreher’s delusional sanctimony while simultaneously accusing other people of “high moral scoldery” really can’t be overstated.
Exactly right! Consider that this is what the gentlemen said about his mother:
That’s it. Fairly vague indeed! And from that Rod Dreher divined all this:
…telling a national readership that Judy Mims of Kosciusko, Miss., is a hateful homophobic bitch.
…most people who read this guy’s article will think of his mother as a hateful bigot
…it was wrong of her son to hold her up to public contempt in this way.
…For all we know, he flew into town and used a big family occasion to make this announcement, and caused a huge row.
Incredible isn’t it?… oh, wait… You thought it was the commenters here doing the divining. Never mind then. That’s just ridiculous.
There’s nothing hilarious about paranoid delusion so severe that it leads the sufferer completely dysfunctional.
Anyone defending Dreher is off his meds or a pathetically bad liar.
Good God, strannix is a fucking moron.
Extremely unlikely. What I meant by not knowing her side of the story is that we know nothing about the circumstances or the kinds of views with which she grew up, although we can certainly guess. I know of a former Mormon who came out to his father and received what sounds like a very similar reception. Over time his father’s views have changed and he’s become more accepting. He’s not a monster of bigotry, he was raised a certain way and had to overcome that to form a new relationship with his son, which he has done.
On the other hand, this is what the original author actually said:
As anyone who grew up in the Bible Belt can imagine, the outcome was heartbreaking. My mother and I used to talk at least weekly; now months go by without a call. I miss her.
Everything else is an invention by Dreher. In other words, the person being castigated by Dreher made pretty much the same kind of statement you just did.
Maybe the writer had previously shunned his gay younger brother, driving him to a messy suicide that, as collateral damage, destroyed the local library’s priceless collection of Wodehouse first editions. And when the writer later came out, the mother realized that he could have saved his brother (not to mention one of the few remaining copies of the British version of The Prince and Betty) if he’d shown more courage earlier.
I mean, you can’t rule it out.
“Dirty laundry” is an odd thing to call rejecting your gay son.
I read what he said. It was more wistful than bitter and goodness knows he’d have every right to be bitter.
Very odd time and occasion to air it
Perhaps you and Rod can collaborate on a book, “Rod and Ed’s Southern Honor Code Rules of Etiquette: How You Should React to Being on the Receiving End of Heartless Bigotry.” Foreword by Robert Stacy McCain.
Dear Rod,
When is the right time to tell my mother I’m gay?
Gentle reader,
You keep your filthy mouth shut, you horrible young man.
Hey, I’m not Ed!
No, I’m not Ed!
Ed’s not here, man.
Gods, stand up for Eds!
The EDs broke up in 1993, when I finished my doctorate and left Salt Lake City
You can’t expect me to have mastered this threaded comment thing after two short years, can you?
Anyway, I’m appalled that you would make this comment when you didn’t even know my side of the story. This is highly unusual; most writing contains full rebuttals from all affected parties.
Always the high road.
One of the issues with that ethos is that “the family” has been a primary site of anti-gay activity and oppression. Keeping it “in the family” makes invisible exactly the sorts of familial rejection we queers are all too familiar with.
Heaven forbid we name and expose such activities.
Heaven forbid we name and expose such activities.
Yeah, it might shame some folks into changing their ways.
Yup. This is the kinder, gentler way of supporting the status quo; perhaps acknowledge injustices in the abstract but find that somehow they’re never being opposed in the right way.
Let’s try a little counterfactual. Suppose the son were actually an international arms dealer, supplier to, oh, say, the LRA. Do you think he’d be more or less ostracized by his family? [if you prefer, let's make him the CEO of Lender Processing Services]
The fact that something he -is-, over which he has no choice, something that is perfectly normal and human, gets him ostracized, while helping commit atrocities most probably wouldn’t change a thing.
Dude, you’re just a homophobe, so why not get it over with and find some better use for your time than trolling?
You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity.
I know you are, but what am i?
Either Woody or Buzz, depending.
You, on the other hand, have my wholehearted contempt as an overt bigot.
“Overt bigot”? That must have felt good. Wash those pants before you wear them again.
It’s always penis references with you. What’s up with that?
Two words: Closet. Case.
And once again, you make my point for me.
Well, he has to make someone’s point and he’s incapable of making his own . . .
I am not sure that he even has a point other than “Ewwww! Fags are yucky!”
strannix certainly manages to convince people that that’s what he believes, but I don’t think that’s his intent. Whether he has some other intent or he’s just not bright enough to form a coherent intent is, at this point, unknowable.