Andrew Sullivan is for gay marriage. Rod Dreher isn't sure.

But he is still very vocal and agitated about something.

Rod concludes his latest outreach in the mutual titty twister he and Sullivan are currently engaged in by nailing these theses to the bathhouse door:

I am glad we don’t live in that world anymore. We don’t live in that world anymore because people like Andrew insisted that gay lives had more dignity than the majority of Americans believed. Again, they did us all a favor by awakening us morally to what it is like to live in a country where what matters the most to you is treated in custom and in law as anathema. But I do not look forward to the world Andrew and his righteous allies are building for those religious people who do not conform. They will demonize dissent, and pat themselves on the back for their moral courage the whole time.

This perplexes conservative commenter Joseph Dooley, who writes

Not sure why Dreher comes out in favor of civil unions and tolerance of homosexuality. It’s a middle ground that is merely a transition stage between hedonism and Judeo-Christian civil society.

Conservative commenter Thursday is more direct:

I honestly do think America is a better place for what they’ve done, on the whole, because it has made us more tolerant and understanding.

I’ll be blunt: this is insane.

If a movement promoting gay sex (however monogamously practiced, or not, as the case may be) has somehow resulted in making American society morally superior to what it was before, then logically gay sex can’t really be that big of a deal. I mean it clearly has to be less of a sin than intolerance for that to be the case. And, if that’s true, then why exactly are we opposing gay marriage?

I mean really, if gay sex isn’t an utter abomination against nature, then what the hell are we doing making gay people suffer by denying them the ability to find love and get married? Are we opposing this for something we truly believe to be noble and pure, or just to be obstinate a**holes?

And if we give every indication that we don’t really believe gay sex to be a terrible sin, why shouldn’t gay rights people take our protests to the contrary all that seriously. Really, why shouldn’t they put the pressure on us to change? It does kind of look like we’re doing this out of pure bigotry.

P.S. A lot this post sounds like Stockholm Syndrome. I’ve said it before, the soft message sends out the impression that we don’t really believe what we say we believe, and so it may actually encourage more pressure and persecution.

Stockholm Syndrome. Now that's a really interesting take.

The liberal commenters in favor of SSM are just as befuddled by Dreher's fey coyness:

Beyond says:
 

[NFR: "Valid" = the state has the right to pass such laws;

Can you explain why the state has a right to regulate what you and your wife do in bed?

[NFR: Yes, I can explain it, but no, I don't care to get into this with you. -- RD]

BWAHAHA...WHAT kind of infantalism is THIS?

 'Yes I can explain superstring theory complete with full mathematical proofs, but no, I don't care to get into this with you.'

'Yes I can explain what advice I offered Obama and Putin in our three-way conference call, but no, I don't care to get into this with you.'

'Yes I can build a Boeing 777 Dreamliner using nothing but coffee cans, but no, I don't care to get into this with you.'

Chekhovian says:
 

[NFR: Yes, I can explain it, but no, I don't care to get into this with you. -- RD]

That’s disappointing. This is something I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on.

Beyond will do anything to get Dreher to say what he means about anything:

[NFR: Yes, I can explain it, but no, I don't care to get into this with you. -- RD]

If you do a thread about it, I promise I won’t comment. Others might find it fascinating.

Finally brought to heel like a small dog on a leash by Thursday
 

Judging by these bizarre Stockholm Syndrome-ish responses from the likes of our host here and Ross Douthat, I suspect that ordinary Christians are just going to have to have to show that we really do believe what we believe by suffering for it. That is something we can do for God, for God himself suffered far more for us.

Dreher moonwalks back, rolls over, belly up, and becomes even more passive, if that's even possible without simply imploding into his own orifices and vanishing entirely, now wanting to claim that he has just been an irenicist cruelly exploited as a useful idiot:

[NFR: You call it Stockholm Syndrome, but I really have known and loved, as friends, gay people for all my adult life. My oldest and closest friend is gay (and chaste; he's a believing Catholic). I believe gays have been badly mistreated; some still are. As a Christian, I genuinely want to be more compassionate in my dealings with them. It's not a suck-up or a put-on. What's happening, though, is that the militancy of the pro-SSM side makes people like Douthat and me look like suckers, and ends up empowering people who believe as you do, because you aren't fooled about what's coming. I don't agree with you about what a just outcome would be, but I'm becoming convinced now that relatively irenic Christians like me were and are useful idiots. -- RD]

Which, if nothing else, lays a whole bunch of chips on Thursday's Stockholm Syndrome theory.

So what in the world is going on here with Dreher? Why can't he find some gravitational ground, any ground, to plant his boots on with respect to gay marriage instead of flitting from one evanescent dewdrop to another like Tinker Bell?

Because he wants to be Andrew Sullivan - or at least, he wants to be the blogger Andrew Sullivan is.

(In the vernacular of the gay culture Sullivan inhabits Sullivan's known as a "top" - which means just what you think it means - while Dreher, well we've all read Dreher, and, really, Dreher could only be the complement to a "top", a "bottom". So Dreher can't really be Andrew Sullivan.)

Maybe Dreher doesn't really want Sullivan to hold him and stroke his hair gently, but he does want to write on the same things, to the same (including gay) people that Sullivan does, in the same way with only minor aesthetic twists (like avoiding anything which might pin him down).

For Pete's sake, he directly ripped off Sullivan's "View From Your Window" and repurposed it as his own "View From Your Table" (which we, in turn, have repurposed as "View From the Hood of Your Car". Speaking of which: after the Blue Rhino incident, we're going to need a new meetup place).

So, at the end of the day, he can't really hold to anything much different from Sullivan. That could only leave him contravening his own essence.

Or maybe all these parallels between Dreher and Sullivan are just me overthinking things once again, and the problem is that all we've been hearing from Dreher all along on this SSM thing is really no more than the outgassing of some sort of mock-Christian-flavored outrage porn, all show, no substance, and certainly no Christian principles.

In which case Sullivan calling out Dreher as an imitation "Christianist" instead of a true Christian may really be more honestly accurate and less of an insult than we first thought.

Andrew Sullivan calls Rod Dreher a coward

And Rod won’t do it because someone might say something mean at the office!

And of course he's right.

Sully, though, is a day late and a dollar short. Rod's own commenters already know he's a sniveling moral coward, as we already discussed previously here.

Somehow in his morally paralyzed state of terror Dreher also forgets that even if he gets pushback against his beliefs at the office, he's first in line for protection under EEOC laws, laws that make it clear who the party in the wrong actually is: the firm tolerating any such anti-Christian discrimination.

Not some vague Zeitgeist, you quaking, gibbering jellyfish.

So let's review:

• Christ died on the Cross to bring Christianity


• Numerous saints, Catholic, Orthodox and probably a whole bunch of others I'm ignorant of suffered torture and died professing and standing up for their faith.


• Ordinary Christians across America, genuinely seated in their faith, also gladly shape their lives to profess and support that faith every day, although because in America we really don't allow torture and murder anymore, they take whatever occasional frownies or passed up opportunities for friendship they might get and shrug them off - like grown adults do

But pudgy little Rod Dreher of St. Francisville, LA, who struts around in life in a cloud of every hipster affectation of exotic religion he can think to muster (fashionably scraggly beard optionally included), who makes his living online acting out a Vegas-worthy performance art of religiosity that would make even Jimmy Swaggart weep, who somehow thinks life outside his Mam's belly should be a protected cozy corner, prepared for him by women and moderated like his blog, is too terrified of losing the gay audience for his blog and books he craves to even point out his own standing in a federally protected class, much less to actually ever have the spine to take any sort of direct moral stance against homosexuality on his TAC blog.

Man, oh, man, Mam and Paw Dreher, do I ever feel for you.

Your namesake Ray Dreher, Jr., only son and heir, is publicly whining and petulantly pleading why some vaguely referenced others should leave him alone to not have to be more of a stand-up Christian man than a depraved homosexual who likes to have butt sex with other men.

That's about as close to the incarnate definition of mangina as you can get.

Erin Manning goes Andrew Sullivan

By which I mean for the duration of Advent her blog will consist only of her posts, without comments.

Now I don't orbit by Erin's blog that often, mostly because the inside baseball Catholic stuff she usually posts about is simply outside my wheelhouse, but when I do, I read it for the comments, to the extent of ordering the posts I read by the number of comments they receive.

Why? Probably that basic human being social animal thing: it's the interaction among people that's the most interesting thing to me, not Erin Manning's sole thoughts in and of themselves (I don't know her, so why would I care what she thinks any more than I care about what anyone else I don't know thinks?) I'm interested in how the only objective measure of what she tried, the grasp and judgement of others, measures her success or failure from the beginning of whether she is even being articulate to the end of whether she has ended up being convincing or not. I'm interested in where her public thoughts fit into the multi-person human world, not in what she and Sullivan are now doing, tight-beaming their special individual mind dumps to Alpha Centauri.

When a blogger blogs without comments it seems to me they're saying a number of different things, either outright or implicitly:

1) I didn't have enough space anywhere at home to keep this private diary, so I'm using this public platform I stumbled across as a last-ditch makeshift workaround. If-ay I-yay ew-nay ig-Pay atin-Lay, I-Yay ould-way even-ay ite-wray it-tay ere-hay in-nay at-thay oo-tay eep-kay it-tay even-ay ore-may ecret-say, but I don't.

2) What I have to say is so important in its own right that it doesn't even matter if anyone reads it, so I don't need to know by way of someone commenting if anyone did read it or what they thought.

3) I already wrote 2) just now. Any comment could only spoil that, don't you agree? Don't answer.

One of the reasons Erin gives for her experiment in isolation is that there is a completely unknowable "depressingly large number of people in the world who feel free to put all sorts of sludge in your comment boxes," which suggests, a bit too facilely it seems to me, that anyone not positively reviewing Erin's output could be suspect of being an inhabitant of that vague and infinitely elastic purgatory.

But Erin is not Andrew Sullivan, so just as with her self-published book output - I think she just finished churning out her fifth or so 50,000 word manuscript in the series, the book(s) her mentor Rod Dreher has yet to even acknowledge exist - what she has effectively done is abandon her blogging now as well to the same sort of private self-publishing for that safely known audience of herself and anyone in her inner circle who considers her special enough that they will phone her or text her or email her personally about it.

This isn't really narcissism, it's more like a self-imposed sort of autism, and it seems to be a way of coping with the internet: people want to be noticed by the public, but only on their own, unilateral terms. So, in between isolated bursts of tight-beaming, they rock to and fro, in self-imposed isolation.

Frankly, it seems to me that a better course for anyone like Erin, even for a raging narcissist like Sullivan who, unlike Barbra, has only achieved first name status in-house, would be to take a closer look at why they are so allergic to the knowable public responses of others to their output.

If the comments Erin actually gets really is disproportionately a depressingly large amount of "sludge", what is she doing to generate those terrible results, and what could she do differently to achieve better ones?

If the problem is feeling rejected at anything short of adoration, that, too, begs for corrective action, action which can only be undertaken and guided in response to the very same feedback that is being preemptively rejected.

In short, a better experiment for Erin might be to explore in more depth why as a public author and blogger she seems to be having trouble getting along with her readers. Solving that social problem might put her further along the path to being a more successful author on top of being a happier blogger.

Yeah, I didn't link to Erin's experiment. Why would I? By her own hand, she's designated it as not really something for public interaction.

[NFP: But I am linking to Ms. Manning's post so I can see if it shows up in her "Links to this post" section. Mwa-ha-ha.]

[NFP2: In this context, NFP stands for Note From Pauli, not "Natural Family Planning". But you all knew that.]

Giving Loads of Hypocrisy

Remember the Armstrong Williams payoff? Remember the Scooter Libby "pardon"? Now we have a payoff and pardon for Andrew Sullivan by Obama's Department of Justice. From Powerline:

No one has been a more uncritical cheerleader for the Obama administration than liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan. Now, Sullivan has gotten his reward, courtesy of Obama's Department of Justice.

Sullivan was caught smoking marijuana in a National Park and was prosecuted, consistent with the usual policy of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. But Sullivan's pull with the Obama administration got him a sweetheart deal: the U.S. Attorney decided to drop the charges, even though there evidently is no doubt about Sullivan's guilt. The issue here isn't whether marijuana possession should be illegal, or should be prosecuted. It is illegal, and the U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts does routinely prosecute such cases. But not Sullivan: Barack Obama and Eric Holder paid him off for his slavish devotion.

Here's what United States Magistrate Judge Robert Collings thought about the charges being dropped. Excerpts:

When the case was called, the Court expressed its concern that a dismissal would result in persons in similar situations being treated unequally before the law. The Court noted that persons charged with the same offense on the Cape Cod National Seashore were routinely given violation notices, and if they did not agree to forfeit collateral, were prosecuted by the United States Attorney. In short, the Court explained that there was no apparent reason for treating Mr. Sullivan differently from other persons charged with the same offense. In fact, there were other persons who were required to appear on the September 2nd docket who were charged with the same offense and were being prosecuted. ...

[T]he Court would not be concerned with any exercise of discretion by the United States Attorney not to prosecute the possession of small amounts of marijuana. The United States Attorney certainly has discretion to determine how best to allocate the resources of his office and could, if he deemed it appropriate, elect to focus those resources on more serious crimes while declining to prosecute the type of violation which Mr. Sullivan faces. However, from all that appears, the United States Attorney has not taken the position that persons who possess marijuana on federal property will not be prosecuted; rather, those persons are prosecuted routinely. ...

In the Court's view, in seeking leave to dismiss the charge against Mr. Sullivan, the United States Attorney is not being faithful to a cardinal principle of our legal system, i.e., that all persons stand equal before the law and are to be treated equally in a court of justice once judicial processes are invoked. It is quite apparent that Mr. Sullivan is being treated differently from others who have been charged with the same crime in similar circumstances. ...

In short, the Court sees no legitimate reason why Mr. Sullivan should be treated differently, or why the Violation Notice issued to him should be dismissed. The only reasons given for the dismissal flout the bedrock principle of our legal system that all persons stand equal before the law.

Via Patterico, we get the best and most damning commentary on the sordid affair:

This is my “Okay, I’ll post about Andrew Sullivan if you stop writing me about him” post.

Via the Internet Scofflaw, we learned that Andrew Sullivan once sanctimoniously wrote:

My view is that no one is above the law, and that when a society based on law prosecutes the powerless and excuses the powerful, it is corroding its own soul.

So when Andrew Sullivan gets busted for something, he will of course demand to be prosecuted if those less powerful than he are also being prosecuted. Right?

Heh.

Heh indeed. I guess Orwell was right—"Some animals are more equal than others." Dennis Prager is always stating that being on the left is never having to say you're sorry. How right he is.

But this Boston Globe piece contains by far, BY FAR, the most absurd comment:

When Collings asked Lang and Delahunt why Sullivan should be treated differently from other defendants charged with possessing marijuana on federal property, the lawyers explained that Sullivan was a British citizen applying for a certain immigration status and that the $125 penalty could imperil his application, according to Collings’s ruling.

Now... there's a reason to drop a charge against someone! Because imposing a penalty might penalize them! Can you imagine that defense? "Your Honor, sending my client to prison will affect his ability to earn an income to support his family." We could call it the Jesse James defense.

Commentator Rod Dreher is riding the fence as usual...

Do I think it would be unjust to keep Andrew Sullivan from becoming an American citizen because he was arrested for possessing a small amount of marijuana? Yes I do, and at a certain level I'm glad this pot bust won't be counted against him. But I am more troubled by the idea that a famous and well-connected person received special treatment in a criminal matter, for no apparent reason other than he's famous and well-connected. I look forward to Sullivan's account of this matter.

How'd he do that—sleight of hand? How can Mr. Dreher be "glad this pot bust won't be counted against him" and yet "troubled" by the special treatment? He seems to feel a little different about Sullivan's pot use than, oh... Michael Phelps, for instance. (I wonder if Andrew Sullivan has a big poster of Michael Phelps on his bedroom wall?) But the incident has had a good effect on Mr. Dreher in that it seems to caused a maturation with regards to ad hominum attacks...

[A] couple of you are using this incident as an excuse to discount anything Sullivan has to say about anything as invalid. That's argumentum ad hominem nonsense.

We look forward to Mr. Dreher's application of this principle to the teaching authority of the Bishops of the Catholic Church. But this is not the first time he's pled for a special privilege on the part of Mr. Sullivan.

Meanwhile, if you happen to get busted for pot possession, you might try talking with a gay British accent. It's at least worth a shot.

(H/T goes to pikkumatti.)