(Bill Keller, George Packer and Charles Blow)
First, reread this legendarily stupid column by former New York Times editor-in-chief Bill Keller from August 26 of last year. In it, Bill Keller demands that the GOP candidates be quizzed about religion, that we "get over our scruples" about asking candidates about the particulars of their religious beliefs. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, especially not in Manhattan's tonier districts, and Keller was much and rightly mocked for his Lefty Boy''s Big Book Of Incendiary Questions.
After you have reread his piece,
listen to Keller this morning asserting that Santorum, who has been talking about freedom of religion, wants to impose a sort of Christian Sharia on the country. Santorum has been responding to questions about religion in the public square and getting zapped for it, but given Keller's August piece, you think he might have had the decency to point out that he and others on the Left had been demanding such conversations on such subjects for months. Now that Senator Santorum has had some, Keller quite duplicitously condemns Santorum as a Wahhabist for doing so.
Then read the New Yorker's George Packer as he displays a marvelous ignorance of not only the First Amendment's design and interpretation --he seems to have wholly missed the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses and to confuse them with the phrase "Separation of Church and State"-- but he also seems ignorant of the fact that Mr. Keller and many on the left want all the presidential candidates on the right to face some sort of lefty Board of Inquiry on the articles of their religion. Mr. Packer no doubt spent a half hour on Wikipedia this morning coming up with his Madison and Jefferson references, but he might have been better served by reading the
9-0 opinion issued by the Supreme Court in Hosanna Tabor authored by Chief Justice Roberts earlier this year.
Rick Santorum has been making an argument about (1) the president's attack on the Roman Catholic Church which violates the Free Exercise clause much as did the EEOC's ruling at issue in
Hosanna Tabor and (2) the proper role of religious faith in the public square, which is robust and enduring, and which is under assault by the secular absolutists that dominate elite media.
To advance their cause, and thus the re-election chances of the president they love, Mr. Keller and Mr. Packer are quite willing to throw overboard all elementary understanding of what freedom of religion means and to distort not just Santorum's arguments and ignore their own, but also to stoke the fires of religious bigotry as a means to those ends. A kind of Christian Sharia law? That is akin to accusing Mr. Keller of the sort of crimes against people that would slanderous per se.
(Mr. Keller and Mr. Packer are not alone in their contributions to stoking the fires of religious bigotry,
but the sad Charles Blow, also of the
New York Times, is like the weak hitting shortstop of the team who bats ninth and is staring at a demotion to Triple A unless he picks up his game. Thus Mr. Blow has made yet another contribution to his very long list of inanities this very morning, adding to his established reputation for bigotry and wild intemperance on tweet feed and
blog the
additional credential of bigotry on television by calling Santorum "crazy." Blow has the makings of a classic five-tool hater if we can only get him on the radio and the big screen. No doubt he is really hoping that Mr. Keller or Mr. Packer, the Ruth and Gehrig of religious intolerance, notice him and ask him along for a drink.)
Here's the problem. The Left really doesn't know what it wants except to hate people of faith who refer to that faith as the wellspring of their values. The vast mob of Manhattan-Beltway media elites gathering to kill the beast that is Rick Santorum, the affable father of seven and devout old-school liberal on matters of faith, is something to behold. He really does, as Mr. Blow put it, "scare the hell" out of them. Or perhaps just makes them aware of an argument they'd rather just as soon forget about the centrality of faith to the republic's history and good functioning, along with their certainty that the Soviet Union would never crumble and that President Obama could get the economy moving again.
I open the show with Senator Santorum today and we will talk about Keller and Packer, though not Mr. Blow. Mr. Blow doesn't warrant a response because he has almost no audience. The other two, unfortunately for the cause of religious tolerance, do. The transcript of my interview will be posted here later:
The Santorum transcript:
HH: I begin today’s broadcast with former United States Senator Rick Santorum, www.ricksantorum.com. Senator, how are you feeling about Michigan and Arizona today?
RS: You know, we feel great. We’ve worked really hard here in Michigan, and we’re going to continue to scrap to the very end. And we feel like we’ve got some momentum on our side. Obviously, it’s a tough state. I mean, it’s Governor Romney’s home state. He’s got a lot of tradition on his side, and a lot of money on his side here, too, and the establishment Republican organization. But you know, we’ve got, we’re an insurgent campaign, we’ve been it from the very beginning, and we feel like we’ve got a lot of momentum going into these last few hours of the campaign.
HH: Of course, a week from now, you’re going to my home state of Ohio. Can we get you to pander a little bit and say maybe Go Browns, beat the Steelers, or anything like that?
RS: You know what? Over my dead body.
HH: (laughing)
RS: That’s one of the things I will absolutely draw the line on.
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