"Glib Fortuna," one of Stop the ACLU's hapless verbal garbage factories and perhaps its most endearingly, childishly over-the-top, has for some reason elected to complain about a San Francisco Chronicle column that is nearly two years old.
The column, titled "God Does Not Want 16 Kids" and written by by Mark Marford in October 2005, takes note of a family in Arkansas, the Duggars, which at the time included -- you guessed it --16 children (God has seen fit to since bless them with a seventeenth). The Rev. Big Dump Chimp wrote a post about this family last year that included this "demotivational" poster, at which I of course laughed heartily.
The husband's name is Jim Bob. These are deeply religious people. They're like a bloated, real-life version of the Flanderses of The Simpsons fame. In other words, they are an eminently ripe target for agitators like Marford, who indeed went hog-wild in his column.
The Chronicle scribe called the family "18 spotless white hyperreligious interchangeable people with alarmingly bad hair." About the mother, Michelle, he writes, "you cannot help but wonder about her body and its various biological and sexual ... no, no, it is not for this space to visualize frighteningly capacious vaginal dimensions." Jauntily (but, one might point out, properly) perturbed over the prospect of the U.S. becoming a nation of mindless, super-starched breeders for Jesus, he crows, "God does not want more children per acre than there are ants or mice or garter snakes or repressed pedophilic priests." You get the picture.
Glib, perhaps as ignorant of the age of this column as he is about so much else, complains (in all seriousness): "Obviously, this is acceptable discourse in the sick, hate-drenched world of the American Left." He also writes: "Imagine a savage tirade like this were published in a legitimate conservative news outlet ... about a woman who'd had a half-dozen abortions or about a homosexual who'd contracted AIDS."
First of all, anyone who expects to be taken seriously when extrapolating the words of one piece by one columnist to form judgments about "the Left," "the Right," or any other group of people tens of millions strong is an idiot. Glib does not, in fact, expect to be taken seriously except by his follow mudheads at STACLU, but his bitchy overgeneralization is nonetheless egregious, almost quaint.
Second, and more important, Marford -- despite his harsh treatment of religious-hillbilly folkways -- is not mocking anyone's misfortune in his column. Whatever anyone else might think, the Duggars are pleased as punch to have all those kids underfoot. It's a happy thing to them. If Michelle's whatzit really is too plumb wore out to be of any use to her husband during sex, well, that's a sacrifice these folks are clearly willing and prepared to have made.
For Glib to liken having sixteen kids to undergoing six abortions or suffering from a potentially fatal illness is incredibly dumb, although not unusually so by his standards. Regardless, had this been a story about a large Arkansas family in which three or four kids were stricken with cancer, somehow I don't think Marford would have been the one to write it.
Also, it's telling that Glib specifically mentions that a conservative news outlet would never write about a homosexual who'd contracted AIDS -- as if everyone should accept at face value the premise that AIDS is an issue only among gay Democrats. These Fuddbloggers are not just ignorant, but as parochial-minded as it's possible to be without actually regressing to sea-urchin-hood and its one or two neural circuits.
Finally, I don't doubt that it would be easy to find a major news outlet that has in fact published just the kinds of stories Glib says would never hit the papers or airwaves, and I don't mean in a sympathetic way. I won't go looking, since his goofy extrapolation and his equivocating childbirth with AIDS means there's no argument left for anyone to dismantle. I would expect people to agree that the righties in the media haven't been especially kind to, say, Cindy Sheehan, whose personal story is not quite as uplifting as that of the Duggars, or to anyone with the temerity to challenge religious myths. On top of that, the Fuddheads are liars through and through, in a way the country hasn't seen in years, from the White House itself right down to the gutter-dwelling mentally challenged bloggers for hate, the latter ranging in reach from Michelle Malkin all the way down to the likes of Gribbit.
That said, one thing -- but not the only one -- that really makes me wonder about the utility of the two-party political system in America is its engendering of just this kind of crap. For every stupid or hateful thing some ignorant wingnut says, there's a moonbat out there who, while perhaps more literate and educated overall, is saying something as baseless. Morons do seem selectively drawn to the Republican Party, but the Republicans hardly have a monopoly on dumbassery, and there are plenty of smart, generous and thoughtful conservatives out there, although you pretty much have to toss the religious strains of conservatives in order to make that judgment stick.
Anyway, these STACLU guys are plenty stupid at baseline, but knee-jerk ideology and the lingering frustration of November's elections have conspired to scatter whatever cognitive candlepower they may have once possessed into the winds.
