Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
Slacktivist wonders "is Lou Sheldon dumb enough to believe his own slippery silliness, or is he just being dishonest to further his political agenda? Hard to say. But any question that begins with 'is Lou Sheldon dumb enough ...' I'm inclined to answer yes."
The question of Lou Sheldon's stupidity arises from a flier he, as head of the Traditional Values Coalition, released. The flier is, as slacktivist writes, "a pro-hate crime flier made up to look like a 'wanted' poster of Jesus Christ." He continues
The TVC doesn't explicitly call itself "pro-hate crime," but the flier expresses their opposition to anti-hate-crime legislation, and to avoid the unwieldy "anti-anti-" prefix, the English language supplies us with the logically apt and more convenient prefix "pro."The flier says penalizing hate crimes based on sexual orientation "begins to lay the legal foundation and framework to investigate, prosecute and persecute pastors and other Christians whose actions are based upon, and reflect, the truths found in the Bible."
Their assumption seems to be, in other words, that Christian pastors are, in the normal course of their work, routinely engaged in violence against people they perceive to be gay.
Or something. This brings us to another simple answer to a simple question. Mark Kleiman wonders whether "'Conservative' = 'Lying Racist'? Who knew?" He's reviewing the interaction between Steve Sailer, who wrote an inaccurate and racist screed for The American Conservative, and Alex Koznetski, an editor at the aforementioned periodical who resigned in protest when his criticisms of the racist inaccuracies were rejected. Ross Douthat surveyed that scene and opined:
If you're not at least somewhat conservative, you probably shouldn't go to work for a magazine called, um, The American Conservative. And if you do, you probably shouldn't get all outraged and resign in protest when they turned out to be, um, conservative.
Kleiman responds: "So telling racist lies is a natural and expected part of being, 'um, conservative'?"
Again, the simple answer – YES – is fairly obvious. Indeed, it may be some sort of corollary to John Stuart Mill's famed quip that:
I did not mean to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.Given the difficulty of separating bigotry from stupidity, we can neatly link both stories together with the simple expedient of Mill's Law.
