Matthew Yglesias discovers something about social conservatives.  You know what?  They never seem to point the finger at themselves, do they?

Ross Douthat has a great column in today’s times looking at American social conservatism through the lens of Judd Apatow’s movies. All three Apatow films have, as he points out, strains of conservative values running through them. But in The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up conservative choices wind up working out suspiciously well. In the darker Funny People, by contrast, bad choices have unchangeable consequences and doing the right thing proves painful…

And that’s the one movie of his that didn’t do too well at the box office.  Now why would that be…?  I’ll hazard the same guess Yglesias does:  Because the United States is a country that’s “conservative right up until the moment that it costs us.

I think this explains a lot about the appeal of anti-gay crusades to social conservative leaders. Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex and bad parenting and whatnot take place because people actually want to do the things traditional values is telling them not to do. And the same goes for most of the rest of the Christian recipe. Acting in a charitable and forgiving manner all the time is hard. Loving your enemies is hard. Turning the other cheek is hard…

Christianity…honest to goodness Christianity…is Hard.  When you hear someone vacantly telling you that becoming a Born Again Christian has taken all the hardship, lifted all the burdens of their lives from their shoulders, you can be pretty damn confident that you’re dealing with a Mega Church christian.  Yes, yes…  when your church has its own Olympic size swimming pool and a Chick-Fil-A in it the life of a Christian must be very easy indeed.  But…it isn’t.  Forgiveness, for example…is Hard.  Damn near impossible sometimes.  Ask me how I know…

Homosexuality is totally different. For a small minority of the population, of course, the injunction “don’t have sex with other men!” (or, as the case may be, other women) is painfully difficult to live up to. But for the vast majority of people this is really, really easy to do. Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences.

No fooling.  Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been pointing out for decades now that these people have been waging a culture war on us, but not…oh…divorce…infidelity…premarital sex…teenage pregnancy.  Yes, they will bellyache about those things, but not throw millions and millions of dollars into political campaigns against them.  Nobody on the religious right is trying to get constitutional amendments passed making divorce or adultery or pornography or having babies out of wedlock illegal.  They’re not putting planks in the republican party platform about divorce.  But homosexuality?  Oh…ThATs the biggest threat to western civilization since  Earl Warren.  Since Roosevelt.  Since Lincoln even.

This isn’t rocket science.  We’re their scapegoats.  Their scarecrows.  The disposable lives of faceless Other People they can pave their highway to heaven with.  It wasn’t enough that Christ died for their sins.  We have to bleed so they can tell themselves they’re righteous.  Because otherwise they have to deal with their own lives, their own sins, their own cheapshit failures of moral character, and anything but that.  As long as they can wage war on the Homosexual Menace, they don’t have to look at themselves. 

Right there is where that venomous ferocity against homosexuality comes from.  You see parents who do absolutely horrific things to their gay children that they would never do even if they’d committed some terrible crime like murder or rape.  It’s not that they suddenly think their kid is some kind of unspeakable monster.  It’s that first hand face-to-face evidence that the monster isn’t real pulls out from under them a vital pillar of self respect.  I may be an unfaithful husband…I might be cheating on my spouse…I might be stealing from my employer…I might be abusing my own children…but by god I am not a faggot.  My cheap little crimes aren’t as damaging to society as Homosexuality.  God will forgive me…but not Them…  You take away that scapegoat, that punching bag, that Faceless Other who has to die for their common everyday bar stool sins, and suddenly morality isn’t something they can beat someone else over the head with whenever their conscience starts tapping them on the shoulder.  Nothing on this earth gets more enraged then a cheat caught in the act.