If I Wanted My Fingers Rapped, I'd Use Sister Mary Stigmata

"You are such a disappointing Left! I prayed so hard for you!"

I'll stop writing posts like this when I stop getting lectured for something I or my fellow travelers aren't doing. From now on, you can call it "the angry, apathetic agnostic reacts negatively to another Jesused-up Beltway insider who are whining for no particular reason because some unnamed people were mean to (a) their sacred beliefs and (b) their attempt to inject their sacred beliefs into the political realm for no good apparent reason." In fact, you can pretty much read everything I'm going to say here with this post.

First of all, there's the title for the group blog: God's Politics. This, of course, is about as meaningful to a fictitious omnipotent Sky Fairy as "God's Preferred Second Division Welsh Football Team," "God's Favorite Pizza Topping," or "God's Favorite Third World Child Who Will Die In Poverty." However, I have nothing against the content itself: exhorting people of faith to catch the new Michael Apted movie about the ending of the slave trade in England, encouraging people to donate their time in a still-devastated New Orleans, explaining the importance of Lent using a bunch of nonsense terminology. It's all good. If a nun is at an anti-war or anti-death penalty protest, what do I care? If somebody finds an obscure passage in Thessalonians concerning progressive income taxation, fantastic. You see, I'm inclusive by my very nature, even of metaphysical gibberish.

Then comes Mr. Wallis, with all of the hallmarks of another simultaneously self-pitying and purging column against the "Secular Left." The deal he strikes with this construct (remember, I'm only the Left, I have no idea who the hell this is, although Daily Kos seems to be a temporary stand-in) is as follows:

How about if progressive religious folks, like me, make real sure that we never say, or even suggest, that values have to come from faith – and progressive secular folks, like you, never suggest that progressive values can't come from faith (and perhaps concede that, in fact, they often do).

I'm perfectly willing to abide by the first part of this deal, insofar as I'm sure that I've never seen a non-theist claim that progressive values can't come from faith. It may be crazy and unnecessary, but it's been proven on a daily basis. The parenthetical confuses me, though. Is there some progressive value that has its entire genesis and justification rooted in faith? If so, please enlighten me.

The rest of the article (and the comments) are consumed with his unwillingness to name the bigoted secularists on The Left who have turned him into some sort of 21st century supermartyr and have been losing elections for the Democrats... assuming one ignores the results from 2006 or learns actual lessons from their own shitty campaigns. But this is classic victimology and self-aggrandizement. Evidently every religious column-writer seems to see him- or herself as some sort of perfect stand-in for all left-of-center Christians, Jews, etc. If secularists think that the columnists themselves are disingenuous assholes, then The Left must hate religious people in general and enjoy losing national elections to reactionary millenialists!

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. You can read his twin columns here and here in order to pick your favorite thing to mock, as is your Phariseeical right! It may be difficult to top Hecate's comment to the second post (although it needed more quotation marks):

Wallis needs to perpetuate the notion that "some" un-named liberals hate religion or he won't get paid to "show" liberals how to "appeal" to "values voters."

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