AS is taking Jonah to task for his imaginings.
One has to snicker at the unintentional irony of a mag inspired by the Catholic right-wing leading-off a critique of leftist attitudes with a bit on buying and selling indulgences ...
After stripping away his wanderings on sexual ethics of the left, Jonah's basic thesis is that the purity of The Party's ideals are undiminished by folks like Craig, who are just fallen, a situation he takes to occur "sometimes".
The point is simply this: Hypocrisy is bad, sure. But it’s a human failing that should fall upon the individual in question. What the left wants to do is use hypocrisy as a cudgel to declare that conservative ideals are categorically illegitimate because some conservatives fail to live up to them. But we all fail to live up to our ideals sometimes ... That’s sort of why we call them “ideals.” Most of us don’t fall as far as Larry Craig seems to have fallen, but that’s not necessarily an indictment of his arguments, it’s an indictment of the man.
The problem is, Jonah, that "gay" isn't "failing", nor "human failing", nor, mostly, is it "sometimes".
Nor are your ideals immune to the simple witness of the faithful that they are mis-guided, ill-conceived, and, increasingly, hypocritically advanced under a banner of "family values" by people who do know that gay people aren't moral failures. In other words, the ideals themselves are not standing the test of time, broadly put, not the test of the devil.
Like the fox and his grapes, you can keep ending up looking at gay relationships, gay sex, gay politicians, and saying, aw, they must be sour, but soon enough you'll be a Party of one, with any luck ...
Oh, and … about that swipe:
The reason that lefties “don’t like moralizers” isn’t because they don’t understand that people fail to realize their ideals in all instances, it is because, historically, right-wing ‘moralizers’ use their “ideals” not to inspire or enable people, but aggressively to exclude them, up to and including oppression, self-serving and otherwise; corral them (including women); put them down (including racism); or denigrate their very existence (including gays and lesbians).
