Civil Commotion

Dennis Rodman to Join Trump and Kim in Singapore
to Shill for a Marijuana Cryptocurrency

Really: You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Bill Donohue says Anthony Bourdain probably would not have committed suicide if he’d been a good Christian man who, presumably, would have understood that he’s no damn good.

If Anthony Bourdain had been a religious man, would he have killed himself? Probably not. The celebrity chef was found dead today in his hotel room in Strasbourg, France.

Bourdain was raised by his Catholic father and Jewish mother, though neither of them saw fit to raise him in any religion. In 2011, he said his views on religion were similar to those expressed by Christopher Hitchens, the British atheist.

Curiously, the Creator of the Whole Big Universe didn’t tell Donohue that only an insensitive cretin would presume to blame Bourdain’s atheism before the body has properly cooled, and without any other knowledge whatsoever about Bourdain’s health or circumstances. And another thing: the NIH data don’t uphold Donohue’s claim; suicide is one of the very few social pathologies that is mixed without any clear bias across the Bible Belt.

Bourdain’s untimely, self-inflicted death doesn’t tell us anything about the value of religion — but Donohue’s behavior certainly does.

Jerry Falwell once said that Paige Patterson was one of only a few preachers to his Right, and he has been for 40-years a driver of the Evangelical Right’s profoundly damaging, theocracy-leaning influence upon this country; his departure from public life is a good thing. The irony, of course, is that until recently he was untouchable. Though his squalid conduct during the co-called Conservative Resurgence was a well-documented and widely-known fact — I have more than a dozen books about the Resurgence — he enjoyed mythic stature amongst the browbeaten sheep who comprise the Southern Baptist Convention.

He had become an idol of sorts, and I mean that in the most Biblical way.

It is not a coincidence that Evangelicals have hastened to Donald Trump — another authoritarian with very bad values and, unhappily for the rest of us, a much larger podium. The Conservative Resurgence, like the election of Trump, was a reaction against modernity by the marginalized, the displaced, the left-behind. We should all do everything we can to assist Trump to the same ignominious end.

Right. All you have to do is believe preposterous tales about talking snakes, and leaning towers, and vengeful she-bears, and floods, and food falling from the sky, and a guy whose staff turned into a snake — and Our Invisible Friend will show you some compassion. Because you’re an idiot, I suppose.