Someone at Breitbart News is apparently unfamiliar with the concept of satire.
The Week’s Michael Brendan Dougherty penned an op-ed this week, titled “Burn Kim Davis,” wherein he offered an obviously absurd take on the recent controversy surrounding a Christian Kentucky county clerk, Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Breitbart News, however, appears to have missed the joke.
Davis was temporarily imprisoned for refusing to hand out the licenses. Prior to her being locked up, left-wing media figures like Brian Beutler of New Republic suggested that prison doesn’t go far enough.
Davis “should be put behind bars until she relents one way or another,” he wrote, suggesting that the state should make an attempt to change her heart and mind.
Dougherty, an outspoken Roman Catholic, reacted by mocking the notion that the state should imprison people until they repent, suggested jokingly that her punishment should be even more severe.
“Davis has already indicated that jail is nothing to her compared to serving God. She’s just sitting there with the approval of her conscience!” he wrote. “And besides, many think that putting Davis in jail risks exciting sympathy for her and a viral donation campaign that will ultimately reward her for her intransigence.”
It’s obvious what needs to be done, he added.
“Any normal punishment rewards her with the comfort of solidarity from right-wing Christians, or her own sense of moral self-approval. Therefore the only way to avoid granting her such ‘martyrdom’ is to actually martyr her,” he wrote. “That’s the really perverse thing about Christians who make a spectacle like this. The only way the state can really punish them is to inform them that their suffering is meaningless and proving that God doesn’t exist by sending them to the darkness of oblivion in torment. Justice Kennedy has issued his theological bull; let Kentucky officials in defiance of it be put on a pyre.”
“When the smoke settles there will be no GoFundMe campaign, save perhaps for a small carbon offset,” he added.
All of this — the jokes about papal bulls, pyres and carbon offsets — appears to have gone over the head of Breitbart News’ Thomas D. Williams, who reported on the op-ed as if it were an earnest suggestion.
“The ominous piece follows on threats from gay activists who told Davis’ husband they would rape her in front of him, burn their house down, and murder them,” said the report, titled “Op-ed proposes burning Kim Davis at the stake.”
Though Williams toys with the idea that Dougherty may have been joking, he argues that the pyre imagery is simply inexcusable.
“[T]he rhetoric of burning alive those who oppose same-sex marriage because they deem it an aberration that offends both human dignity and the laws of God seems only to stoke the flames of anti-religious sentiment that already threaten to undermine the foundations upon which America was built,” the article read.
It added, “It remains to be seen whether a country founded on religious liberty will be able to withstand the waves of the new orthodoxy that crash daily upon its shores.”
Dougherty, for his part, appears amused that his obvious reductio ad absurdum appears to have confounded Breitbart News.
“Surprised, as many of their writers are familiar with me and I with them,” he said Thursday morning on social media. “The right wing’s persecution fantasy/complex was not my intended target. Just collateral damage.”
“[T]he fact that some people thought it was serious is not an indication that satire is dead. On the contrary, that it lives,” he wrote. “Then again who thinks that anyone would defend Justice Kennedy by describing his opinion as theological, and a usurpation of the Church?”
He added later that afternoon, “Not to make light, but I just got a threatening phone call at home. Thanks Breitbart!”
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UPDATE 09.10.15 – Breitbart News has updated its story to show that it now recognizes Dougherty’s article was meant as satire. The amended report also refers to his op-ed as a “dark piece,” rather than as an “ominous piece.”
Breitbart News has also stealth edited the following passage [emphases added]:
“Some have assumed that Dougherty’s essay is meant tongue-in-cheek, calling it a ‘Swiftian proposal,’ after Jonathan Swift’s famous essay suggesting that the children of poor people in Ireland could be flayed and their soft skin used to make gloves and their flesh consumed to help defray expenses. Be that as it may, the rhetoric of burning alive those who oppose same-sex marriage because they deem it an aberration that offends both human dignity and the laws of God seems only to stoke the flames of anti-religious sentiment that already threaten to undermine the foundations upon which America was built.”
That passage now reads [emphases added]:
“Some have compared Dougherty’s parody to Jonathan Swift’s famous essay suggesting that the children of poor people in Ireland could be flayed and their soft skin used to make gloves and their flesh consumed to help defray expenses. The rhetoric of burning alive those who oppose same-sex marriage because they deem it an aberration that offends both human dignity and the laws of God underscores the anti-religious sentiment that threatens to undermine the foundations upon which America was built.”
Original: “Op-Ed Proposes Burning Kim Davis at the Stake”
The updated Breitbart News article bears no editor’s note drawing attention to the report’s many changes.
