Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
Who do you think would win in a fight between Roy Moore and the truth?
Brent,
Tuscaloosa
That’s a hard one. Though Roy Moore is now 70 years old, he used to train under a renowned kickboxing instructor in Texas, and if accounts hold true, he’s proven to be a formidable grappler, especially if you’re a teenage girl trying to wrestle your way out of his car.
The truth is quite a bit older than Moore, and has lately seemed the worse for wear. In days of yore, my money would be on the truth. It has a storied history. It has always been a bruiser, able to slap all comers in its dojo into submission holds. It used to have distinguished adherents like Thomas Jefferson (“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom”) and Keats (“Beauty is truth, truth, beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”).
But these days, the smart money is on Moore. It’s getting harder for truth to find purchase, since we seem unable to even agree upon what it is any longer. Facts are stubborn things, as John Adams said. So increasingly, the nation seems to be saying “to hell with them” when they don’t conform to our political worldview—politics now trumping morality or honesty more often than not. Facts have gone from being a loosely objective reality that reasonable people can generally settle on (even to further manipulate them for cynical or polemical ends), into a choose-your-own-adventure fantasy stroke book for the onanistically inclined.
On the left, that has looked an awful lot like Bill and Hillary Clinton, celebrated feminist heroes, even if one of those heroes (Bill), by most credible accounts, spent the ’70s thru the ‘90s propositioning, groping, and even allegedly raping his way through America’s women folk, plenty of whom were his political supporters.
More recently, and on the right, that looks like our sainted president and Roy Moore, the former of whom is now all but endorsing the latter (birds of a feather), both of whom have legions of female accusers who remain un-discredited. Though Moore seems to have out-Clintoned even Clinton in the sleaziness department, allegedly laying hands, as we Southern Baptists used to say in a different context, on a victim as young as 14 years old. Which, if you don’t buy that as pedophilia, try touching a 14-year-old in your neck of the woods—without the benefit of the president of the United States going to bat for you—and see how that goes on your end. Prediction: The only seat you’ll be taking isn’t in the United States Senate, but in the prison infirmary after your ass is turned out in the prison shower by a guy named Blade, since, if my viewings of Oz are to be believed, kid-touchers don’t fare so well in the joint.
All of this is disturbing enough on its face. But while we’re finding jump seats in hell, alongside the facts, my vote goes for assigning one to evangelical folk hero and Focus on the Family founder, Dr. James Dobson, who recently cut a radio ad supporting Moore, saying:
One, of course, expects creepy politicians to do what politicians do best: to deny and dissemble and generally lie themselves blind in order to protect the only thing most of them truly value, which is political survival. Getting mad over a sleazy politician acting like a sleazy politician is like getting mad at an anteater for eating ants. It’s not merely their tendency, but their biological imperative. But when purported men of God do the same—as everyone from Franklin Graham to a slate of Alabama pastors have done on Moore’s behalf, all evidence notwithstanding—one doesn’t have to physically hear the voice of God to imagine Him saying, “Hey guys, sully yourselves all you want, but do me a solid and leave my good name out of it.”
I come after Dobson with a pick-axe not because I’m some “establishment” Christian-basher, but rather, a Christian. I grew up in an evangelical household, and still go to an evangelical church. My mom used to play Dobson’s radio show every single morning in the car on the way to school. That and Christian rock were (sadly) the soundtrack of my childhood. And my father, who chose to abdicate his birds’n’bees-talk responsibilities, instead flung a book at me that instructed me on how it all went down. The book was “Preparing for Adolescence” by Dr. James Dobson, in which I pored over the sex chapter (titled “Something Crazy is Happening to My Body”) like a Playboy without pictures.
All of which is to say that Dobson and me have some history, even if I started looking suspiciously at his increasing involvement in electoral politics. Who can forget in 2008, when he said of John McCain that he could not vote for him “as a matter of conscience”? This was back when Dobson presumably still had one. An affliction he suffers from no longer.
Nor do many of the people in his party. For rare is the day these days when you don’t hear someone on the right—many of them the loudest moralistic cluckers of the ‘90s (think William Bennett and Sean Hannity)—pop their ligaments from twisting themselves into logic pretzels in order to rationalize behavior they once found inexcusable.
The rationalizations, in the case of Moore, often go like this: Why should we throw our own overboard, when the left doesn’t do the same to theirs? Isn’t this just a diabolical plot of the establishment? What moral choice do the people of Alabama have between voting for Roy Moore or—brace yourself!—a liberal? Isn’t it more important for us to preserve a Republican majority, and sort things out later?
In light of Moore’s alleged crimes, all of these concerns are easily dismissed by anyone with a room-temperature IQ and even the most remedial sense of right and wrong. Aside from pedophilia heretofore never being considered a difficult judgment call, why is it even so important to preserve another Republican Senate seat, when all Republicans have done under Trump is fail to repeal Obamacare while inching closer to passing a tax hike (under the false pretenses of tax reform), the populists proving themselves just as feckless as the establishment they’re purportedly usurping?
Mitch McConnell and the Washington Post didn’t sexually assault a teenage girl in a car. Roy Moore allegedly did. Meanwhile, the diabolical left for its part has done just fine as of late—with a few exceptions (see John Conyers and Al Franken)—drilling its own offenders out of polite society, acting with such ruthless swiftness that there hasn’t even been time for trials in the court of public opinion. And now, add Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor to the very long list of left-leaning entertainment and media figures who’ve lost their jobs without anything like due process in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal that kicked everything off. Weinstein, of course, seems doomed to spend the rest of his life as a pariah, if not an inmate. Rightly so, considering the preponderance of evidence against him. And yet Weinstein is drawing a harsher sentence than Moore. The latter is poised to represent an entire state in the U.S. Senate, whereas the former only represented degenerate movie producers, as the only thing he ever ran for was scared starlets fleeing his open robe.
I don’t wish to sound like a preening moralist, as I’m too homely to preen, and too immoral to moralize. Still, it stands to reason that if you want to be considered honorable, you have to act with honor. If you think your side is better than the other, than it is even more incumbent upon you to police your own, in order to ensure it. If you celebrate yourself for becoming like your enemy, then the distinctions which made them your enemy no longer exist: Congratulations, you have become your own worst enemy. Instead of being afflicted from the outside, you’re now rotting from within.
Though again, I don’t mean to sound too judgmental. After my James Dobsonesque childhood, I can beat bibles with the best of them, as well as with the rest of them. And so I know that the Good Book says, “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Likewise, I realize that The Son of Man Himself kept company with sinners. He was on a first-name basis with whores and tax-collectors. Which makes me think if J.C. came back today, he might make an excellent senator. He’d find a lot of similar company in the modern GOP.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
