Without fear of contradiction I can assert that the group most detested by all and sundry at this hour in America is the Westboro Baptists, who have the unmitigated gall to show up at military funerals and proclaim God's hate, hate!, for America, her soldiers and her symbols.
"Her" is said advisedly, because to the Westboro Baptists, America is a bitch, a whore, ancient Babylon re-incarnate, for her late friendship with homosexuality, among other things.
Closely following them in opprobrium is the US Supreme Court which has rather thumpingly ruled that these fanatics have a right to express their opinions as they do, which has been according to the law. As far as the Supremes would have it, the quarrel is local, the politics local, and the local laws the law until such time as the locals change it and the Westboro Baptists break it.
A writer for First Things, one David Bentley Hart, is quite beside himself over all this.
Here he calls the Westboro Baptists barbarians, fiends, resorters to absolute license, and abusers, with Mr. Hart fancying that the founders would have had them duly arrested. Actually, the founders would have criticized the Westboro Baptists for their timid response to the moral outrage of homosexuality, the practitioners of which the founders would have characterized as the barbarians, the fiends, the abusers and licentious in the extreme. The rest of us they wouldn't recognize as countrymen.
The truth is Mr. Hart actually would have preferred a fascism of the judicial sort, while crying out the generic variety, saving him all this trouble.
True to the readership of First Things, Mr. Hart has taken it a bit in the shorts not for any of that, but for suggesting, facetiously enough, that the Westboro Baptists and the military families might usefully settle this by a duel, which should tell you two things.
One, many readers of First Things apparently live where Rush Limbaugh lives, in not liberally educated Literalville, in a different neighborhood from Rush but still the same town, which comes as quite as much a shock to me as it does to Mr. Hart.
Two, Mr. Hart is sufficiently unnerved by this that he has found it necessary to write a follow-up (
here) in which he has proposed instead that we all quickly recover the manners of a bygone age and treat these Westboro Baptists to the cut instead of the duel, a refined social custom descended from the shunning teaching of, for example, Paul's First Corinthian Epistle, chapter the fifth.
Oh yeah, that'll hurt 'em.
Except that in First Corinthians, Paul advises shunning actually the sinners, like the homosexuals, whereas Mr. Hart advises shunning, well, the shunners, Paul, and the Westboro Baptists, for example.
If there is a God in heaven, the Westboro Baptists are surely His prophets, and Mr. Hart is one of their targets. I'd say they're scoring hits.
