Posted by Harcamone
Here are the links to Hitch’s and Taranto’s dueling essays. Hitch’s is thoroughly predictable, and gives no new or interesting slant on anything. He could have phoned his ideas in. He has said the same thing a thousand times, and so has everyone else on that “side” of the issue.
But Taranto is interesting. Far more interesting. Taranto has stretched his neck till he got his eyes in back of his subject. Hitchens can’t do that, smart as he is — especially on the subject of religion, where he turns tendentious, one-dimensional and very boring. It is the one area where I’m forced to see Hitchens as mediocre, and lacking in imagination.
Forget Hitchens in this matter, about which he has no more to say than a pot-head college student. He is not a serous contender for our attention — or ought not to be. Taranto has the ideas.
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Forget all this social crap. Conservatively religious Americans (who are not only Christians, as Taranto points out) cannot hold their line forever, whether it is against cultural acceptance of homosexuality or abortion, or whatever. Social progress is moving against them. Too many people have queers in their families. The right to abortion is like the right to vote, it can NEVER be taken away … not in the real world. We are NOT about to be plunged into the darkness of Theocracy, for too many people are online with NO restrictions on what they may read. You don’t even need a library card anymore.
And as Taranto asks in effect — who the hell is going to define, let alone impose, a Theocracy in this fractious spiritual chaos that is America?
And so what if not everybody — including queers — can get EVERYTHING they want? This is a bad thing?