La Shawn Barber Blues

Yesterday I was banned from La Shawn Barber’s blog for making untoward comments. I had just got done telling her to “go right ahead and shut down the comments” advising that she join the ranks of other conservative bloggers who have no forum for discourse on their site. She responded to one of my profanity-free posts (that she had just deleted) with some claptrap about how “if she reads just one more blah blah blah, then I’m going to shut these comments down for good." “It’d be a good thing, too,” I responded in another comment (also deleted) right before she banished me forever, “because most of you ultra right-wingers get migranes at the sight of your own contradictions.” Sort of like programming R2D2 to divide by zero. After a while, a little plume of smoke appears over their heads and “they’re just gone, man.” I didn’t even say anything offensive. All I said was John Cole’s take on Dick Durbin was probably the right one; the response should not be to "cheer for more"/"laugh at" torture. I asked how torture squared with her Christian beliefs; she made some irrelevant noise about rape rooms and beheadings. Yes, I'm sure that on judgment day Jesus will ask you about those toenails you pulled out saying, “but what did he do to you first?”

Oh well, so much the better. I was spending way too much time over there anyway. Silly me for seeking out an alternate point of view. I normally don’t assume that people who disagree with me are completely insane, so I figured that I’d try to see what made La Shawn, an uber-Christian former liberal, tick. And when I say uber, I mean über. She actually believes in the divine right of kings (quick look at watch, yes 21st century, yes King Louis XIV is dead). Paul the Apostle was a great guy and everything, but I can’t resist pointing out that if his pronouncements in his letter to the Romans about “anything the king does is good” are to be taken on face value, it sort of undercuts the idea of dethroning Saddam. Which, of course, they were for. Because the Bible told them so? Or maybe it was Fox News. I’m sure they’d break me off a little Bible Code where something like Saddam, palace, righteous, explosion, I <3 Gitmo, was hidden deep in chapter 12 of Ezekiel. I won’t even point out that here in the good ol’ USA we have a government of the people, the power of which is manifested in their duly chosen representatives. So if anyone’s got a divine right here, it’s me. Or maybe I will point it out.

It really is amazing if you think about it. Here is a blog that is comparatively ranked with the mighty Eschaton in the “blog ecosystem,” and we’ve got the author of said blog trolling around her own message boards busily refuting and deleting. Does Atrios do this? I don’t think so. Of course what initially attracted me to her blog was the idea that I would be able to engage the author in an active discussion over the merits of her arguments, which were, on the whole, utterly ridiculous and in need of some serious taking down. She probably sensed that, though. Still, why not just be confident in the merit of your arguments and just discuss? How does shutting off my voice make the quality of discourse any stronger? On the rare occasions when they’re not spouting jingoistic hogwash, I actually quite enjoy the contributions of those on my right. We liberals can be just as knee-jerk as they can so it’s good to hear something out of the box. Usually you hear someone who’s out of their mind, of course, but all in all it’s a good trade-off: suffer the ravings of whack-jobs for the nugget of unconsidered wisdom that will come along every once in a while.

But I guess La Shawn and the rest of the Christublicans and Moral Socialists don’t want that type of exchange on their websites. It shouldn’t surprise me, because it really does fit with their overall world view. These are the same people who want to ban science, the purest form of agenda-free inquiry, from being taught in Kansas. Keep in mind that I’m not talking about conservatism, which is, like liberalism, merely an approach from which to begin a consideration. You’ve got to begin somewhere, and for me it just happens to be the liberal starting point that has served me best. After all, I do believe in what government can do, and since it’s apparently here to stay, we may as well get stuff like healthcare and public transit in addition to the garden variety corruption. No, this is about The Faithful, not to Christ but to a very narrow, Dick Cheney approved worldview in which there is no contradiction. It must be nice to have a deflector field that protects against all cognitive dissonance, to have a filter that blocks all shades of gray, to believe so strongly in a thought process that would hardly challenge a ten year old.

I respect La Shawn, not only for her wildly successful website, but because I think she is a reasonably intelligent person. Not that she cares about what I think, though. She did ban me from her site, you remember. Maybe she’ll let me back on if I start towing the line a little bit. Here goes: “Yay torture! I hate gay people! Jesus told me to bomb that mosque!”

Update (6-22-05): Still banned.

Update 2 (6-22-05): Back on line. Vow to behave self.