Why Do Secularists Hate Grandmothers?

I sometimes wonder what goes through the heads of some op-ed page editors of major newspapers. The LA Times has blown my mind a couple of times, running Charlotte Allen’s horrifically bad anti-atheist bigotry bonanza and then weirdly defending it. TheWashington Post thought Sarah Palin’s treatise on energy policy was something worth the time and neurons to read it and the trees killed to give it column inches. Paul Krugman points to another such astounding lack of judgment by the editors of the Financial Times.

Now, I know that the Washington Times’ op-ed page is no bastion of open-minded rationalism, but a piece it ran by Cal Thomas may just take the cake of uninformed, anti-intellectual, paranoid wingnuttery. Wait, it doesn’t just take the cake. It seizes the cake, mashes it between its fingers, smears it on the walls, and cackles uncontrollably while singing “Happy Birthday to Me!!!”

Thomas takes the health care debate, already rife with demagogues who are ginning up the credulous and xenophobic to lash out with froth and bile, and uses it as a jumping-off point to attack the “Secular Left” for being allegedly without morals and seeing no inherent value to human life. Does that sound like a lot of secularists or liberals that you know? You know, those secularists and liberals who want to help the poor, speak up for the working class, stop wars, protect the freedom of speech (and religion), end atrocities and genocide around the world, and educate children regardless of their economic status? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

But along we go for Thomas’s mad ride. There’s no sense in doing a point-by-point refutation of something that is itself devoid of sense. In fact, it’s not at all news that there are those who demonize secularists in the vitriolic way that Thomas does. What’s so disturbing is that the Washington Times (owned by a man who recently had himself crowned as the messiah in a ceremony attended by Members of Congress) thought this was a good thing to put front and center on their op-ed page as a worthy contribution to public debate.

Read the rest here.