Monday, January 31, 2005

Of SpongeBob and My Own Intolerance

Listening to: Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti

Before I get a-rantin', I'm fishing for answers here regarding JenL and her pregnancy. Last post she made was the 27th and she was about to burst. Does anyone have any news? My thoughts and prayers are with her for a soft landing, a speedy and seamless delivery (so to speak), and tremendous joy with the new arrival.

OK, the rant:

My posts have taken a turn towards spiritual concerns over at my political blog as it has occured to me that truly righteous Christians have tainted and painted with the broad brush of philistine pig-ignorance due to the nitwittedness of some truly repulsive sacks of garbage.

For every Ellie Mae and Jethro out there, there's a cousin or sibling who is "one of them" and, well, they were always like that, y'know, you could always tell they was gun' be "one of them". I suspect that the vast majority of Christians believe that there's a whole helluva lot more to the Good Book than what some paranoid kook like James Dobson has made it out to be.

After posting a comment on The Zero Boss about this very same issue, Jay agreed that the rhetoric that was used to oppose integration is the same as the rhetoric being used by these hate-based Christians:
"It ain't nach er ruhl"
"It will mean the end of Civil Lye Zay Shun"

As I mentioned to Jay, the arguments today are no less specious and unfounded as they were then.

So, my own intolerance is caricaturing these hate-based redneck zipperheads as ignoramuses. So be it.

However, if you go to Keith Olbermann's blog, you can see my assessment is not so far off the mark:
Firstly, you wouldn’t think a member of this group could misspell “Christian,” but sure enough, one of the missives had the word as “Christain” three times. I think just about every word you could imagine was butchered at some point (and we’re not talking typos here - we’re talking about repeated identical misspellings):

Spong, Spounge, Spnge - presumably meaning “Sponge.”

Dobsin, Dobsen, Debsin, Dubsen, Dobbins - presumably Dr. Dobson.

Sevility— I’m not sure about this one. This might be “civility,” or it might refer to the city in Spain.

The best of them was not a misspelling but a Freudian slip of biblical proportions. A correspondent, unhappy that I did not simply agree with her fire-and-brimstone forecast for me, wrote “I showed respect even though I disagreed with you and yet you have the audacity to call me intelligent.”

Well, you have me there, Ma’am. My mistake.

You'd think after the SpongeBob mis-step most of these Neanderthals would be backtracking like mad, "Damn, we really do look like a bunch of shitheads, don't we?" but they prefer to compound the appearance by writing inane and barely literate emails.

Just to hack me off. Well, if they can scapegoat gays, I can scapegoat they-of-the-outhouse-and-unibrow.

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Congrats to Jay on the mention in Saturday's NYT, even if the article really, really SUCKED.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have also thought about the irony of my intolerance for intolerant people. It makes me ill to think of the hate so many idiots spew in the name of Someone so full of love.

Anonymous said...

Dangit! That was me again. I think I'm going to have to break down and get a freaking blogger account.

Heather

Jenl said...

I've popped! And I'm back. Visit over at my place for more details.

Scary how close to the average citizen of my world you came with those Ignoramous descriptions. I liken myself to the more "enlightened" of believers that you describe, and I am trying desperately to instill that into my children since they are growing up with little versions of the disciples of hate. Frustrating to always have to take the high road and tolerate the intolerant, and I fail miserably at it more often than I like. But...I said I was enlightened, NOT perfect. ;-)

Oh yeah. Me and mine are fiercly loyal to those we love and we really dig us some animated sponge. So, there it is.