THE HARD PART. All due respect to the Reverend Schenck, but this is more than touching. This is the one of the most purely Christian acts of public Christianity since Himself blew town. For almost 30 years, we've had to put up with reactionary politics and retrograde social idiocy gussied up in Scripture. We've had to pretend that the near-sedition that the crackpot Richard John Neuhaus and the Pharisaical crowd down at Crisis Magazine were preaching was worthy of something more than ridicule and contempt. The whitened-sepulcher crowd has been riding high, and they've scared timid liberal Democrats onto the fainting couches far more often than has been good for the country. This sweeps all of that away: all the Just War Catholic he-men who have made a graven images of their own arguments and who worship primarily their own cleverness; all the smug, foundation-fattened preachers whose gyno-Christianity has reduced the basic message to what people can do to whom with their genitalia, all the fakes and frauds and mountebanks and Republicans. But I repeat myself. This is the real thing. This is the Gospels, acted out in public, by someone who's never going to be asked to smirk on Tim Russert's television show. The hard part about being a Christian is not that you have to live in a world where evolution is taught in the schools, or that John Kerry is allowed to take Communion, or the fact that you can buy your contraception at the grocery store. This is the hard part about being a Christian. This part, right here. Humility. Acceptance. Forgiveness. -- Charles P. Pierce
