Kathleen Parker and the Oogedy-Boogedy Monster in Her Closet.

Kathleen Parker thinks the conservative evangelical Christian influence in the Republican party is to blame for the failings of the GOP and conservatism. Well, she doesn’t actually call them that. In her Post column, she chooses to describe the “gorilla in the pulpit”, Christians, as “right-wing oogedy-boogedy” types, a phrase deemed too childish and reductive by Air America Radio.

It’s unfortunate that she wrote such a juvenile column (all content aside), because Parker’s column deserves a look for a few reasons, and not simply so people can see a prime example of pandering and self-loathing. Let's turn it around, shall we...

...How do I know this? How can I be so sure that she’s desperately trying to fit in to the Beltway culture of lukewarm Episcopalianism? Because I know Washington elites. I’ve worked with some in D.C., I’ve been raised amongst grandparents of the same cloth as William F Buckley, these are the waters I swim in, man. I know these people. I mean, if the name “Snowden” doesn’t say “see you at the fox hunt on Saturday?” nothing does.

I know that so few D.C.-Republicans are asking “Why are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, et al. so popular yet the GOP lost?”, but let me clue them in to the answer: it’s because many of us in the rest of America are convinced that those hosts are sympathetic to “Joe the Plumber” types and not merely using us as a political flock which is directed and instructed by a few elegant shepherds.

There’s not a sneaking suspicion that Rush Limbaugh is tired of hearing playful barbs about the “snake-handlin’ rubes” in conservatism by fellow journalists while having drinks at the Mayflower Hotel. No one worries that Dennis Prager is okay with “religious” people but gets creeped out by the passionate ones who believe that the Bible says more than just “make sure you have a white wedding and everyone is well-dressed at your child’s christening.”…

Even after writing those last three ill-conceived paragraphs, even after making massive generalizations about a nuanced people group, even after all the poorly-hidden scorn, even then I wrote with more equanimity for Beltway residents than Parker wrote for evangelicals. But that’s doesn’t matter as much as the fact that I knew I was being unfair. There is nothing in Parker’s writing to signal that she’s even aware of her insularity. At least when reading Christopher Hitchens one is left with the feeling that the man is at least familiar with the positions he chooses to eviscerate.

Pundits often have to answer the charge of “being out-of-touch” from disgruntled readers. My complaint, however, isn’t based on a personal grievance, that an author is unfamiliar with my specific life details. I’m no apologist for Dr. Dobson. In the past few years I’ve taken several large steps away from the evangelical Religious Right, the culture of my childhood and teens (let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t vote Mike Huckabee for Dogcatcher). I don’t listen to “Christian” music. I don’t care much for the “culture” of safe movies and chastity rings beloved by many church parents. But I don’t consider conservative evangelicals, as Parker puts it, “the lowest brows” of the party. There might be some evangelicals who lack intellectual curiosity, but I can think of several GOP constituencies that have fewer crayons in their boxes (“The South Was Right” crowd comes to mind). The evangelical community is vast to the point of defying most descriptions. Good grief, Obama is an evangelical.

Parker knows this. Her complaint isn’t with the Obama-style evangelicals, yet she never quantifies the types of Christians she dislikes beyond playground rhetoric. “Low brows” is one jab in the litany of thinly insinuated complaints Parker has with the ill-defined “oogedy-boogedy” party. She writes sentence after sentence of what the GOP is not, attackin evangelicals by proxy. According to Parker, the GOP suffers because it is white, married, and Christian, while the country is becoming less of each.

Is there a memo I missed? Did Dr. Dobson mail out a missive saying “round up the single Jews and the Blacks!!”? Look, I have big, repeat BIG, problems with Focus on the Family, but only a stultifying idiot like Bill Maher would claim that the man is anti-minority or anti-single. One of the most amusing moments of this past campaign was the media’s initial attempt to smear Palin with revelations of her first pregnancy coming before marriage, both for herself and her daughter's, and the press's following confusion that the Palins’ reputation wasn’t injured but instead burnished by the story. It was as if they said: “Why aren’t evangelicals disappointed? Don’t they hate single mothers and sex outside of marriage?” Sorry to disappoint, MSNBC.

Evangelicals, by and large, are some of the most tolerant people around. They want to practice their personal faith as they interpret it. It's the secular types and "moderate" Christians who want to rein in the evangelicals. I'm convinced that 90% of the people who are uncomfortable with evangelicals have rarely or never met one. All they ever hear is their peers deploring the Christian Right which makes the Christians even more deplorable, &c. This recursive crap-flinging soon creates a boogie monster (an oogedy-boogedy monster, perhaps?) that has no basis in experience.

As a personal example, let's talk about the dreaded gay issue. I’m again outside the evangelical camp on the idea of marriage, libertarian-ish as I am, but I don’t know a single evangelical (dreaded anti-gays that they are) who thinks homosexuality should be banned. They vote against gay marriage because they view marriage as a fundamentally religious institution, and if the state makes it acceptable for gay marriage the state is imposing a secular worldview upon their faiths. Yet most evangelicals I meet are for civil unions (And, if you’ll notice, Ms. Parker, part of the fab-riots happening in California is gays outraged at evangelical Black votes for Prop 8.).

I’ll close this out by quoting from the column:

“Meanwhile, it isn't necessary to evict the Creator from the public square, surrender Judeo-Christian values or diminish the value of faith in America. Belief in something greater than oneself has much to recommend it, including most of the world's architectural treasures, our universities and even our founding documents.”

I think that statement, besides being nauseatingly patronizing, show just how much religion Parker can stand: a cross on top of a pretty building, a nice quote from the Bible atop a college library (in Latin, please!), and historical context for those famous dead people, the Founding Fathers. I mean, they were Christians, but what did they ever do?