Am I prescient or what?
Here is the reception that Miss California Carrie Prejean got at the gospel music Dove awards the other night. A standing ovation.
And here is a clip from a press release by the Liberty Counsel
Coming a long way appears to be an essential part of the zeitgeist anymore. But since it also appears to be more than a little confusing, let me explain just a tad about what that “way” might be. Here is the key to it. A large number of people appear to have decided that it is better to be naughty than depraved (better in the sense of being more fun for them for a longer time). In the real long run, of course, such stopping places down the steep cultural slope are not really possible. It is sort of like building your house part way down that slope of potential mud in Malibu, and eventually you find yourself having taken a degringoladish tumble. When that happens, you find yourself at the bottom of the cliff right alongside the nihilists and glue-sniffers who jumped off the cliff ten years ago. So this is not a good long term strategy, but in the meantime the evangelicals who pace themselves do enjoy the view longer. And also in the meantime, as Joel Kilpatrick puts it, evangelicals “are enjoying sex lives the editors of Glamour magazine can only dream about” (A Field Guide to Evangelicals and their Habitat, p. 126). In a weird kind of way, evangelicals are better at being bad than the heathen are.
A similar phenomenon can be seen with Fox News, that bastion of conservative values and insolently sexed reportage. I have not seen an awful lot of Bill O’Reilly (because I am not sanctified enough to handle it with any kind of internal serenity), but I have seen enough to know that (to make up a representative example) he likes to report on third grade teachers who have side jobs as pole dancers, viewer advisory warning, roll it. Presumably, this footage is shown so that good culture warriors everywhere can write indignant letters to the school board while breathing through their mouths. This is a key to unlock many doors. You can have the fun of looking down on depraved people, along with all the fun of being a little bit naughty yourself.