Mary sent me this editorial from the new york times. UGH! Here's the first paragraph:

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.

So, the first part of his argument is that Obama's race (what is it, really?) and Hillary Clinton's sex (can I say the same thing?) is exactly the same as Mike Huckabee's choice of invisible friend. Yeah, that makes sense. That's like saying that mocking goth kids is the exact same as making fun of children with down syndrome (note: I'm not condoning the active mocking of this girl more like mocking this girl).

He then quickly switches to the standard argument of "look, everyone, we aren't burning people at the stake anymore. Evangelicals do some good." Here's a good quote:

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

He starts off, of course, with making a statement as though it is a fact: "Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant..." Really? Why is this such a self-obvious fact? Explain to me why scorning people because they have a leftover from the invisible friends of childhood is "intrinsically repugnant."

I love the line "...how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade." Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize they had much such strides in their humanitarianism OVER THE LAST DECADE!

He goes on to explain how evangelicals have FINALLY started putting fighting poverty over abortion as their issue of choice. WOW! Thanks, christies! As he says, they used to be mean (Falwell describing AIDS as "God's judgement against promiscuity"), but now, oh man, they are so nice and interested in helping people now!

He then goes on to talk about Rick Warren and how fantastic it is that he and his megachurch are finally getting around to helping people. I wonder what percentage of their profits are used in pure humanitarian aid and what percentage are used to further their own aims of poisoning the minds of our youth.

Well, the rest of the column is just the same old attempts to give examples of how the christies are doing good and we should be thankful for it. We've heard these arguments before, and they follow the same pattern: give examples of how there are some nice christee organizations, not bothering to mention all the of the negative that is done, all the while ignoring the secular organization doing exactly the same task without the negative overhead of an invisible friend telling you that you have the truth over the person you are trying to help.