Stealing a headline from Terry Teachout (in which he quotes passages from elsewhere that he laments that he did not write himself — example here), I find a pretty well-crafted expression of disdain for the American Religious Right written by Yar of Yar’s Revenge. Generally, I am unable to write such things about this segment of American society: either I look on them mainly with bemusement, in which case I’m more likely to toss off a simple one-liner, or if they manage to arouse me to great anger, I simply sputter and spout and fume and generally test the boundaries of incoherence. Anyway, here’s Yar, and excuse the profanity — like I said, I didn’t write it:
“The religious right is fucking stoked about this [the Marriage Amendment], needless to say, because outlawing non-procreative sex in all its various and sundry forms and permutations guarantees them a ticket to Heaven, where the ghosts of aborted fetuses will bring them Mai Tais and crabcakes while they sit on cotton-candy cloud cushions and look down into the gaping maw of Hell, where the sight of abortionists, libertines, and sodomites being tortured by Satan will entertain them until the Day of Judgment, when God collapses into a singularity and shakes clean the cosmic Etch-a-Sketch upon which our lives are awkwardly, angularly drawn.”
Somehow, this scans even better if I imagine it being spoken by Richard Schiff as Toby Ziegler on The West Wing. There’s a guy who, when his script sends his character into a rant, always manages to find the exact right word to harshly emphasize for effect.
