I can't say I read Andrew Sullivan with any regularity: he has no knowledge base or intellectual skills, and he mostly recycles stale right-wing tripe, dressed up in slightly better prose. But occasionally I do end up at his blog because of one link or another, and I am repeatedly struck by how morally repulsive the man is. So I ask myself, why? What is it about this noxious creature that makes him stand out?
Sullivan is obviously more literate than the run-of-the-mill right-wing garbage mouths in the U.S. like Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh; in that respect, his blog has the pretense to be cosmopolitan and high-brow. Yet, at the same time, he has a rich supply of all the typical pathologies of the American right: limited horizons of possibility, moral tunnel-vision, parochial prejudices, national chauvinism, historical ignorance, and so on.
But it's the presence of these latter traits that goes some distance towards explaining why he's such a morally repulsive creature: for there is one issue on which he exhibits the sensibilities of a citizen of the larger world, an empathetic human being, someone whose intellectual and moral horizons aren't defined by John Kerry and George Bush. And that issue is: the rights of homosexuals. On the one issue that affects him, as a gay man, most directly, he is not a noxious right-wing creep. Consider his recent, passionate postings objecting to Bush's endorsement of a constitutional amendment stigmatizing homosexuals as unfit for marriage: strong, powerful statements.
And there's the rub: what does it say about someone that the only time he can really come to the defense of human dignity, the only time he can appear to rise above parochialism and chauvinism, is when his interests are at stake? Well, I suppose we know what it says.
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