South Carolina Conservative Hypocrisy: Gay Escorts, Gun Rights, Miranda

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.--Matthew 23:23

The author of Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality, and co-founder of the Family Research Council, the Rev. Dr. George Rekers, has just returned from a ten day vacation to Europe with his gay escort. Rekers, University of South Carolina professor emeritus of neuropsychiatry, and anti-homosexual Baptist preacher, was photographed by a reporter for Miami's New Times as he pushed his luggage cart through Miami International Airport. He admitted that he met his young companion on Rentboy.com, a website that is exactly what it sounds like. Rekers insisted that he brought him along to carry his luggage, a double entendre that even "hiking the Appalachian trail" cannot top.

Meantime, South Carolina's Lindsey Graham is advocating selling guns to suspected terrorists as a necessary protection of the Second Amendment, while lamenting the reading of Miranda rights to suspected terrorist Faisal Shahzad. (Shahzad had not just explosives in his vehicle, but a 9mm handgun as well, according to CNN.)

Now let me say that I believe in the Second Amendment, and I am deeply suspicious of government attempts to abridge it. I also believe in the Fifth Amendment, which requires due process and the prevention of self-incrimination of suspects, and am deeply suspicious of government attempts to abridge it. The "Miranda rights" to silence and to an attorney are drawn from the Fifth Amendment, as the right to carry a gun is drawn from the Second.

In South Carolina, where slimeballs like Rekers regularly denounce gays and lesbians, while hiding their own sexual lives and where the political yammering class regularly denounces the President for the "constitutional infringement" of regulating insurance companies, hypocrisy is virtue, fascism is necessary to security and justice, mercy and faith are nowhere to be found.