JESUS HATES YOU. The Crunchy Conservative blog is in its what-is-to-be-done phase. The Crunchies were previously examined here. At that time, I thought of them as latter-day friends o' Jesus in a VW micro-bus -- only with more money and expensive tastes: grooving to the infinite on an IKEA altar with granola eucharists served fresh from a Crate & Barrel monstrance. So after a few laughs I ignored them.

I peeked in again today. All these weeks of being mocked even by their conservative colleagues seem to have raised the Crunchies' choler, because now they have thrown off their cheery Godspell threads and are questioning this "freedom" thing with which the heathens amuse themselves. Bruce Frohnen:

I find particularly striking Chris's statement that "that the free market is, like democracy, only as good as the people who participate in it"... Frank Meyer, father of fusionism, himself noted, not just that virtue requires freedom, but also that freedom requires virtue.

Burke said "intemperate men cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." And no institution, no matter how well crafted, can alter that.

So, does that mean we the unchurched (and thereby unvirtuous) only think we're free? I guess when the God-boys teach us true freedom, we will be deluded still, and imagine that they are oppressing us. Later, Crunch Daddy Dreher himself quotes some nut who thinks that, in this godless age, homicidal Muslims sorta have a point. Dreher, ever the reasonable sort, tries to make this sound less mad:

I don’t think Spengler is saying that a culture must either apply the hammer to all heretics, or sign its death warrant. None of us wants to live in a culture that punishes those of minority faiths, or no faith at all. Is he saying, though, that it’s a law of nature that once a culture grants permission to apostasize without (serious) consequence, it has already started down a path to self-destruction?

"None of us wants to live in a culture that punishes those of minority faiths, or no faith at all" -- how can he be sure? After all, some of these guys want to follow St. Benedict into monasticism -- presumably with enough of a budget to keep the neo-monks in Priuses and organic toothpaste for as long as it takes Moloch to fall. Our very presence they find corrupting. Their only conflict seem to be over whether to abandon us to our sin, or to try and live among us as a corrective influence.

I guess these are the kind of Christians who smile at you on the street and then imagine you roasting in hellfire. And then smile for real.

UPDATE. Why don't they all just move to Disney's Celebration? Oh right -- the gay thing.