JESUS WANTS ME FOR A DUMB SCHEME. I hope you've all been enjoying the latest conservative counterintuition: That Fox News is in the tank for gay marriage. Rod Dreher is right in there, telling us one of his famous stories about how ten years ago a "Fox staffer" told him he "had been told not to touch anything to do with homosexuality" -- in the specific context, that is, of Rod's big scoop on "the role homosexual networks within the seminaries and the Catholic clergy have played in the [child abuse] cover-ups." (This was before Dreher decided that it was not the gay nets per se but the "cultural Left" that caused the altar-boy daisy-chains. Or is that the same thing?) "This was policy handed down from the very top of the network," the apparatchik allegedly told him. Straight from the Gay Fox Kremlin!

Ah, how this takes me back -- specifically, to 2007, when Brother Rod was ecstatic that Foxy "Uncle Rupert" Murdoch had bought Beliefnet:

This is good for Beliefnet, trust me. Murdoch is an Internet visionary, and his deep pockets will only allow this website to diversity and improve its content. I have absolutely no fear at all that Team Rupert will in any way dictate content. Murdoch's core ideology is capitalism -- for better and for worse.

Happy capitalist Uncle Rupert is Jesus' best friend until it's time for the story to change. Outrage, for these people, is a little tin clicker they keep in a box until opportunity demands they take it out, stand on a soapbox, hold it righteously aloft and feverishly fiddle. That the scam sometimes involves a pretense of interest in the truth probably amuses someone Dreher's working for, though I don't think Dreher himself understands what's funny about it.