BOO FUCKING HOO.

The latest martyr to the cause of No Homos is Ryan T. Anderson. Unlike Brendan Eich and the Duck Dynasty guys, though, Anderson has no inherent celebrity or entertainment value: I guess they've gotten to the point where they no longer even need avatars people might know, and are just breeding victims in their own propaganda labs.

Previously known mainly to people who cover anti-gay gasbags for a living ("Says Glee corrupts youth: 'We should be as concerned about what the FOX TV show Glee has done to corrupt a young generation as we are about anything the Court has done'"), Anderson recently received flattering coverage in the Washington Post (strange are the ways of the liberal media! I thought they were all in the tank for Gay ObamaHitler) as "a fresh voice on same-sex marriage," "fresh-faced" and "millennial," who tours the country lecturing on "anthropological truths that men and women are distinct and complementary," illustrating his points with polygamy scare-stories from The New York Post.

This was especially hilarious to me because I last paid attention to Anderson in 2007 when, as an assistant editor at First Things, he was already on the moral-panic beat, complaining that Princeton freshmen had to watch a sexual assault prevention program that had gross stuff in it like "sexual skits, innuendo, 'coming-out' scenes, gay kisses, and other nonsense that some students don’t want to be forced to sit through." If only they'd make sexual assault prevention programs that even rightwing plants can enjoy!

Along with the sex angle, Anderson was (even then!) working the victim-status angle. From my post:

Anderson spends the rest of the article complaining that liberals make jokes about him and his buddies. Normal people learn to shrug this kind of thing off, but for wingers snide comments are hate-speech or bad-touch or something. "Professor [Lee] Silver’s attack wasn’t really aimed at Professor [Robert George]; it was aimed at the students," Anderson claims, because a laff on a prominent conservative buffoon sends students "a message about which points of view are acceptable and which are unacceptable. 

Well, little Ryan has grown up, and advanced from vicarious sufferer over the martyrs of his movement to abused saint himself.  After the Post story came out, his old high school first publicly acknowledged this accomplishment, then ham-handedly rebuffed him. To you and me, this would be tsk-worthy, but to Anderson's brethren it is the iron boot of repression.

"The shunning of Ryan T. Anderson: When support for gay marriage gets ugly," thunders Damon Linker at The Week. Rod Dreher needs two posts to wring his hands over it: "Intellectually bankrupt, morally corrupt," sputters Dreher. "Illiberal elitist liberalism at its ugliest. These people have the power, and will have the power." (He's talking about high school administrators, remember.) At The Federalist, credentialed wingnut Joseph Bottum plays the old trick of telling us he's cool with gay marriage, more or less, but since the Facebook posts of Anderson's high school he's outraged by Chappaquiddick: "Our lives and our discourse are narrowed to only a trickle of intellectual light if we encounter someone like the intelligent and serious Ryan T. Anderson—and simply close our eyes in holy dread." Etc.

I'm not sure what the long term strategy is here: Maybe they just want to get this idea spread around enough that young conservatives for whom there is no room on the wingnut-welfare gravy train can go out on the street with a tin cup and a cardboard sign that says PLEASE HELP, I AM A NO HOMOS MARTYR and wait for donations. Or maybe they think people will go back to persecuting homosexuals because they feel sorry for conservatives.

COLD SHOWERS FOR EVERYBODY! It's Friday -- and at National Review Online, you know what that means: time for sex hatred! The surprising dud in the bunch is Jonah Goldberg, who emits one of those No Guardrails thumbsuckers about how Madonna and Pamela Anderson (!) are turning girls into prostitutes with the help of the Democratic Party. He even writes "What matters is the signal such people send." As usual with Goldberg, this is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.

The hapless K.-Lo. fares little better, submitting what seems to be a synopsis of a botched interview -- maybe the Margarita Hut had a generous buy-back policy -- with the authoress of a book called Girl Gone Mild: Fashionably Long, Overexplanatory Subtitle. From the precis, we may judge that insofar as the book has a point (besides serving as a rightwing front-group party favor), it is that some young women will not wear thongs, dammit, despite what Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi may think. "Today, more and more sensible young women are bridling when they hear 'bitches' and 'hos' on the radio," she writes. Very good! How do they react when they hear "bear my baby whether you want to or not, subhuman?"

As often happens in these dimwit competitions, the prize goes to a newbie: legacy pledge Ryan T. Anderson, "an assistant editor at First Things," who says that a skit the Princeton frosh are required to attend "amounts to little more than mandated indoctrination in liberal sexual ideology." Anderson fails to describe the "Sex on a Saturday Night" sketch, so I had to go read another rightwing kid's review, and even through that cloudy prism could see that the skit is a typical bit of agitprop telling the youngsters that date rape is bad. Does Anderson have a different POV? No, he says:

You can tell incoming freshmen that date-rape and other sexual assaults are illegal without subjecting them to an hour of sexual skits, innuendo, “coming-out” scenes, gay kisses, and other nonsense that some students don’t want to be forced to sit through.

I hear ya, kid. Similarly, Crest toothpaste didn't have to sell its product by putting commercials on "Will & Grace." They could have just told people how darned good for them Crest was. Turns out people prefer their selling messages to come with racy humor. Who knew?

Anderson spends the rest of the article complaining that liberals make jokes about him and his buddies. Normal people learn to shrug this kind of thing off, but for wingers snide comments are hate-speech or bad-touch or something. "Professor [Lee] Silver’s attack wasn’t really aimed at Professor [Robert George]; it was aimed at the students," Anderson claims, because a laff on a prominent conservative buffoon sends students "a message about which points of view are acceptable and which are unacceptable."

One always hears this from young conservatives who were subjected to just such allegedly soul-crushing mockery (Anderson is a Princeton grad), yet somehow managed to retain their contrary opinions into adulthood. How did Anderson do it? Maybe he passed long nights POW-style in his dormitory cell, scratching "God and Man at Yale" on the wall with a piece of purloined charcoal. In any case, is it true the overwhelming majority of students helplessly adopt every piece of nonsense their professors put in their heads? Because if so, I'm going back to college, and looking for a teaching job at an all-girls' school.