Twilight of the idles

Poor, poor Republicans. So hard at work just trying to wrap up this legislative cycle, wall off this great nation, fight terror and germinate some more basic democratic freedom in Iraq – yes, everything's just coming up rose-colored heading into the electoral recess, when what happens?

It gets out that one of their rank and file is an alleged alcoholic pedophile who's been sending "overfriendly" e-mails to little Congressional pageboys several decades his junior, and they've known about it for some time and kept it quiet.

But why would there or should there be outrage? Like White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said Monday morning, "There have been other scandals, as you know, that have been more than simply naughty e-mails."

Yeah, you guys, at least the good, now-ex-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) didn't have a consenting adult under his desk or anything. Quit over-reacting. Those e-mails were just the alcohol talking – for years on end – and he's getting help for that now.

And your leaders have gone and set up a page-abuse hotline to boot, so anyone can report concerns (Or just try to cash out – "Is your child performing poorly in school? Acting out at home? Just not living up to his potential? Are YOU? Your Congressman and his uncontrollable prurient urges may be to blame. If you so much as suspect your elected representative may have been getting a bit too responsive, don't hesitate, call today!").

After all, Republicans are the morality party, remember? The party of Dr. Dobson, and innocent little bug-eyed blastocysts just gunning for a chance at life, and Jesus. Certainly not the party of crude and utterly unimaginative adolescent humor, as Maureen Dowd wrote Saturday:

W. and Karl Rove "shared an array of fart jokes," Mr. [Bob] Woodward writes. A White House aide put a toy that made a flatulence sound under Karl's chair for a morning meeting on July 7, 2005. When officials learned of the terrorist attacks in London that day, the prank was postponed. But several weeks later, "the device was placed under Rove's chair and activated during the senior staff meeting. Everyone laughed."

I can't wait until that one finds its way onto YouTube. Seriously, I don't know why I even bother writing any more about taking religious and kindred forms of moralizing out of the public sphere. I suppose I just keep thinking that, eventually, the people who propagate them are going to take a quasi-rational look at what they're frittering away they're energies on and just give it up already and move on to something productive.

Take the ideological heirs to the Ashcroft crusade down in Texas who are still trying to get exhibitionist statuary to show some modesty and quit scandalizing the children.

Or the true believers who have their tubers in a twist over NBC's chopping up of "Veggie Tales" in hopes of making it palatable to a secular Saturday morning audience.

Or, my personal favorite to emerge from the week's news, the appeasers abroad who cancel contemporary stagings of a Mozart opera for fear of incurring "incalculable risk" by offending the devoutly and apparently utterly single-mindedly religious of one particular faith, never minding that others' are being dramaturgically skewered right alongside theirs:

The disputed scene is not part of Mozart's opera, but was added by the director, Hans Neuenfels. In it, the king of Crete, Idomeneo, carries the heads of Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon on to the stage, placing each on a stool.

"Idomeneo," first performed in 1781, tells a mythical story of Poseidon, or Neptune, the god of the sea, who toys with men's lives and demands spiteful sacrifice.

(Students of the fine art of book larnin' may recognize that last line as irony.)

As Thomas L. Friedman wrote last week, with his recent remarks on Islam that proved so inflammatory they're now apparently spawning pre-emptive artistic censorship, "The pope was actually treating Islam with dignity. He was treating the faith and its community as adults who could be challenged and engaged. That is a sign of respect."

And without that respect, or at least that basic willingness to entertain or even ignore ideas you personally do not espouse, what sort of culture can we as a collective be said to have?

Examples are all around of what happens when people get too comfortably ensconced in self-rectitude – not only do they become reactionary and intolerant, they atrophy their internal capacity for imagination and open-mindedness in relating to the world at large.

For while putting ideologues and fundies in charge of things can look like a good, ethical idea on paper, in practice, we have to pause and ask ourselves – do we really want to live in a world so ordered, dulled and saccharine that even our leaders' sordid sex scandals are about as steamy and stimulating as the average canned stump speech?

Yes, if ever there were an argument more succinct and persuasive for keeping the mindless moralizing out of the discourse, Foley delivered it when he instant-messaged a young page, "I would drive a few miles for a hot stud like you."

And to think, romance was supposed to be dead.