Don’t get mad. Really.

Picking up from yesterday, the magic underwear jokes bother me, but I will survive. No amount of stupidity can diminish God, or my faith. It can make life less pleasant, but there are much worse things out there.

The first of the jokes that I was really aware of came from Adam Levine, lead singer of Maroon 5. The reason I was aware of it was I saw a headline, “Adam Levine flaunts anti-Mormon bigotry in tweet about Romney’s ‘magic underwear’”. I was curious about that, so I clicked on the link and found a site called Twitchy.

I kind of hate to link to it and give it any traffic, but recapping it would be pointless, so here you go:

http://twitchy.com/2012/08/31/adam-levine-flaunts-anti-mormon-bigotry-in-tweet-about-romneys-magic-underwear/

Levine’s initial tweet really isn’t that bad, and anything that is wrong with it I covered yesterday. The reactions, however, can you see what I am saying is worse? He got a lot of negative feedback, and responded with a comment about Mormons being bigots, which then got a lot of other negative feedback, and I think it died down after that, except that I keep seeing more and more jokes. Obviously it feels weird to have staunch conservatives defending Mormons. It doesn’t make me feel as warm and fuzzy as you might think.

At first I couldn’t figure out anything about the site, other than that its purpose seemed to be to find stuff to be offended about and then share it so that no one else had to miss out on being offended, though it does seem to also look for opportunities to mock liberals.

I was later able to determine that Michelle Malkin seems to be involved, so I guess that makes sense. The name is interesting. My first thought was that perhaps it was a combination of Twitter and a possible adjective for Michelle Malkin, which would seem like an odd thing for them to acknowledge. What it really reminded me of was like a twitchy eye or trigger finger, so maybe there is some stress, and some tendency to shoot off, and are we forgetting that these are bad things?

I thought today was going to be about what Christians do wrong, and it looks like that will actually be tomorrow, because I really need to write about how horrible this site is. This may be easier to illustrate with a recent post. Joan Rivers tweeted something about Adele giving birth that was basically a fat joke, and now people are piling on about how ugly and fake Joan Rivers is.

Okay, Adele does appear to be overweight, though you can totally see the double-standard in how big of a deal people make over it, and Joan’s plastic surgery is horrible, so let’s just get that out of the way. Let’s say that you truly feel that the fat joke is wrong, because it is so awful to make fun of someone else’s appearance and be mean. There’s nothing wrong with that. You have a point. You feel that point so much that you track it down and post it on your site so that other people will come and make ugly jokes, because making fun of someone’s appearance is mean. Also, being mean is wrong, but you are specifically looking for things you can mock Liberals about. What are we accomplishing exactly?

Actually, I think there may be something worse going on here than simple stupidity and hypocrasy, where the key conservative strategy is divisiveness and vilification and ways of distracting people from the inherent flaws in the platform, but for now I am going to make two other points, and then tomorrow I will explain why I am not mad at Adam Levine.

The first point is that if on at least some of these posts the issue is anger at religious oppression, because we have such good Christian values, you do realize that this sort of nastiness is not Christ-like, right?

Actually, I’m going to link to an old post from a few years back on not being offended, because it is a timely message, and I know back then it did touch some people, and I hope it can again:
http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2009/05/may-2009-on-not-being-offended.html

The other point, and it’s really just a tiny question, would you be as outraged by the magic underwear jokes if they were tweeted about Harry Reid?