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January 18, 2014

Rod Dreher: Pot for me but not for thee; it's gotta be the gay

Rod Dreher channels his inner David Brooks on legalization of marijuana, and gets even worse.

Old "crunchy con" (I guess a nutbar with extra rocks in it can be "crunchy") Dreher says, nope, no pot for you, you huddled masses, you 47 percenter slackers. Only the financial titans vulture carcass feeders of America are entitled to smoke dope:
Most of these driven, type-A personalities would benefit heavily from being able to relax and avoid burn-out. If they experiment with drugs that function as source of stress relief (and pot does that better than anything else!), they see their experiences as overwhelmingly positive. They project those positive experiences externally on the general population, to the extent that they are in urban population centers which have little contact with “ordinary” Americans (those who feel their lives offer little prospect for advancement or self-improvement).

So, like children out of wedlock, this becomes another example of how something that works well for elites can simultaneously become a disaster for the underclass. Middle/lower-class employees in America need the energy and drive to show up at miserable jobs and work long hours for meager wages. That’s something you get from caffeine or nicotine, not from THC. If they mellow themselves out, they become the proverbial pot-smoking ex-roommate on the couch who never holds the same job for more than a couple months, due to apathy and disinterest. So successful members of the working-class are disproportionately not pot-users, and perceive unsuccessful pot-smoking members of their circle of friends and family leeching off them. This is a totally different set of immediate social references than those urban elites ever get to experience.
Old Rodney tries to spin himself as a moderate libertarian, even to the point of deceiving Oprah. But really? He's a hardcore far rightist on social issues who has never met a conservative religious based issue where he didn't want maximum state regulation against your personal rights.

He's antigay and personally homophobic. He's a racism apologist. (Related to that, he's probably some sort of Lost Cause Confederate mythologist.)

But, more than apologizing for the likes of Paula Deen, per the first of my two links in the paragraph above, it's teh gay that really bunches Rod's knickers in a knot. So much that the former Catholic, who's sampled from all the different waters of conservative Christianity, also got his dander up over the idea that Pope Francis might want to turn down the Vatican's boiling pot of antigay down to a low simmer.

So, it's gotta be teh gay, eh Rod?

Pot for me but not for thee? Maybe we should only let straights have pot because, well, teh gay will go all jungly-jiggly on us if they toke, you know? Some big gay black buck might want to molest Rod, fulfilling both his worst nightmare and possibly his top secret dream.

You know, Rod? Most gay and lesbian people just want to be treated as, and called, people. The Castro-district types are a small minority and probably, were it not for gay rights issues, they'd find some other reason to get their freak on.

And, you know, Rod? If you didn't rabidly foam at the mouth over stuff like this, on teh gay, then go on to write classist and racist crap like this on marijuana, people would not take such sharp shots at you.

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