D’Souza: ‘Traditional Values’ for You, Freedom to Follow my Heart for Me Post by PETER MONTGOMERY

As Sarah Posner has noted, anti-Obama propagandist and Christian college president Dinesh D’Souza has found himself in an uncomfortable position vis-à-vis the right-wing movement that has funded and shepherded his career as a conservative “scholar.” It seems he’s been traveling to religious right events and sharing a hotel room with a woman he has been introducing as his fiancée. But it also seems that he is still married, and didn’t even file for divorce until he was questioned about the situation by evangelicals, according to WORLD magazine.

D’Souza told the WORLD reporter that his marriage was over and that he “is sure Denise is the one for me.” D’Souza’s breezy assertion that he had “done nothing wrong” in sharing his hotel room with a “fiancée” while still married would be more surprising if we hadn’t all gotten used to lectures on the sanctity of marriage from the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.

I can’t stomach too much delving into D’Souza’s writing, but here, courtesy of Amazon’s “search inside” function, are a few excerpts on marriage and morality from his book, What’s So Great About Christianity:

“…abortion, adultery, and homosexual marriage, can be largely understood as a clash between traditional morality and secular morality.” (page 252)
“As fallible human beings we can be wrong about a lot of things but we cannot be wrong in how we feel about someone else. At the same time, Christianity emphasized that free choice should also be binding choice. As we have consented to marry without coercion, we should live up to our vows and preserve marriage as a lifelong commitment.” (page 60)
“Christianity did not contest patriarchy, but it elevated the status of women within it. The Christian prohibition on adultery—a sin viewed as equally serious for men and women—placed a moral leash on the universal double standard that commanded women to behave themselves while men did as they pleased.” (page 69)
“High rates of divorce in the West can be accounted for by the moral force generated by the secular ethic. Today the woman who leaves her husband says, ‘I felt called to leave. My life would have been a waste if I stayed. My marriage had become a kind of prison. I just had to follow my heart and go with Ted.’ So divorce has become, as it never was before, a form of personal liberation, what Barbara Dafoe Whitehead terms ‘expressive divorce.’ Here we have the first hint of a serious problem with secular morality. In its central domain, that of love, it is notoriously fickle.” (page 256-7)
It turns out D’Souza has lots in common with his hotel roomie Denise Joseph. Wonkette culled from Joseph’s Facebook writings a few Ann Coulter-ish denunciations of feminists and liberals and their rejection of “traditional morality” and “traditional institutions such as marriage.”

Even though the WORLD story on D’Souza’s complicated relationships is titled, “King’s Crisis,” it is not clear how damaging these revelations will be. D’Souza’s attacks on Obama have reached wide audiences and made lots of money, both of which are highly valued on the far right. If he is considered useful, he will find redemption and acceptance. Just ask Ralph Reed.

[quote=squat250]just so fucking human.

it’s beautiful.

i don’t mean it ina schadenfreude kinda way.

it’s just life on this planet with a heart and a penis.[/quote]

Scaredy: Dude, you’re discriminating against those with a heart AND a vagina!

You gotta love the religious right, though. Fulminating against the very sin they’re engaged in. Whoops.

What’s that old joke? It took the Catholic Church to make sex fun again…

What God wants is just a weak comeback to anything.
It’s unfortunate that religious arguments get half of the stage in these debates on human behavior.

Who would create an animal that has to eat to survive and also create an animal that can eat that animal? How concerned would that entity be with who marries whom and abortion?

it’s just weird because his whole career rests on being holier than thou. so you’d think a guy in that position could hold it together, if ony for the money and because it’s his job. at least divorce and get involved later. i’d be worried about the money!

i preach nothing, expect failure and chaos, and have been reasonably happily on balance (that is, the happiness outweighs the misery about 51-49…) married for almost 20 years. there’s not even any money in it for me, like dinesh!

i ean, im not saying you shouldn’t leave your spouse (although it’s generally a bad idea, just from a practical happiness standoint)…im just saying if you write a book about how God demands you stay with your wife, and you shack up with a babe while youre president of a christian college, you shoudl be able to take a little ribbing!

Dinesh is taking his work literally. He is out to prove that he could be anything (immoral, gay whatever) but never an anti-colonial.