(dis-)Honesty, Intemperance, Religiosity & Ben Domenech

If it is not too boastful, I think that the "great minds" proverb is at work, for I have been reading the same Glenn Greenwald post as Walldon, this morning. Only my attention was more drawn to his follow-up comments on last week's Ben Domenech/plagiarism/Washington Post dust-up itself, and the particular LA Times article he cited.

In that article, we read:

While the initial concerns about Domenech were raised by liberal bloggers and online commentators alarmed by the extremity of his politics and the recklessness with which he expressed them, his critics didn't stop there. Because his career-- if a 24-year-old can be said to have such a thing-- has essentially been conducted online, there was a digital trail to follow through cyberspace. And follow it they did, within hours. What they found was not simply vulgarity and intemperance, but serial plagiarism of an unsophisticated, unimaginative undergraduate sort.

Several things arise out of this matter.

First, it seems odd to me that only the plagiarism issue counted against Domenech for the Washington Post. It may or may not be reasonable to say that the Post should having caught this themselves before hiring him, and certainly, once the case was made, they needed to let him go. Plagiarism raises fundamental issues of honesty and judgment, critical to journalism (if not necessarily to a blogger, per se).

But what about that "extremity . . . and recklessness", "vulgarity and intemperance"? That was a matter of public record, not requiring Google searches and comparisons-- simply reading what their prospective employee had written. "Vulgarity and intemperance" are not the sole province of the radical Right, nor am I suggesting some prudish standard for the "blogosphere" in general. But one might have thought that the Post, home to editorialists such as Broder, Cohen, Raspberry, and Will, had slightly higher standards for its writers than this. Do they think that little of bloggers as a group? Was this appointment merely appeasement or some political payback/payoff? Who knows? But one might have hoped that a hitherto respectable newspaper like the Post would want to raise the level of blogosphere with the blogs it hosted. Apparently not. Maybe the LA Times is the paper most worth respecting these days?

And then there's Mr. Domenech himself. Mr. Domenech claims (here, for instance) to be a Christian, holding to a "literal" interpretation of Genesis, part of an of an "inerrant" Bible. Fine and dandy (debate over this belief belongs in another sphere). Christians are prone to human failings like everybody else: plagiarism is hardly rare, nor vulgarity and intemperance. Yet Christian values are supposed to militate against such things, if I am not mistaken.

In our current global, political situation, intemperance combined with "literal" interpretations of "inerrant" scriptures is not a happy mix. Suicide bombings, beheadings, executions of converts, nuclear proliferation, cross-burnings, homophobia: the list goes on and on. The issue is not so much that people of different faiths argue, intellectually, about the relative merits of their faith, values, and holy books. But religious fundamentalism seems to breed and, worse, to sanctify intemperance, and intemperance is deadly: that is a problem.

Before we of a Christian bent complain about the sins of others (Islamists or Bill & Hillary), we might just look at the "log" lodged in our own eye,* as that inerrant Jewish Teacher we claim to honor once said. If I am not mistaken, that teaching-- taken as "literally" as a metaphor can be taken-- precludes intemperance. (Don't call Coretta Scott King a "communist" without first at least wondering if you are a fascist.)

The word, Ben, is repentance.

*Just in case, here is the text, from the Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel of Matthew chapater 7:

Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.

For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye.