St. Douglas the Confessor

While perusing Sonny’s fine post and the links therein to the Kmiec–Douthat dustup, I also chanced upon Kmiec’s counter-response to Douthat’s biting takedown. It’s worth a quick read, if only to see exactly what pseudo-magnanimity sounds like. There are plenty of examples, but here’s a taste:

Genuine love and affection do not reside on the Internet, so I cannot extend it to you, but in my heart, I forgive your great unkindness. I do hope you can free yourself from its enslavement. Realize that your meaning is bound up in the occasions in your life to be of service. Ross, once you allow yourself to see your dependence upon others, and their need for you, I am certain you will appreciate the cruelty of what you have written.

Ergo, I, Douglas Kmiec, Missionary of Peace to the pagan hordes of Cyberspace, do hereby confer upon thee, Ross, my blessing and my forgiveness for the unkind arguments that thou hast spat from thine unclean lips. Go now, repent of your churlishness, and vote Republican no more!

After reading such a dense agglomeration of backhanded forgiveness, I had to go back to Douthat’s orginal response to make sure I hadn’t missed something. Was Kmiec’s extreme unction warranted? Had Douthat truly acted the part of a digital brownshirt?

The vilest, most hateful, most sinful notion I could find was Douthat’s suggestion that Kmiec was a “useful idiot” for the Party of Death. As you may have gathered, I don’t think Douthat has anything to apologize for. There’s nothing uncharitable about arguing that someone is so mind-bogglingly wrong that they don’t even meet their own criteria for being right. In fact, I think I can propose a very simple metric to test Kmiec’s level of idiocy (and, I suppose, his usefulness, too): Let us wait four years, and then make a graph of the rate of change of abortions per 1,000 women since 1973.

Now, the abortion rate has declined at a more or less consistent rate since it peaked in about 1980. So, if for the next four years the downward slope grows even more pronounced, then we can conclude that Kmiec is probably not in fact a useful idiot. But if it doesn’t, then…well, draw your own conclusions. I don’t want to be guilty of saying anything that merits Kmiec’s forgiveness.