I mean, about the comments in this front page diary over Karl Rove's divorce.
(This started out as a comment there, but I grew long enough that I decided to make a diary out of it.)
I recognize that Karl Rove' political machinations have brought unparalleled disaster onto the country - not just the people he put into office, but the way he corrupted the entire electoral process. I am, after all, the one who came up with the term "Rove Margin" to describe the potential for stealing an election.
Moreover, Rove climbed to power on the backs of gays, on people he intimated were gay, on the unfounded fears of childhood indoctrination if gay marriage were to be legal. He denigrated other people's relationships, as Rachel Maddow just said, to further his political ambitions.
For that reason, we can be forgiven a touch of schadenfreude when his own relationship comes to an end.
But only a touch.
We on this end of the spectrum recognize, I like to think, that marriage is, like any other human endeavor, something that, despite the best wishes and intentions of the people involved, does not always succeed. We do not subscribe to the conservative Catholic doctrine that marriage is created by God and therefore cannot be broken by man (nor do most American Catholics). Divorce is seen as an admission of failure, not as a sin.
Because I want us to hold ourselves to a higher standard, I think we should be above petty cracks about Karl Rove getting it on with Jeff Gannon or getting into some other gay affair. Aside from its own nastiness, it has the implication that something is wrong with gay relationships. Rove obviously thinks so (or, at least, thinks there's political gain to be had from saying so), so our pairing him off with another man not only confirms his worst suspicions about sites like this, it gives him ammunition.
But that's the practical problem. There's a larger ethical issue here. The temptation to kick a man when he's down is a very human one, but that's no reason to give in to it. It's what the Freepers do, the Teabaggers, it's the mode of operations of O'Reilly and Beck and Limbaugh.
It's an appeal and a surrender to the lesser parts of human nature. To the extent that I side with the progressives (I hate being pigeonholed), it's because I think progressives try to appeal to the better aspects of what makes us human. We work for health care reform, for example, not because we individually may benefit from it (though many of us will), but because we think it there is an ethical imperative to care for those among us who have trouble caring for themselves.
Rachel carefully set what I think was the right response. She reported on the divorce in her best neutral tone, reported also that the family had asked that their privacy be respected, and then, citing to numerous comments and attacks Rove had made on gays, on opponents he labeled as gay, and citing to his playing to the traditional morals crowd, explained that such a person has forfeited the right to privacy.
And she left it at that.
Rachel is a class act. When she slips up (and it happens to everyone), she calls herself out on it and apologizes. We admire her class. I'd like to see emulate it.