I rarely pay attention to what is festering beneath George Will's toupée, but Sunday's exchange with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday was like riding a Q-Tip into his inner ear and witnessing his brain twist itself into a pretzel below that polyester do.
Discussing the rash of "religious freedom" laws breaking out like acne across the land, George sounds as deflated as a carnival balloon at midnight.
Itching to prove he is still relevant, Will gives us his bona fides as a designer and defender of civil rights, irritated that it brought us to this day, admonishing us for rubbing his nose in it, and ready to frost our cakes.
Chris Wallace: George, I think it's fair to say that there are deeply felt positions on both sides of this debate. Religious freedom versus gay rights. We asked all of you for questions and we got this on Facebook from Dan Pletcher:
Dan Pletcher: With as many taxes as businesses have to pay, how does this government think they have any justification to tell a business who they will and won't serve?
How, George, do you answer Dan? And more generally, how do you come down on this issue of religious freedom versus gay rights?
George Will: Free exercise of religion against...a clash of rights and here is how I answer Dan. Fifty years ago this year, in one of surely the great legislative achievements in American history, we passed the Public Accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act saying, "if you open your doors to business in the United States, you open it to everybody."
That's a settled issue and the prestige of that law, the just prestige of that law obtains and I think that's where the American people come down [I think that is what he said here. You would have to ask him what he meant by all that].
That said, this too must be said: It's a funny kind of sore winner in the gay rights movement that would say, "A photographer doesn't want to photograph my wedding and I've got lots of other photographers I could go to, but I'm going to use the hammer of government to force them to do this." It's not neighborly and it's not nice. The gay rights movement is winning. They should be, as I say, not sore winners.
Chris Wallace: But having said that, and I understand your point, but you do say that if a gay couple wants to go into a bakery and have a wedding cake, the bakery should have to make the cake.
Will: Bake the cake
Wallace: Bake the cake.
It's not telling at all that George Will begins by waxing nostalgic that it was only 50 years ago this year that black people could sit at a lunch counter with white people. My, how time flies. It's a happy thing that this misunderstanding was settled way back when.
But dammit, what have we now?
Gay people?
Gay people!
And they all want cake and photographs? What the hell? You have burdened us with a cake too far and we simply won't stand for it.
Unless you press us and get lawyers involved. Then we might, just might give you cake too.
Just don't get too uppity about it.
