I think this will – should be – my last Rod Dreher post.

For a long time, I respected him even though I disagreed with him about much. I thought his insights were sharp, his humanity fully-rounded, his heart generous.

I can’t make those claims anymore. He has been so alarmist about what the advance of gay rights means that I can no longer separate what might be legitimate arguments about religious freedom from half-baked conspiracy theorizing. And as I’ve said previously, I have no sense that Dreher’s Christianity — the structure upon which his entire worldview depends — has any kind of eternal element to it. It’s a club with some restrictive rules about sex, and he’s really mad that club isn’t winning anymore. There’s no sense that Dreher believes what Christianity, generally, proclaims: The victory is already won. If you think you have to come up with strategies to save the existence of your faith, perhaps your faith is misplaced.

Or maybe you’re doing it wrong.

But now we’ve gone too far. Why? Because Dreher recently  got taken by a fake “Gay Agenda is Pedophilia” document and published it to his blog.

That’s not the problem.

This is the problem: He now acknowledges it’s fake — he refers to it as “The Protocols of the Elders of NAMBLA” — but still writes a lengthy post about what we can learn about the gay agenda from … the fake document.

It is true that I read it too quickly to pick up what in retrospect are obvious “tells,” and for that I’m sorry. Though I did say in the original piece that I had doubts that it was real, I should have been even stronger in saying so, and would have done had I read it more closely.

I still would probably have posted a link to these Protocols of the Learned Elders of NAMBLA, though, because the document is worth reading….

Well, no. It’s fake. It is a fake created in the service of smearing people. To turn it loose to the world so casually, and then to retract it with a “yeah, but,” is too much. If we’re going to disagree, I have to believe that you have some intellectual honesty, some rigor. Rod just spreads whatever smear jobs he happens to agree with — even, it turn out, when he knows they’re wrong.

I’m done with him.