I’ll fess up to being a few hundred volumes behind on my Approved Smart Guy™ reading list. If it gets any worse, I won’t be one of The Quiz Kids anymore. One that I can say proudly I’ve caught up on is Bobo’s In Paradise by David Brooks. This book, more than anything I’ve read, makes intelligent use of the intellectual compost referred to euphemistically as Marxian Analysis. Unfortunately, like all other Marxian Analysis, it has its limits as far as describing the real world.

By fortunate happenstance, Marxism isn’t overly fond of private property; intellectual or otherwise. This preference allows the Marxist to hotwire The Hegelian Dialectic and go for epistemological joyrides over surreal terrain. Brooks so endeavors. He describes the Bourgeois-Bohemian (Bobo for short) as a Synthesis between the Bourgeois (Thesis) and Bohemian (Anti-thesis). He then goes further to claim that this union of Bacchus and Prometheus is a stable configuration that will define American high culture over the next few passing decades.

Brooks has a quick-footed wit that avoids paradox and fallacy the way Adrian Peterson weaves a broken field towards the end zone. However, his project is limited by the same problems that lay to nines canonical believers in overdetermining history such as Marx, Hegel, and Oswald Spengler. Not everything is evolutionary. Some things are canonical and binary. They exist or they don’t exist. They equal 1 or they equal zero. They are categorically discrete and there is no uncountable infinity between these two states. A synthesis between 1 and 0 equal to 0.425 is not a logically possible member of the subset.

We encountered a somewhat off-color and rough-and-tumble example of that recently as feathers were weather by the proud patriarch of Louisiana’s Duck Dynasty. Phil Robertson was asked what he thought of homosexuals. He tends to think what St. Paul used to think since he cited 1 Corinthians and put the Torquemadas of Tolerance on an agitated state of DefCon1. St. Paul roundly poops the orgy-party in 1 Cor ( 5: 9-13). And then, as if the astute scholars of Early Christian morals may have wondered what he meant, St. Paul calls homosexuality and doesn’t exactly ask it out on a date in 1 Cor 6:9.

If you ever pick up Bobos in Paradise, swallow your vomit and read the chapter about the Arizona Power Exchange twice. It explains exactly why this Post-modern Bobo society has no prayer o reconciling and forming some sort of synthesis with the body of Christ. You see the Arizona Power Exchange is not your typical corporate entity. They are a BDSM club for the modern sophisticate. They take the most perverse and perverted human frailties and wrap them in a prophylactic patina of high-minded discourse.

This, like the Church of Satan’s impassioned appeals to free will and volitional action, are efforts to avoid owning responsibility for cultivating behaviors that all logical people would at least consider obtuse if not profoundly and utterly immoral. The purpose of a purportedly high-minded façade, like the Arizona Power Exchange, is to remove the stigma from sin while still running rampant clad in leather and with whip in hand. If you stop calling it a sin and only sin in socially appropriate fashion, it is supposed to no longer be sinful. Christianity is too hard for that. Virtue is practiced and repeated and earned. Sin remains sin whether it occurs in the lacquered boardrooms of The Arizona Power Exchange or in Bubba and Sparky’s Double-Wide. It’s the act, not the trappings that either passes or fails the testing applied through the ages via Christian morality.

So when Phil Robinson tells people what he believes he is supposed to think about homosexuality and other so-called “acceptable” perversions, he’s about 2,000 years or so behind the latest chic Hegelian Synthesis. But that’s just it! He is supposed to be about where he is, and the beautiful people can do what they wilt. *

And all of this “enlightened free will” is light years away from legitimate freedom. I’m free to blog what I want, but I can’t fire everyone who down-votes or spam-bombs one of my posts. Free people are required to have the strength to take a few arrows or else the only recourse is to exit the arena. Bobos can’t take arrows and have no clue what they would do if they had to exit. This leads us to the Torquemadas of Tolerance such as GLAAD.

Now if GLAAD really wanted a free and open dialogue on the issue so that they could win hearts and change minds, they would perhaps be explaining to us plain and simple folk in the flyover where St. Paul committed his theological errors in the epistles to the Corinthians. They aren’t. They are trying to destroy the income stream of those who hold their lifestyles in contempt. This isn’t about answering dissent. This is about censoring it out of existence. Twitter is a prime example.

In the latest development in the ongoing culture war surrounding Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson’s controversial remarks on homosexuality, the pro-Robertson website iStandwithPhil.com has been flagged on Twitter, prohibiting users from posting messages containing links to the page.

In the end, there will be no Hegelian Dialectic that can make the hard or challenging parts of Christianity just vanish. The law was fulfilled by Christ. It can’t be changed for the better by merging with its antithesis. The media-approved religious leaders will tell us otherwise and ask us to tolerate, but that was never what the Christian religion was founded to do. We may be taught to love the sinner, but we can never remain true if we lapse in our will to properly hate the sin.

*-As Aleister Crowley famously advised.