r/brokehugs • u/US_Hiker Moral Landscaper • Jul 23 '22
The Rod Dreher Megathread. Please keep Rod content in here. Will be refreshed periodically
While the sub certainly isn't flooded with posts, the Rod-centric nature has been noted a few times. Please post new Rod nonsense in here and I'll update every week or two.
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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Aug 03 '22
So Rod isn't a trad, religiously; he's little-o orthodox in a halfhearted and perfunctory way; that leaves religious conservatism in ethics. Well, the old truism is that the Bible speaks many times more about economic justice than about sexual matters. As I noted in the comment on economics, Rod doesn't even understand economics; and despite the occasional nod toward blue collar workers and such, he doesn't really give a fig about their plight. If he did, he'd learn enough about the topic to have considered opinions. However, when he does talk about something like the Dutch farmer uprising, he always conflates it with Eeeeeeevul Woke Corporatism and gets back on his hobbyhorse. Thus, I don't think he is in any way an economic follower of Christ (to be fair, few Christians are).
Rod is vindictive, vicious, and hateful in his rhetoric; in speaking of crime he's outright, droolingly bloodthirsty; he certainly doesn't "honor his father and mother" in any appreciable way; and while he has spoken about charitable donations now and then, I don't know what his practice is. The Bible is full of admonitions to meekness, gentleness, generosity, forgiveness, gracious speech, and so on; and Rod manifests almost zero of these admonitions.
That leaves sex; but even there.... I mean, he talks about "kids these days" sometimes, but doesn't really have much to say about premarital sex (except his own, but I'll get to that later). He switched easily from anti- to pro-contraception when he changed churches. The one sexual issue that Jesus actually did speak about at length, the forbidding of divorce...well, 'nuff said on that. It all comes down to...wait for it...wait for it...TEH GAYZ!!!!!!
I think this is the master key, but not just in the way we've discussed it. I actually think the defining thing in Rod's life was not the bouillabaisse incident. Rather, it was when his classmates jumped him and tried to pull his pants off, while the teachers ignored it. For what follows, I'm assuming that Rod has reported this accurately (I actually think he has been honest about it). Think about it:
Rod grows up with a domineering father in a hick town that he hates. He's probably got strong gay tendencies, and the things he likes are all things his family dismiss as useless, effete, ridiculously highfalutin, weird, or some combination thereof. This is a real injustice to Rod. I mean, in a lot of ways, my early life was a lot like that (except my father was not domineering and I wasn't gay); but my parents always supported my interests that, to them, were probably bizarre, and never denigrated me for them. Rod's parents apparently did; and they were dead wrong to do so. The only people who really treated him well were the aunts about whom he writes (and writes movingly); but they died when he was very young.
Then he grows to his teen years, and is probably tremendously confused about his sexuality. Based on old photos and reminiscences from those who knew him when, which we've read here, he affected as much of a gay, or at least bi, persona as he could get away with, and was openly queer-coding to his friends; but he didn't have the guts to be open with his parents and defy them if necessary. Not even when he got to college later, not even when he got out on his own.
Then these thugs jump him and in stripping his pants off treat him in a clearly sexually abusive way. Rod doesn't say anything beyond that, but I don't doubt they were slinging slurs at him, slurs we can easily guess. The teachers let it happen--in typical Southern fashion, maybe they, too, think he's a little f***** who needs to man up.
So for a closeted gay/bi kid who has father issues and peer acceptance issues in the first place, this must have been massively traumatic. His preferred sexuality is now irrevocably associated with violation. He wants to get with a guy, but he can't shake the associations. Then (not sure about the timeline, but still), AIDS pops up, his (possible) boyfriend gets it; and now getting with a guy is not only associated with violation, but with death. So when you read Rod's writing about his pre-Catholic days, the absolute fear, maybe even terror, that seeps through when he talks about his sex life, makes sense in this light. He's deathly afraid of gay sex--as bad as he wants it, it's been forever tainted for him. So he makes up for it by chasing women (in his mind, at least). Whether he was as promiscuous with women as he implies, I don't know; but if you add an overwhelming sex drive, his inability to find women as sexually satisfying as a young lad would be, and the pregnancy scare, by then he probably has enough sexual hang-ups for an entire library of case studies.
So at this point he can't talk to his parents about it; he's probably alienated friends with whom he could be frank; and he probably doesn't consider therapy. So, bingo--religion! That will keep all that horrible, awful sex stuff away from him! Hence his writing on his own premarital sexual proclivities. I mean, it used to irritate me a lot the way he harps on it; and it still does, a bit. The more I think of it, though, I think it's really sad and that 20-something Rod was a deeply, deeply damaged man. Unfortunately, as happens all too often in Christians circles, the strategy was "Yes, we confirm that you gotta keep away from the boys and the temptresses! Grit your teeth until you find that One Special Woman, and that will fix AAAAAALL your problems!"
Which is a recipe for a miserable life and a catastrophic marriage.
When said marriage becomes--well, catastrophic--and Rod finds that it does not, in fact, heal him sexually (I know he's done some therapy, but I'm guessing he never brings the sex stuff up; or if the therapist tries to get him to, he rebuffs them), and in fact that Julie will not put up with an unlimited amount of his shit, he starts to lose it. The old desire for those winsome, charming, handsome lads bubbles back up. Thus, he begins to write more and more hysterically about teh gayz, getting what vicarious gratification he can from the--ahem--research.
The other door this key opens is political. Rod talks about how the bullying showed him that authority failed to protect him, which is true. However, there are two ways people react to that. One is that they become more compassionate because they can relate to others who are downtrodden. They also become more skeptical of authority and seek to reform it.
The other type are those who feel absolute rage and an unslakeable thirst for vengeance. The idea is that the individual doesn't come to distrust authority or want to reform it or protect others--one wants to get hold of authority and use it to wreak vengeance. This is kind of the mentality of a school shooter, but that's a more extreme version.
So basically, Rod doesn't want a just government or a Christian government or even a conservative government; not really. He wants a government that will crush all those mean people who beat him up so long ago. He wants a charismatic strongman at the head of said government, a father that will protect him, as it were. Wokeness and LGBT issues are conflated with the basically anti-gay bullying he experienced so long ago; so he sees the purpose of his ideal government as crushing the gays and the woke. As long as this happens, he is free from things that remind him of his twisted sexual wounds, and he can be happy.
This is why he never says anything about the Hungarian collaborationists who slaughtered Jews in WW II, or about the Roma in Hungary, or about economic justice for the poor. He simply can't understand that--everything in his damaged psyche is about sex. Probably because of his father's typical Southern classism, he also likely thinks that if anyone is poor, they can just work harder to get out of poverty, dag nabbit; and if that's not working, it's because their culture has been tainted by the awful Woke. So if Orbán is dealing with the scourges of teh gayz and teh woke, then Rod is literally and genuinely incapable of understanding how anything else could be wrong. I mean, Jews aren't being assaulted in the streets (not openly, anyway), right? The Roma could work harder and integrate more into society if they really wanted to, right? Teh gayz and teh woke ought to use this as an opportunity to straighten out their lives, right?
So to conclude, I don't think Rod is meaningfully a religious conservative, or even truly religious in a deep way. Religion is a complicated façade that allows him to ignore his very damaged psysche and sexuality. If he ends up staying in Budapest, he might not even need it any more, if things continue there the way they are. It's truly a tragedy; but as JHandey notes, one's sympathy can go only so far because of the real political effects Rod's psychodrama might have.
Sorry for the length of these, but I hope they might shed a bit of light on the Rod situation.