Are people born wicked?

No One Mourns The Wicked – from Wicked

Sometimes I really wonder about what makes it into the primetime as a Big Story.  Of all the loopy things that have been said by major Republicans candidates this cycle, I struggle to understand what is supposed to be such a big deal about Christine O’Donnell’s comments about witchcraft.  It wouldn’t even make my top 10 list of crazy stuff that SHE has said.

What’s the story here?  That candidates have lives where they at one time did things differently than they now do?  I guess I would get it if she was out on the campaign trail talking about how her Wiccan faith really influences her approach to public policy.  But remember that the point of her comment was to say that she tried it when she was a kid and didn’t like it.  And now looking back it helps to confirm her faith.

Now, if you were going to complain about this comment, there is some fair ammunition.  We can start with her depiction of ‘witchcraft’ as being focused on devil-worship.  Which, you know, it isn’t.  There are, of course, random folks out there who may self-describe as witches and also claim to worship Satan or whatever, but on the whole the more ‘official’ variants of witchcraft are very clearly pagan, focused on the natural world, etc.

What this suggests, of course, is that O’Donnell had no clue what she was talking about and just made some stuff up.  Her description of what she ‘dabbled’ in comes straight out of the Christian moral panic manual that’s been circulating for centuries and has no resemblance to what actual people do.  So there’s that.

And let’s also remember WHY she brought up witchcraft.  It was because she wanted to argue that Halloween is dangerous because it valorizes devil-worship.

Verdict: she is worthy of some mild derision for the comment.  But this is among the stupidest things to fixate on.  And it’s kind of depressing that a candidate for a major office can be lunatic-fringe nutty on actual POLICY issues and get nary a mention, but mention witches and everyone freaks out.  So yes, they’ve managed to suss out a crazy person but for many of the wrong reasons, I think.

The American media: even a broken clock is right twice a day.