David McElroy

The more I try to figure out what to say about the whole “Duck Dynasty” flap, the more I wish everybody on all sides would just shut up and go away. It’s just another idiotic battle in a war between two groups of people who seem to wake up every morning looking for a reason to be offended.

If Phil Robertson is the standard-bearer for your religious faith, you might want to rethink your theology. And if the religious beliefs of this eccentric clown threaten you, then you need to get out more and discover how many other people disagree with you in more serious ways. It’s insane that this “nobody” has become a celebrity and that people are yelling profanity at each other over his views.

I’ve never seen “Duck Dynasty,” and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have seen it even if I still watched television. It’s a “reality” show on A&E centered around a strange Louisiana swamp family that makes duck calls. Or something like that. Doesn’t it sound like something worth wasting your time on?

Robertson is widely known as a social conservative and he talks openly about his religious beliefs. In an interview with GQ magazine this week, Robertson asserted that homosexuality is wrong. He didn’t advocate legal consequences for being gay or lesbian. He just expressed the belief that it’s sin and he said he thought men should be more attracted to a woman’s vagina than a man’s anus.

“It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus,” Robertson said. “That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”

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Are we really arguing about what color Santa Claus is? Has anyone broken the news to the people arguing that he’s just a fictitious character?

That’s right. Santa doesn’t exist. But that hasn’t stopped culture warriors from trying to turn him into a cause. On Fox News this week, anchor Megyn Kelly started the ball rolling.

“For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white,” Kelly told viewers. “Santa is what he is…. I wanted to get that straight.”

Other people have struck back, arguing that to claim Santa is white is “oppressive.” In the Los Angeles Times, there was a piece about why “we deserve a Santa for the people, not just white folks.” Over at the progressive left website Think Progress, they were writing about “Megyn Kelly’s fear of a black Santa.” And a blogger at the conservative Washington Times was defending Kelly and writing about “why Santa Claus’ skin color matters.”

One of my friends reports that a very intelligent friend of his believes that “having a white Santa is just cultural dominance over a disenfranchised and unempowered race and we might want to consider transitioning to a less-white Santa and for me to insist that a character keep his image just because said character is and always has been depicted as a white male is oppressive in nature.”

That’s right. Our culture has been reduced to arguing about whether a fictitious character’s ethnicity is “cultural dominance” over “disenfranchised” people and what kind of Santa “we deserve.”

To all of the combatants, I simply say, “Who cares?”

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When I first saw Beth Wednesday, she looked like a woman who had just won the lottery. She was grinning from ear to ear and looked as though she might start bouncing off of walls at any moment.

“I passed! I passed! I made it!” she told me, as though she assumed I knew what that meant.

I was in an office on a college campus and Beth had just come out of a computer lab where she had checked her final grades for the semester. She had passed all of her finals and she had excellent grades. She had successfully completed her first semester of nursing school.

She explained all this to me and told me that she was so excited that she had to tell someone — and I was the first random stranger she saw. It made me happy to see her so jubilant, so I asked her to step in and tell me more.

Beth is about 40. On this day, she seemed on top of the world. But she kept telling me that she had been afraid she would “blow it.” I kidded her about whether she has a history of negative self-talk.

“Have you been talking to my therapist?” she asked jokingly. “Seriously, that’s what she’s always telling me, that I’m always expecting the worst and saying bad things to myself, but that’s the way it’s felt since my husband left in the middle of the semester.”

All of a sudden, this happy story sounded much more interesting to me — and more complicated.

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