Veggie Tales creator Phil Vischer, the man who swears he’s not progressive despite knocking creationists as a bunch of dummies, crediting his white privilege for the success of his show, claiming he didn’t know there were such things black Christians until he was an adult, thumbing his nose at “Cracker Barrel Christians,” getting upset at Christians for opposing LGBTQ, and coming out as pro-choice, has a burr in his saddle.
On episode 537 of the Holy Post podcast, Vischer is set off by Al Mohler’s column critiquing David French for his endorsement of the “Respect For Marriage Act.” In particular, this paragraph by Mohler really got him going:
One of the most perplexing marks of our time is the defection of so many “conservatives” from the cause of conserving what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things.” If marriage is not conserved—if civil marriage is not conserved as a man-woman union—then nothing genuinely conservative can last, at least for long. Support for the Respect for Marriage Act is bad enough. The way David French frames his argument is worse. This is how conservatism dies, and this is how marriage is surrendered.
In response, Vischer begins sniping that Mohler is “not defending the faith in this. He’s defending conservatism. Conservatism has become the thing that we are supposed to fight for. Not Jesus. Not the faith. Not the church.”
Then, in what may be the clearest indication yet that Vischer has become pro-LBGTQ, he criticizes people who say that heterosexual marriage is a foundational belief that must never be compromised, saying that confederate soldiers said the same thing about slavery, making a 1-to-1 comparison.
And I’m just trying to like- even the notion that nothing genuinely conservative can last, at least not for long. How do we know if that’s not a good thing? How do we know what isn’t good to conserve if our only value is conservation of what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things.”
And now who gets to decide what are the permanent things? Where does that come from? Because for 100 years, what conservatives fought to conserve in America was racial hierarchy. That was the number one thing conservatives were fighting to conserve, because that was a permanent thing, because that was God established because that was in the Bible, because the one thing that all Confederate theologians agreed on in 1865, was that the Bible was on their side. It was clear the Bible does not have any problem with slavery.
So we’re trying to conserve the permanent things. Slavery has always been a permanent thing in history. These northern Yankees who don’t know how to read the Bible, are trying to take away our way of life, and we must conserve it. So now we say “oh, yeah, yeah, but they were wrong. Oh, yeah. That wasn’t that wasn’t one of the permanent things. Now we know what the permanent things are. And the permanent things are the nuclear family as came into existence in 1952. That’s a permanent thing. And heterosexual marriage.”
