The Rutland Heraldfinds a Fool!

Matthew Coffin stands at the vanguard.

Who will join him?

Mr. Coffin's reflection practically defines Reasonable and Foolish behavior. He lifts up Fools right away:

In a recent editorial on Judge Roberts' nomination and the issue of religion, you called Senator Leahy a devout Catholic. I cannot speak to the senator's devotion, but as a Roman Catholic and a former seminarian, I am aware of the church's teachings. The church speaks out against abortion, gay marriage, and from its beginning, opposed the war in Iraq because all ignore the sanctity of human life. The Catholic Church advances a culture based on the dignity of the person, not a politically correct sentimentality.

The church is intolerant of rampant consumerism that treats the gift of human sexuality as a marketing tool to sell most everything — exploiting women and the young in the process. It objects to a system of laws that gives species of endangered trees more protection than a six-month-old unborn child, and it is opposed to social practices that ignore the very purpose for which God ordained the sacrament of marriage. The church is far from perfect, and when it violates its own teachings, it is held accountable by its members and the world at large.

He then throws the advocates of the former under the bus:

Some Democrats believe that only a public square devoid of religiously informed moral arguments is safe for human rights and democracy. They are determined to exclude transcendent reference points from public life and embrace the notion that in order to be truly free and modern, society must be radically secular. This belief is alive and well in universities, in the media and in our government. Together these institutions promote a "Christophobic" culture that tolerates anti-Catholicism.

As if that's not enough, Mr. Coffin then raises the curious behavior of that "devout Catholic" Senator Leahy. He observed the devout Senator's recent outrage about the "abuse" of Q'urons in Gitmo. He then contrasts the devout senator's mouth-foaming reaction to that with his support for NEA. That's the NEA that sponsered this:

KWAME HOLMAN: Since it opened at New York's Brooklyn Museum of Art last week, "Sensation" indeed has caused one, and drawn crowds from curators and critics to simply the curious.

Fully titled, "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection," and carrying a mock health warning, the show features 90 works from the collection of British advertising magnate Charles Saatchi. Among them: Damien Hirst's "A Thousand Years" composed of flies, maggots, a cow's head, sugar, and water, another Hirst work, "This Little Piggy went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed Home" a split pig carcass floating in formaldehyde; Marc Quinn's, "Self," a bust of the artist made from nine pints of his frozen blood; and, most controversial, artist Chris Ofili's work titled "The Holy Virgin Mary;" it is this work -- a depiction of a black Madonna adorned with elephant dung and sexually-explicit photos -- that was deemed by New York's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani "anti-Catholic."

The city acted to revoke the museum's lease and remove its municipal funding unless it took down the show.

Finally, Mr Coffin exposes the latest curiosity of the devout senator and his Komrads

The same politicians who tolerated the desecration of Christian icons that Catholics revere are now making an issue of Judge Roberts' impartiality in light of his Catholic faith and questioning him in ways that would be unthinkable if the nominee were Jewish.

Behold, a Fool arises even in Howard Dean country!

He stands at the vanguard. I stand with him.

Who will join us?