By now, most of you will have read somewhere or another that Rush Limbaugh is getting divorced. Hopefully we won't be hearing any diatribes from Rush about how liberals are the source of the breakdown of the family unit and all that tripe. But in the meantime, I have a message for the Left: enough with the supercilious schadenfreude.

As I posted on dKos, I think we're in danger of losing perspective here--not to mention a bit of our soul. The man is getting divorced. This is unfortunate, but to hear some of the people in the comments sections at the two sites I linked, you'd think we were a bunch of freepers crowing over some liberal notable's divorce and pointing to it as an example of how America had lost its values.

I realize that much of this reaction comes from the fact that Rush is a dishonest, moralizing blowhard who has recently been revealed as a hypocrite on most of what he's been lecturing his fans about for years. Pointing this out as an example of his hypocrisy is understandable (although it'd be nice if even one person could cite a /quote/ from Rush about divorce--I've been looking, and I can't seem to find one; searchable transcripts are hard to come by).

But then I read crap like this, this, this, this, and this--a representative but by no means exhaustive list. I am not exaggerating or kidding you here when I say that this kind of shit makes us sound like freepers. And whatever you think of Rush--tanj knows my own opinions of him are pretty nasty--that is not a comparison that should make any of us comfortable.

Divorce sucks. But when we react like this to some right-wing hypocrite's divorce, we do two things: we give legitimacy to the stigma that the moralizing right tries to level on divorce and divorcees, and we lower ourselves to the level of the hyena pits over at the Free Republic.