I would like to raise as much awareness about this douchebag as possible so as to make his name infamous among the public. I have no posters and I have no bracelets. But I am willing to help train an army to bring this fool to justice…

Consequences, Mr. Myers? Is this really how one would choose to start and argument such as the one who have so nobly and eloquently begun today in your comment piece? Sarcasm, Mr. Myers. That was sarcasm.

For those of you who are not aware, in today’s Irish Independent, Kevin Myers (right-wing op-ed extraordinaire) posited the opinion that Fianna Fáil’s move to promote marriage equality in Ireland will result in dire consequences. Among the hypothetical situations that really got to him were potential plans to give preference to same-sex couples when adopting a child over heterosexual couples. Making one giant leap after another, Myers then decided to gather some badly handled statistics and compare the U.S. death toll of the Vietnam War and the current U.S. death toll of AIDS. He then proceeds to drop his knowledge bomb on the esteemed readers of the Indo: “But almost no one is aware that the price for male homosexual liberation was around four times the death-toll of Vietnam, and in a far shorter period.” But he is not making a comment through this thinly veiled call to hatred, not at all: “And I’m not expressing an opinion either way, just asking a question.”

Well that’s alright then, isn’t it? He was only asking a question! He was only positioning the tone of his article with some arse-ended comparison to make the readers aware of a question that had been bugging him for some time. There’s been a question rattling around my head too for a while now: every time Kevin Myers writes another piece a lot of things also go on in this world. One of those things is Kony forcibly drafting more children into his heinous army. Now I’m not sure of these two things are coincidental or otherwise, but hey, I’m just asking a question!

Of course, my comparison is completely ludicrous, we’re all aware of that, but Myers does not seem to be aware that he is crossing all sorts of contextual barriers in order to bring his esteemed readers his own little tid-bit of tailor made bullshit. He draws lines of understanding from the conservative base in the United States, claiming that long ago they foresaw the harbinger of doom that is homosexual marriage. No wonder his personal morality is so eschewed from reality! Our dear Kevin is drawing from the same piss puddle of such reputable news and comment sources as Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and ‘Papa Bear’ Bill O’Reilly. From this modest list of idiots, one can indeed draw an apt comparison between Kevin Myers and his trans-Atlantic facsimile. Glenn Beck often ends his obnoxious, hate-filled and morally bankrupt rants with nifty little disclaimers such as, “…but I’m just asking questions…” Time after time, Beck “uncovers” secret government plots against the American public, rolls them round the bigot spinning-wheel in his maggot infested brain, while simultaneously uttering this gibberish in front of a live studio audience. Once his mangled brain catches up with his Aryan mouth, it is almost too late to undo the rhetorical damage. But Beck has an ace up his sleeve. Coincidentally, it’s the same ace, suit and all, that Myers has stashed up his: He’s only asking questions. He’s only positing his monstrous opinions, all over an already disgraced rag of a paper, hidden behind a curtain of quizzical idiocy.

Furthermore, in the third to last paragraph of Mr. Myers’ jeremiad, our literary villain points out that if one is for same-sex marriage then FF’s new position is no problem for you. But, “if you think differently: if you consider that a boy should be raised with a mother and father, then the Fianna Fail vote is more than a difficulty, for it will legally prevent an adoption agency from even having an opinion on such matters.” Once again we witness the awesome power of Myers’ unbiased platform of balanced and fair opinion. One quick line acknowledges that those nasty liberals out there may have some validity in their own warped world view, as opposed to the screed of ‘if’s’ that assert and proclaim Myers’ own opinion and point of view. His quote directly appeals to one of the last bastions of old-world bigoted conservatism: that a child is better off being raised by a heterosexual couple. Without any supporting evidence other than his own flatulent opinion, Myers concocts a haphazard “binary” argument without any thought to a dialectic, which rhetorically states that a child will be better raised in a heterosexual environment. That is unless Dad is beating Mom, or Mom’s an alcoholic, or both of them are viciously sexually repressed and take it out (ideologically or otherwise) on the child. In fact, in a world with Kevin Myers in it, the only negative I envision for the child of a homosexual couple is the likelihood that Mr. Myers himself will probably show up at the school to personally bully the child with hateful oratory and then wrap up by reaffirming that he is only asking questions.

Alternatively, Myers is simply stirring the shit on a slow news day. Maybe these are not his personal opinions, or are simply an exaggerated version of them (Diet Wanker)? Even if this is the rebuttal of the Indo or Myers himself, it doesn’t really matter. The only thing that such an excuse serves to illustrate is that Myers is completely and holistically morally bankrupt. It would be someone with Myers’ track record who would twist such a sore knife in order to squeeze out a few hundred words of utter bile. It would be a writer like Myers that would close his article by putting the word rights in sarcastic, whining quotation marks: “It’s as well to remember that the next time you vote for someone’s “rights”.” But for Kevin Myers, civil rights are something that are about as sincere as his capacity for altruism or love.

Consequences, Mr. Myers. There are consequences to your actions. There are consequences when you have let your disgusting, backwards mind shit all over pieces of paper that go out nationally. There are indeed consequences to active shit-stirring like this. Other than a national outcry of detest in your direction, the only foreseeable consequence to this is that maybe, somewhere across the pond, you have successfully given Glenn Beck his first swelling erection in many, many years.

Jake O’Brien