John Danforth: Rebel Without a Clue

That's the sub-head on today's Best of the Web, in which James Taranto quotes from a Washington Post profile of the former Missouri senator. In the profile, Danforth decries conservative stances on recent issues such as the Terri Schiavo issue ("an effort to appease the Christian right"); same-sex marriage ("he believes most people would say no if asked, 'Do you believe we should just be nasty and humiliate people and degrade them because of sexual orientation?' "); and displaying the Ten Commandments ("Talk about much ado about nothing").

I thought Taranto's response was spot-on:

Whatever one may think of the merits of each of these issues, Danforth is bizarrely clueless about the context of all of them. He doesn't seem to understand that there is another side to each of these issues, a side that is every bit as aggressive, if not more, in pushing its views.

On the Terri Schiavo case, for instance, some of us who aren't religious were appalled by the zeal of those who supported an adulterous husband's campaign to end his disabled wife's life over the objection of her blood relatives. As for same-sex marriage, has it escaped Danforth's notice that the effort against it is purely defensive, a response to activist courts in several states that have tried (successfully, in Massachusetts' case) to impose it on an unwilling population? And if Ten Commandments displays are "much ado about nothing"--a position with which we sympathize--why is the ACLU always filing lawsuits seeking to banish them, and why do the courts take such suits seriously?

And when did John Danforth go from a solid conservative to a Lincoln Chaffee clone?