the day after

Nothing cleans the palate after a day of love like a ranting post of pure hatred.

I hate adultery. I hate it. With a consuming passion. In comparison, my feelings about fornication, torture, abuse and murder are lukewarm, tepid. The only things I hate more than adultery are adulterers. That’s right. I hate the sinners even more than the sin.

An adulterous relationship is, by definition, a relationship between a coward and an idiot. The coward is too small of a person to be honest and confront the other person or the problem in the relationship. The idiot is too stupid to understand the wisdom of “once a cheater, always a cheater.” Both are usually steeped in denial and egocentric justification of the worst kind, assuaging each other’s fear and guilt with “I’m ending it after the holidays,” “I'm only staying for the kids,” “this can’t be an affair; we’re not even having sex,” “we’ve grown apart” and other meaningless incantations. Then there’s the penultimate anthem of the chicken-shit lot: “You can’t help who you fall in love with.”

Even if this last statement is true, guess what you can help?! Lying. Cheating. Sneaking around. Sleeping around. These things are not like breathing – they actually require conscious decision-making and often a lot of carefully planning.

Deep down in my Old Testament heart, I applaud the idea of stoning adulterers (as long as it’s evenly applied amongst the sexes). On the one hand, it rids society of some cowards and idiots. On the other, it acts as a deterrent by setting an example. Now that’s nailing two birds with one stone.