Standing Up For His Country(‘s) Values

Vince Gill

During my college years, I worked summers and weekends as a country-western disk jockey in Frederick County, Maryland. It was an immersive learning experience for this born-and-bred city boy, and I developed a roster of favorites that I admire to this day, including, among others, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Tompall Glaser, the “outlaw” country rocker who passed away less than a month ago.

But I have a new favorite country star at the moment and his name is Vince Gill. It stems from an incident this past Sunday.

That was when members of the Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church were picketing a concert by the popular singer-songwriter at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, Missouri. This is the fringe church headed up by the notorious Fred Phelps whose members – mostly Phelps’s family, it seems – show up at American servicemen’s funerals and proclaim that God killed them because he doesn’t approve of homosexuality and other such outrageous nonsense.

Anyone who reads this column regularly knows that there is just about nothing we hold more sacred than the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And to protect this sacred right, we have to tolerate the filth that spews from these toads (just a metaphor; I have nothing against actual toads).

But that doesn’t mean they should go un-confronted.

As he was going into the Kauffman Center, Gill walked up to the picketers, one of whom asked, “Vince Gill, what in the world are you doing out here? What are you doing with another man’s wife?”

“I just came to see what hate looked like,” he responded.

“Don’t you know that divorce plus marriage equals adultery?” she went on, pointing out that since he was now living with his second wife – a longtime marriage, by the way – he was living in sin and therefore condemned to an eternity in hell.

“Don’t you know that you fuckers are lucky that you don’t have a sign that says something about my wife?” he countered.

I almost wish they had. Gill is a big guy and I’m sure he knows how to handle himself.

The woman then helpfully attributed her previous statement, “Jesus Christ said that.”

“Did He? He said a lot of stuff about forgiveness, about grace. You guys don’t have any of that.” He then recognizes a man in the group and comments, “I’ve seen you on TV. You’re a big dipshit. You know that, don’t you?”

I can’t think of any more eloquent words to get this point across.

More than anything else, Gill’s exchange reminds me of the emotional climax of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings on Capitol Hill when Joseph N. Welch, the intrepid chief counsel for the Army, leaned forward in his chair and addressed the alcoholic, red-baiting Republican demagogue from Wisconsin with the now immortal lines, “Senator, you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” This was the beginning of the end for Joe McCarthy.

For me, Vince Gill is the new champion of public decency. And Fred Phelps, while abusing the First Amendment, can crawl back under his rock and then go to hell.

Speaking of the First Amendment, I was disappointed to hear what Dana Perino, the smart, articulate and feisty former press secretary for President George W. Bush, who bravely took over when her boss Tony Snow tragically succumbed to cancer, opined on Fox News’s show “The Five.” She said she is tired of atheists attempting to remove the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. First, please note that the phrase was not part of the original pledge, so if it was okay for citizens to petition to get it included, it should be okay for citizens to get it removed.

But what really got me was Perino’s comment, “If these people really don’t like it, they don’t have to live here.”

So that’s what she thinks, “one nation, under God” means: one nation, all thinking like she does.

Dana, if that’s what you really think, then you’re the one who shouldn’t be living here.

And Vince, you just keep on keepin’ on. You’re the man.

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