Michael Novak is an ex-Reaganite, a campaigner for Catholic causes, and a staunch conservative, at least at this point in his life. He also writes blogs for the National Review Online, though if Bill Buckley were alive he would long for the grave reading Michael Novak’s drivel.

Today’s column by Micheal Novak is a review of the Barack Obama Presidency, which he claims has already sunk into paganism. Yes, paganism. Novak’s comments concern Obama’s decisions to work to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities, and to authorize foreign aid to organizations that promote family planning, including the offering of abortions. On this last point Michael Novak deliberately distorts President Obama’s announcement concerning foreign aid for family planning. Here’s how Novak puts it, from his blog at National Review Online:

On January 23, President Obama issued an order that authorizes tax dollars for abortions abroad.

Before I go further in a critique of Mr. Novak, whose credetnials as a lay Catholic are impeccable, I want to note that a distortion of this sort is actually a lie. Here’s an article a lot closer to the truth about what President Obama did on the 23rd. If Mr. Novak is so partisan that he can’t even recognize his own distortions, certainly someone at the National Review can. They did not. This says a whole lot more about the state of the National Review, and about Mr. Novak’s extreme partisanship, than it says anything about President Obama’s policies. But let’s move on to the good parts, where Michael Novak calls Barack Obama a pagan.

Barack Obama is a pagan? Vroom! Pagan? Ooops, not that kind, either. When Michael Novak brings up the accusation that Barack Obama is ushering in paganism, he’s referring to the notion of Obama trying to repeal the DOMA legislation. Of course Novak distorts and lies as he presents his case, almost as if the God he worshiped said not one word about false witness. Here’s his case:

From these announcements we learn that President Obama recognizes no difference between the Jewish-Christian covenant between a woman and a man (a covenant that they will have and nurture children, if they are so blessed), and a civil contract between two persons of any sex, in order to set up a household of affection and sexual favors.

This is a relapse into paganism. The point of monogamous family networks is to treat male and female with complementary and mutually cooperative dignity and to tie the power of sexuality (male, especially) to self-sacrificing communities of love.

There’s really too much to unpack here. It seems that Mr. Novak thinks gay men and women merely want to marry in order to share some minimal affection and trade sexual favors. Clearly Novak has never met one gay or lesbian couple who longs for the covenant of marriage to make their most deeply felt relationships both holy and whole. But the real laugher is that Novak calls Obama a pagan. Does Novak really believe that pagans were gay, or even that they did not respect committed relationships? The man is seriously deficient in his scholarly skills to make such a blanket statement, but hey, extremist partisanship such his will do that. Heck, his argument about Obama closing Gitmo is at least as ludicrous.

I suppose the point of all this is that Michael Novak reached waaay too far in his analogy in his attempt to discredit President Obama on his fifth day in office. The extremism of the attacks on Obama are increasing, and the extremists on the Republican side are starting to get their voices. And those voices are already spouting such ludicrous crap as to make any normal person laugh. Evidently the editors over at National Review Online are no longer normal.