Desperate, champion-starved Cleveland sports fans prematurely elevated a talented young athlete to the basketball monarchy by proclaiming 22-year-old LeBron James "King James."  He is a well-spoken, well-mannered, and well-liked hometown boy, one of the most visible role models in the country.  He's building a 30,00 square-foot home in a pleasant suburban neighborhood (of much smaller homes) for his girlfriend and their children, so when the materially obsessed Cleveland Plain Dealer asked its readers the fatuous question, "What should LeBron buy next?", the most frequent answer was "a wedding ring for the mother of his children."

Shortly thereafter, the following letter from a Matt Harmon of South Euclid, Ohio, appeared on the Plain Dealer's editorial page:

Must The Plain Dealer insist on printing the hate speech of religious zealots?  The fanatics who continuously pelt LeBron James with their harsh criticism of his marital status are no better than the extremists we fight overseas.

The beauty of democracy and the principles for which our soldiers continue to die is that we are allowed the freedom to worship as we see fit.  LeBron and his girlfriend are well within their rights not to bind themselves to a legal contract.  Love is thicker than parchment.

With half of all marriages ending in divorce, perhaps those with complaints for LeBron would do better to focus on the quality of their own unions.

Mr. Harmon's letter wouldn't be worth a response, except that it's a good example of the muddled thinking that makes political discourse so messy lately.  Where does one begin in responding to a statement obviously based on so many false assumptions?  I guess one must start with great patience at the beginning.

Logic is turned on its head by the leftist, media-nurtured view that healthy skepticism about half-baked ideas that reject time-proven practical traditions makes the skeptic himself the radical extremist.  Anyone who hates LeBron probably doesn't care whether he gets married or not.  Those who want him to marry his girlfriend and legitimize his children want only the best for him.  Since when is urging a man to be the best man he can be "hate speech"?  No one is even threatening to behead him.  Would the opposite, encouraging all black men to knock up as many "ho's" as possible, be hate speech?  

The vast majority of people in all cultures support the institution of marriage.  To assert that this makes them "fanatics" is absurd.  Is the family unit necessarily an exclusively religious idea?  Of course not.  Family units persist in force because they work.  Every religious person is not a religious zealot.  If Mr. Harmon had to plead for his life before a would-be murderer, would anyone seriously scoff at him for being a "religious zealot"?

To say that LeBron's fans' (distinguished from fanatics) wishing he would set a good example to his hero-worshippers is "continuously pelt[ing]" him with "harsh criticism" is nonsense.  The expectation that a man will get married before he has children has never been called "harsh" before, because the word was unthinkable in this context before the regrettable rise of the undereducated left.

Mr. Harmon echoes sound principles when he cites religious freedom as a cause requiring ongoing blood sacrifice, but nobody knows or cares what Mr. James's religious belief are, for they are irrelevant.  A marriage is not merely a contract between two people, but a change in legal status involving a third party, the state.  It is in the state's interest to encourage stability in family relationships so that we won't be overrun by packs of feral bastards.  Some states abdicated this responsibility by enacting no-fault divorce statutes that make dissolution relatively easy and by subordinating the healthy childhoods of future community leaders to the narcissism of their parents.  If love were thicker than parchment, then most paper mills would have gone out of business long ago.

Mr. Harmon suggests that people should not encourage others to get married because the divorce rate shows that marriage is perhaps not such a good thing.  The rumor that half of all marriages end in divorce has been disproved by census data, and the higher divorce rates caused by 1970s radical feminist attacks on the institution of marriage waned as people rediscovered the human nature they had been told to reject.  The single thing that pushes the divorce rate up is disrespect for the institution of marriage.  As long as divorce is an easy choice, like switching cell-phone networks or having an abortion, it will continue to be a threat to (rather than a last-resort safeguard for) families.  If divorce were not so convenient, people would have to think twice before choosing their life partners.  Even good marriages are hard, and the more easily they can be undone, the more frequently they will be undone.

Mr. Harmon's outrage of outrages, however, is this equation:  Anyone who supports marriage is a religious zealot.  Islamofascists are also religious zealots.  All religious zealots are equivalent.  Therefore, people who support marriage are no better than—perhaps even worse than?—those who invoke the name of God in murdering as many innocent children as possible to earn a gold key to a heavenly whorehouse.

Whether Mr. Harmon is a teenager educated in the public schools, an aging 1960s hippy who missed the evolutionary train through yuppidom, or just a senile crank who writes stupid letters to the editor all the time, he certainly moved the discussion of the Cleveland's NBA championship loss from the superficial to the existential.

LeBron James, as good a man as he already is, might say he's not a role model, but such protests are always in vain.  Everyone is a role model in some way, and no one can avoid it.  But everyone CAN choose what kind of a role model he is.  The best thing an adult can do for a child is set a good example.  Setting a bad example does not make one any less of a role model, just a bad one.