Social conservatives are apparently muy upset about GQ‘s profile of Rand Paul’s college days. I take the tempest over the rather humanizing article on the candidate as further evidence of how fucking humorless the god-botherers are — as are people in general, these days, really, considering that Paul’s opponents are trying to make hay over the article, too. Frankly, details about Rand Paul’s history of hanging out with an underground, free-thinking, prankster-ish secret society at Baylor University, and his “kidnapping” of an entirely willing female friend in order to (unsuccessfully) persuade her to smoke grass, after which he and his buddy required her to “worship” Aqua Buddha (you see what grass does to you, kids?) before returning her safely and soberly home make him more likeable to me, not less.

Underlining the harmless nature of the whole matter, the woman in the Aqua Buddha incident told GQ “they never did anything wrong” and clarified the matter to the Washington Post by emphasizing her willing role:

“I went along because they were my friends,” she said. “There was an implicit degree of cooperation in the whole thing. I felt like I was being hazed.”

Apparently the woman in question wasn’t entirely pleased by the affair, but this was at a very religious college where Rand Paul was an outlier by being not uber-conservative and she seemed freaked out by the sacrilege inherent in the Aqua Buddha worship as well as the pot-smoking.

Would anybody really be more comfortable if Paul had fit in better at Baylor?