The moral - or should that be amoral? - gymnastics that some folks practice never cease to amaze us. As we've learned over the past week, the Christmas holidays offer no respite from this Theater of the (Morally) Absurd. To wit:

As one ethically conflicted British clergyman informed the world a week or so ago, sometimes shoplifting - i.e., stealing, which, to the best of our recollection, is addressed in the Ten Commandments - is permissible . . . in a recession . . . and only so long as one pilfers from a big chain store and not a locally owned mom-and-pop establishment.

The Rev. Tim Jones, the Anglican priest who ministers to St. Lawrence Church in the northern city of York, did not drop this pearl of moral relativism in casual conversation, but actually made these distinctions in a Sunday sermon. "Thou shalt not steal" sounds like a blanket prohibition to us.

Oddly enough, last year the Rev. Jones went to a local market and removed Playboy magazines from the shelves, noting their bad influence on young children. A solid enough stance, to be sure, but we wonder what his reaction would be upon learning that one of his parishioners had been caught shoplifting the magazine.

If the Rev. Jones' descent into relativism were not one for the books, then the following exercise in creative legal reasoning certainly is. After allegedly running afoul of drug laws, James Dean Stacy, who started a medicinal marijuana "collective" near San Diego, is saying, in essence, that President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder "entrapped" him.

How so? Well, on the campaign trail, Mr. Obama repeatedly made the point that his Justice Department would cease aggressive raids on medicinal marijuana distributors. Mr. Holder echoed these words and pledged to follow through on that promise.

Feeling secure enough to engage his own entrepreneurial whimsy, Mr. Stacy opened his collective. But after telling undercover officers they could provide labor to the enterprise in exchange for marijuana and then inviting them to a "farmers market" where patients could buy directly from growers, he was charged with manufacturing marijuana and for conspiracy to manufacture and distribute the drug.

He is now mounting what can best be described as a novel defense. He says the statements made by Messrs. Obama and Holder amount to "entrapment by estoppel," meaning that the government busted him for something he was told was legal.

Hence, what we have here are the president and the attorney general - or at least their words - being hauled to the dock in a drug case. Theater of the Absurd? You bet.