I’m not sure why right-wingers like Jim Hoft think that the left is supposed to be “tolerant” of people who are anti-gay activists. I suppose he’d like us to think of him as someone who simply has a difference of opinion, rather than as someone who promotes bigotry against gays and lesbians and who doesn’t seem to care how it impacts the lives of people when they are discriminated against under the cover of law.
The people who are losing television shows and their lofty spots as CEO’s and their basketball franchises are all hateful people who have said hateful things or taken actions to affirmatively discriminate against people. They can say what they want, but we are under no obligation to give them our money or to give our money to their advertisers.
I think what terrifies these folks is that they’re are being defined out of polite society. I’d say that that’s progress, except a polite society wouldn’t include college presidents who would even consider asking Condi Rice or other high-ranking Bush administration officials to give a commencement address. People of conscience still have work to do to make this a country that turns away from bigotry, torture, and needless war.
It’s a pretty straightforward application of the golden rule, really. The bigot’s offense against polite society is that he would exclude people from it, for no defensible reason. So he gets excluded.
Stephen, while I agree with the gist of your comment, the pendant in me can’t help but point out that excluding bigots from polite society because they would exclude people is not an example of the golden rule. It’s more like the old testament eye for an eye, or maybe karma.
I’ll let myself out now…
The pedant in me wonders if you’re hanging from a chain around someone’s neck.
The pendant in me is more of a Foucault pendulum than a necklace.
“Polite society,” eh?
Where? In the U.S.?
Please.
Does a polite society” produce murderous children? Children who murder other children?
Would a “polite society” accede to the shocking percentages of minority races in prison?
Would it commit atrocities in foreign countries over and over and over again? Hundreds of thousands dead, millions homeless, countless more millions of lives completely disrupted?
Allow its culture to be debased to the point that U.S. culture is currently debased?
Sit by while its educational system bottoms out? And I don’t just mean in poor areas, either. I teach in all levels of schools and so does my female friend, and I am here to tell you that the reading comprehension, listening comprehension and reasoning abilities in some of the richest public school districts in the country has plummeted over the last decade.
Plummeted.
Would a “polite society” repeatedly support…sponsor might be a better word… military juntas and neofascist coups in countries that are simply in the path of the economic imperialist policies of this nation?
Ain’t no “polite society” here, S.S. Not really. It’s just a fragile veneer draped over a rotting system to fool the foolish.
WTFU.
AG
When they say you are being unfair because you fight back, it means you are winning.
This.
The funny thing is that the trashbags have already lost on this issue, but are using it to alienate young people.
Please proceed, trashbags.
“…asking Condi Rice or other high-ranking Bush administration officials to give a commencement address.”
If you take Rutgers president’s word for it, they are simply “teaching to the controversy”, which has GOT to be the laziest teaching method ever to exist, if it even qualifies as “teaching”.
I’m sure that we could arrange for Condi Rice and John Yoo to be invited to give a commencement address at a university in The Hague.
With a “special event” to follow.
I’m fascinated by the psychology of this mode of conservative thinking. It’s based conservatives’ popular defensive mechanism of projection.
When a bigot does or says something that disrespects or denies rights to a class of people, progressives insist on tolerance and equal opportunity.
The bigot, who apparently considers bigots to be an underprivileged class of people, insists progressives aren’t being tolerant of the bigots and therefore are hypocritical.
You see this pattern of defense all over the place in conservative writing. It’s a twist of “logic” only a bigot could think up. But then they’re deeply steeped in fear and that is what the human mind does.
“I’m not sure why right-wingers like Jim Hoft think that the left is supposed to be “tolerant” of people who are anti-gay activists.”
Galloping sense of entitlement and privilege. Next?
I think he feels perfectly tolerant himself because he doesn’t recognize the humanity of those he wants to exclude–he’s tolerant of (straight, white, male, non-Communist, non-poor) liberals and why would they not reciprocate? Are they just mean? He can’t see how our definition of who’s in society is different from his.
These people don’t think of themselves as bigots. They justify their positions based on their reading of religion or tradition. They are NICE PEOPLE! They go to church. Why can’t the hippies leave them aloooooooooone!
Hell, there are still people around who believe anyone objecting to their racist and/or sexist opinions is being rude and intolerant. And most of them do the same mental reversal of reality — thinking that more people being less willing to put up with their shit means they are the ones being discriminated against.
Weep, weep, assholes.
Indeed. Cry us a fucking river. I have next-to-zero sympathy for people like this.
They really hate that, “Freedom of speech,” means anything other than, “Rich, well-connected people say what they think, and everybody else sits respectfully and listens.”
And don’t forget that they will always frame our responses to their nastiness by calling it “too much political correctness”.
“Political correctness” is the most used tool of the every day street-level conservative, and the actual meaning of this phrase is totally lost on them. This is a word that was seeded long ago on talk radio and is a convenient retort for those who are unable to explain their arguments in sentences. You say “political correctness”, and everyone in the tribe nods vigorously because, like Justice Potter Stewart remarked concerning pornography, they “know it when they see it”.
The particularly funny thing about this is that it’s just business for HGTV. HGTV’s audience skews heavily female and gay, not to mention towards educated viewers and higher income. Putting on a show with two anti-gay activists would be terrible for its ratings, and it wouldn’t just be that show that would suffer. It wouldn’t be quite as bad as putting on a KKK grand wizard on BET, but it would be pretty bad.
But of course the marketplace is supposed to work only in favor of the right, not the left.