Morally Correct

[rodeodance]

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041129&s=trb112904

Morally Correct

by Peter Beinart

Post date: 11.18.04
Issue date: 11.29.04
Once upon a time, conservatives considered "sensitivity" a dirty word. In the 1980s and 1990s, when African Americans and other campus minorities claimed they were victims of racism and demanded greater respect from white students and faculty, conservatives popularized a term for this group whining: political correctness. They gasped when campus radicals tried to silence criticism of affirmative action by saying it created a hostile climate for black students. They worried aloud that university administrators--in their efforts to spare minority students' feelings--were stifling debate. For a time, combating this culture of punitive sensitivity was one of the right's primary concerns.

Not anymore. In the wake of their recent triumph at the polls, conservatives have found their own supposedly disrespected minority: evangelicals. And they are playing victim politics with a gusto that would make campus radicals proud.

One of the things that galled the right during the "political correctness" wars was the way leftists casually threw around terms like "racist" and "bigot." For conservatives, some of whom knew firsthand how much harm those accusations could cause, it became axiomatic that such pejoratives should be reserved for only the most egregious, clear-cut examples of racial or ethnic animus. After Trent Lott--a man who had long consorted with white supremacists--praised Strom Thurmond's segregationist 1948 presidential bid, many conservatives called him dumb and embarrassing. (To their credit, some called for his removal as Senate leader.) But very few were willing to call him a bigot. Few would pin the label even on Jesse Helms or Thurmond himself. Extreme scrupulousness about such epithets seemed like a touchstone of the conservative worldview. ....

[no_hypocrisy]

1. For the next 4 years, you're gonna hear a lot about persecution of

Christians. In schools, in courts, in the media, at public hearings, in stores. You name it. You will think you are living in Communist China and the government is attacking the disenfranchised and humble masses of the faithful.

That is the gameplan for chipping away at the wall of separation between church and state. The Establishment Clause will have a new set of legal precedence once the new federal judges are installed.

[MemphisTiger]

2. I've seen this happening in the south...

The fundies around here will say all day long that they are persecuted; even though it is the Christians around here that run everything around here so they can cry me a river. They act like the government owes them a 10 commandments monument or a holy war to get rid of all of the Ayrabbs. These people disgust me.