Liberal Hate Speech on the Rise

Intellectual Conservative ^ | April 21, 2008 | Carey Roberts

[az4vlad]

Speaking at an April 4 awards banquet, Village Voice editor Mike Lacey let slip the N-word. The fact that his remark was uttered exactly 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King didn't help matters. Lacey didn't mean any harm, of course, and he issued the required apology.

This wasn't the first time Mr. Lacey has crossed the boundaries of good taste - a few years ago he publicly defended Jesse Jackson when he referred to New York City as "Hymietown."

But Lacey stands in good company.

The discovery of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's expletive-laced sermons and anti-Semitic rants plunged the Obama campaign into full damage-repair mode. And Barack triggered an uproar when he remarked about down-on-their-luck voters, "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."

Soon Barack turned on Hillary. During a Pennsylvania campaign stop he twice stuck his opponent with the harsh, "Shame on her." Mocking her new-found support for gun rights, he compared her to a warmed-over Annie Oakley.

So much for Barack the Unifier.

Candidate Hillary Clinton has made her share of caustic remarks as well, often directing her barbs at members of the male species.

Shortly after she announced her candidacy, Clinton traveled to Iowa to press the flesh. In response to a question about persons like Osama bin Laden, she responded with a sly grin, "And what in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men?"

And hours before she pulled off her New Hampshire primary upset, Hillary regaled the audience with this biting stereotype: "the remnants of sexism are alive and well."

Not so long ago, liberalism was synonymous with tolerance and open-mindedness. If you weren't of the liberal ilk, you were almost suspected of being a closet bigot.

But in the last decade, the good name of liberalism has gone to the gutter.

Remember the racist, thick-lipped caricatures of Condi Rice when she was named Secretary of State? Recall former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill who blamed the 9/11 attack on the victims themselves? And how is it that modern liberalism has come to embrace resurgent anti-Semitism?

Then there's the suppression of free speech on college campuses.

At Colorado College, the Feminist and Gender Studies Program produces the Monthly Rag. The latest issue featured an excerpt from The Bitch Manifesto and a vulgar discussion of "packing" in which a woman creates the appearance of a male genitalia under her clothes.

But when a group of men issued its own flyer satirizing the Monthly Rag, progressive administrators charged the students with violating the campus speech code.

So how did liberalism devolve into a wellspring of potty-mouth rants, crude stereotypes, and campus intolerance?

Part of the reason, I'm convinced, is the ever-strengthening grip of radical feminist ideology on the liberal conscience.

Were you in New Orleans this past weekend? If not, do you realize you missed Jane Fonda's reading of The Vagina Monologues at the Super Dome?

Actress Kerry Washington was also there. She was particularly touched because the Monologues compares a woman's vagina to New Orleans and the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. (I'm not making this up!)

Recently I had the unpleasant task of reading Catherine MacKinnon's 1989 tome, Toward a Feminist Theory of State. Now required reading in women's studies programs, the book is best described as the Mein Kampf of the radical feminist movement.

While Mein Kampft blamed Aryans' woes on an alleged international Jewish plot, Toward a Feminist Theory of State sees men as secretly aligned in a vast anti-woman conspiracy.

MacKinnon alarms the reader with improbable statistics such as "85% of working women will be sexually harassed," and "one-fifth of American women have been or are known to be prostitutes."

She then concludes that "the major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it."

By reducing females to docile and helpless creatures who lack moral agency, MacKinnon does an enormous disservice to women. In the end, her high-octane screed epitomizes gender intolerance at its worst.

Five years after MacKinnon's book was published, along came Sen. Joe Biden's Violence Against Women Act. That became the occasion for another round of male-bashing.

Just imagine, I once believed the liberal agenda would bring about a kinder, gentler existence to our planet. Now I'm beginning to have my doubts. I suspect many Americans will have the same thought come Election Day.

[popdonnelly]

Do you think maybe these folks are bitter?

[infantrywhooah]

It’s not on the rise, the libs have always used it. They preach they are the people’s party but behind closed doors they still consider blacks to be “untermensch”. It’s just now it’s becoming more fashionable as that party spirals more and more out of control.

[snoringbear]

“I once believed the liberal agenda would bring about a kinder, gentler existence to our planet. Now I'm beginning to have my doubts.”

Well, I suppose that is progress, such as it is. Personally, I have never doubted liberals for what they are - arrogant, condescending, elitists who believe the rest of us are too stupid to run our own lives without their supervision. And, they want me to give them my guns...

[Prokopton]

Personally, I have never doubted liberals for what they are - arrogant, condescending, elitists who believe the rest of us are too stupid to run our own lives without their supervision

I'm afraid we have gotten to the point where all politicians fit into this category, Republican or Democrat.

[Billthedrill]

There's nothing in the least "fair" about the radical approach to "free" speech. A class claiming to be oppressed arrogates to itself rights that it has no intention of sharing, based on the lie that such rights were commonly denied it in the past and hence may be legitimately be denied by it to others. One law for everybody has no place in this Balkanized little political delusion.

Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff wrote a book on the topic come years ago - Free Speech For Me - Not For Thee. Some of the examples are a bit dated - Anita Bryant, for one - but the theme is more true now then when it was written. Speech codes are power plays, and what is significant about them isn't the specific speech they cover but the ability of authority to render and enforce them.

[I still care]

They’ve always talked this way. Now that they’ve created their very own monster, they are amazed that they are actually being called on it.

[I see my hands]

Scroll down just a bit for the vid.

[Ouderkirk]

President Hillary

Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Senate Majority Leader Diane Feinstein,

Will institute a new era of Jim Crow against men.