They’ll tolerate you as long as you don’t deviate from their orthodoxy.

–James Taranto, Best of the Web, May 17, 2012

Due to the bigoted, bullying, anti-Christian tirade of the Obama Administration’s partner in “anti-bullying”….

…this blog has had its highest traffic in 2 years.

BWAHAHAHA.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I just noticed this quote from Savage’s wild-eyed bullying tirade…

“There is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding nights if they’re not virgins — at least not yet,” Savage said. “We don’t know where the GOP is going these days.”

“People are dying because people can’t clear this one last hurdle,” he said. “They can’t get past this one last thing in the Bible — about homosexuality.

If I didn’t know better, I would think he was criticizing Islamic governments around the world that routinely stone women & hang gays NOW. I don’t recall an American government official doing anything of the sort in at least 50 years. And back then, it would have most likely been a Democrat.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Released in the last hour… GOPROUD condemns Dan Savage.

Jimmy LaSalvia, GOProud Executive Director – “Dan Savage’s outrageous anti-Christian tirade hurts – not helps – the fight for gay rights in this country.”

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, GOProud – a national organization of gay and straight Americans seeking to promote freedom by supporting free markets, limited government, and a respect for individual rights, condemned a speech given by left wing gay activist Dan Savage. “Dan Savage’s outrageous anti-Christian tirade hurts – not helps – the fight for gay rights in this country,” said Jimmy LaSalvia, GOProud Executive Director. “There is nothing incompatible between being a Christian and believing that all people should be treated equally, and Dan Savage’s attacks on Christianity only fuel those on the extremist fringe who oppose gay rights.”

“Dan Savage should apologize for his comments and should apologize to the high school students in attendance who he called ‘pansy-asses,’” continued LaSalvia. “It is ironic that someone whose claim to fame is fighting bullying would resort to bullying tactics in attacking high school students who were offended by his outrageous remarks.”

“GOProud works with people of faith every single day – gay and straight. We believe strongly that people of faith should be treated with respect,” concluded LaSalvia.

Bravo.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

This morning I was greeted with a message from someone on Twitter I had never heard of before.

Here is her Twitter profile.

And here was her lovely message to me….

I hope my Mom… or hers…. doesn’t read this posting. 

Classy.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

In his monologue yesterday, Rush Limbaugh reflected on a theme which John Podhoretz considered in his column on the Supreme Court arguments over Obamacare and, as I put it yesterday, “the failure of all too many in the chattering classes to appreciate the merits of conservative arguments“.

On the astonished reaction of liberals to the poor arguments the administration made before the Supreme Court in defense of the president’s signature initiative, the talker explained:

It’s eye-opening.  I really want to be serious about this.  They’re a bunch of overhyped know-nothings who do not have an expansive view of the world.  They’re in a prison that’s created by their own conceit.  They’re in a prison that’s the result of their own arrogance and they live in a place where there is no reality.

. . . .

Now, let me go through some of Hayward’s piece here to try to be illustrative of what I’m talking about.  “The Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Month for the Left.”[*]  I’m not gonna read the whole thing.  I’m gonna take excerpts here.  “It is typical for politically engaged people to note the weaknesses and defects of their own side…” No, that’s what’s remarkable; they don’t.  There are no weaknesses. There are no defects, until they’re confronted with them.  They do not conceive them. (Continuing reading excerpt) “…while overestimating the strength and prowess of their opponents.”  That’s us.  That’s what we have always done, and hopefully no more.  There’s no reason to ever feel inferior to these people.  There’s no reason to grant them superior or elite status in any way.

Via Powerline picks.  And Rush invites the question:  why do some on the left refuse to acknowledge the weaknesses in their own arguments?  Or the merits of their opponents’?

* (more…)

In the New York Post today, John Podhoretz has a great piece which, in looking at some liberal commentators’ reaction to the Supreme Court arguments over Obamacare, considers the failure of all too many in the chattering classes to appreciate the merits of conservative arguments:

The panicked reception in the mainstream media of the three-day Supreme Court health-care marathon is a delightful reminder of the nearly impenetrable parochialism of American liberals.

They’re so convinced of their own correctness — and so determined to believe conservatives are either a) corrupt, b) stupid or c) deluded — that they find themselves repeatedly astonished to discover conservatives are in fact capable of a) advancing and defending their own powerful arguments, b) effectively countering weak liberal arguments and c) exposing the soft underbelly of liberal self-satisfaction as they do so.

Read the whole thing, and as you do, ponder why all too many in the chattering classes so regularly dismiss the intelligence of conservatives and the merits of our arguments.

Via Powerline picks.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, it does seem that conservatives are more tolerant of their friends with opposing political points of view than liberals.  We may have anecdotal evidence for that notion, but can’t regularly confirm that hypothesis with actual scientific data.  Well, today, we have some data to work with.

The “Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project posed a series of questions about people’s general use of SNS [Social networking sites] for politics and about the ways in which they interact with friends on the sites over political material. One goal of the survey was to see if people are using the sites in a way that suggests they live in social network “echo chambers” of like-minded friends.”  And what they found confirmed our hypothesis:

Liberals are the most likely to have taken each of these steps to block, unfriend, or hide. In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates.

Introducing the study, Ed Morrissey (to whom I tip my hat for this story), quipped “Superior liberal tolerance is such a fact that they will scream at you if you dare to disagree or debate them, demand that your advertisers bail on you, and pressure the FCC to get you banned from the airwaves.”  The 2010 CPAC blogger of the year also quotes Andrew Malcolm who, as Ed puts it, “has some fun with the implications:”

Not exactly shocking news for those exposed to them for years, but the respected Pew Research Center has determined that political liberals are far less tolerant of opposing views than regular Americans. (more…)

Our reader V the K linked this report about Sandra Fluke’s distaste for opposing points of view:

As a student at Cornell and treasurer of a pro-choice organization at the school, Sandra Fluke, helped shut down a pro-life speech on Cornell’s campus by counter protesting. She argued that a pro-life organization at Cornell was about “manipulating [students'] emotions” with misleading statistics about abortion.

So, if this organization offered misleading statistics, why then didn’t Ms. Fluke take it upon herself to demonstrate their inaccuracy and argue the merits of her own position?  If this story is true [and it appears it may not be*], this woman is not much interested in debating ideas, but in preventing the airing of views with which she disagrees.

In this, she has much in common with her ideological confrères in the Occupy Movement.

Just over a week ago, “unruly Occupy students at American University in Washington, D.C., shouted down Republican governor Jan Brewer of Arizona on Friday, forcing her to flee the room with aid from security guards.”  H/t:  Instapundit.

This week, they disrupted “a panel discussion [at AIPAC] led by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami, FL led a discussion about Stopping Iran: Can the West End Iran’s Nuclear Drive?”

In the fall of 1964, liberal students at the University of California/Berkeley launched the “Free Speech Movement”; they wanted to end the school policy preventing student groups from operating “on campus if they engaged in any kind of off-campus politics, whether electoral, protest or even oratorical.”  Now, liberal students want to prevent their ideological adversaries from expressing their views.

They times, they are a-changing.

* (more…)

What remains striking about the LA Times Op-Ed that I linked and critiqued earlier today is that the paper’s editors chose to publish it.

Now, to be sure, its author is representative of a certain type of liberal, she is not representative of American liberals in general. Indeed, many of us on the right have left-leaning friends who hold political views similar to the columnist, yet don’t shun people merely because of their politics.  As our reader sonicfrog relates in the comments:

My partner in the duo band Taylor Martin is a Socialist… No, not the socialist lite that many consider Obama to be, but a real card carrying Socialist / Communist. And he’s not quiet about it either. He’s a political hot-head and talks about how evil capitalism is all the time. Yet, we get along just fine.

I would dare say that he’s not the only GayPatriot reader (nor indeed the only right-of-center American) to have such friends.  By the same token, many (if not most) liberals have conservative friends with whom they continue to associate (and whose company the often enjoy) despite their political differences.

With that in mind, I ask agin, “What were the Times editors thinking when they accepted this piece of publication?”  Did they want to discourage liberal readers from befriending conservatives? Did they think she could serve as a role model? Or did they just want to make excuses for their own ideological isolation, explaining away their paucity of conservative friends and associates?

In reading this woman’s piece, we can see that, boy, she does have her issues, projecting her prejudices onto conservatives, contending we lack empathy– even as she provides evidence that they are.  And saying we’re not kind.

She assumes that should her conservative neighbor fall on hard times, he might well question his feeling “that the government shouldn’t be helping anybody out” as if he had never factored bad things happening to people into his political calculus.  Many of us righties do.  And that’s why most of us donate generously to charities.  (Is she aware of surveys showing conservatives to be more generous than liberals?)

One wonders why this woman refused to take the time and attempt to empathize with her conservative neighbor.  It does seem a kind person would at least consider his neighbor’s opinions.

Sometimes you read a column by a liberal that seems it was written by a conservative to caricature his ideological adversaries. And when you realize it’s probably legitimate, you wonder at the editors who approve this piece for publication.  Are they so contained within their liberal bubble that they’re blind to how narrow their ideological confrère might comes across to someone with a broader perspective?

Such were my thoughts when I chanced upon this Op-Ed in a paper I used to receive every morning on my doorstep.  The author writes about a political argument that changed her feelings for neighbors she describes as “the best neighbors in the world. Always ready with a tool, an ingredient or a jump-start for the car. Whatever you need, if they have it, they will give it. They are a lovely family: husband, wife and four smart, funny, polite children. I was sure they were Democrats.”

Already there, we see her prejudice, assuming that nice people must be Democrats.

When while playing poker and drinking with the author and her spouse, the aforementioned husband, a white man married to a black woman announced that that tea party was not racist, indeed, that he was part of that dynamic grassroots movement. The argument became heated.  Insults exchanged.

The following morning, the tea party conservative came over with his wife to apologize.  His contrition, however, could not soften the hardened heart of his erstwhile hostess:

But my feelings about them are changed. I cannot respect them as I did before. And as they headed back across the street, I saw the look they gave each other: They don’t like us anymore either.

How does she know what that look meant?  Well, we do know what she feels.  She spells it out pretty clearly

I don’t want to be friends with someone who is a member of the tea party or is a Newt Gingrich Republican. We are not the same. I equate their political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. (more…)

Particularly since I moved to Los Angeles, I’ve observed that for many on the left cultural issues account for their political leanings.  So focused are they on such issues as abortion and gay marriage that they assume these are the defining issues for the two major political parties in the United States.  In reality, they are the defining issues only for them.

Even as they express frustration at the burdens of federal regulation (see, e.g., this example of the regulatory state run amok*) and appreciation for the merits of the free market system, they refuse to back a political party that supports restrictions on abortion, even if they recognize the merits of its economic policies.  And as they fault their party for being beholden to such special interests as public employee unions and environmental extremists.

Many of us saw this last week on Facebook when some of our liberal friends went apoplectic when the Susan G. Komen Foundation, a breast cancer charity, announced it was temporarily suspending its funding of Planned Parenthood.  And although the foundation may have been trying, as James Taranto put it, “to extricate itself from the divisive national battle over abortion by severing its connection with a leading combatant,” some saw the action to kowtowing to pro-lifers.

Before the foundation backed down, its leaders weren’t taking sides, merely attempting to “back out of” the battle.

“The implication here,” writes Timothy P. Carney in the Washington Examiner, “is that giving money to the abortion lobby has nothing to do with the culture wars, but not giving them money somehow does.”

*Via Instapundit

UPDATE:  Apparently, George Will believes abortion is the defining issue of the American left: (more…)

Religion of Peace Alert! (via @BillyHallowell)

A disturbing trial came to a close this week in London, England, after three men were convicted of distributing pamphlets that called for gays and lesbians to be murdered. The hateful fliers were disturbing at best. One of them, titled, “Death Penalty?,” showed a mannequin that was hanging from a noose and said that gays should be sent to hell.

“The death sentence is the only way this immoral crime can be erased from corrupting society and act as a deterrent for any other ill person who is remotely inclined in this bent way.”

The leaflet continues: “The only dispute amongst the classical authorities was the method employed in carrying out the penal code.”

It goes on to offer burning, being flung from a high point such as a mountain or building, or being stoned to death as suitable methods.

It’s okay, the real threat to gays (according to American gay leftist/progressive types) is Rick Santorum. 

Move along, nothing to see here.  Except the truth.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Ever since college, I have blessed with friends and teachers holding political views opposed to my own.  My favorite political science professor in college was — and remains — a Marxist.  One of my favorite professors in law school has since become one of the leading liberal jurist in the country.

These professors, like many liberals, strive to respond to conservative arguments without insulting the person making them or questioning his motives or his awareness of current events.   They know that people can hold viewpoints different from their own and arrive at them through legitimate means.

All too often, however, we conservatives find that whenever we articulate a politically incorrect viewpoint or express considered opposition to the incumbent administration, our left-of-center interlocutors express incredulity that a supposedly intelligent individual could say such things.  A woman who overheard a visiting reader and I criticizing the president at a Los Angeles restaurant, turned around to accuse us of racism.  She later relented in her rebuke when I explained why the incumbent has failed (she had actually thought the Democrat had cut the federal budget!).

And then there are the reactions when we dare take issue with articles my left-of-center friends link — or arguments they make — on Facebook.  Today, when I said the president’s campaign theme was at odds with a much-linked (by lefties) video of the Democrat singing a song about staying together, dubbing Obama a divider, this friend all but cut and paste the response of other liberal friends when I call a liberal shibboleth into question:  ”just because one sees it on fox does not make it true.”  Some, to be sure, call the news network, “FauxNews” (and think they’re so clever in doing so).

Which all leads to the question (repeatedly asked):  why are so many supposedly intelligent people so ready to dismiss opposing arguments without even considering them — and remain ready as well to attack the ideas’ advocates.

All gay and lesbian conservatives seem to have one experience in common, that of facing the hostile prejudice of our liberal peers.  Some (but fortunately not all) of our ideological adversaries ever so quick to deem any opposition to their agenda as “hateful” seem to harbor themselves a lot of hatred toward individuals who do not share their political predilections.

And although we read much in our culture about the animus social conservatives have for homosexuals, we see little coverage of the animus some gay leftists feel for gay conservatives.  In the seven years (and three months) I have been blogging, I have received nearly twenty times as much hate mail from liberals than I have received from social conservatives.  Why do these people hate so much?

One gay conservative addressed this hatred in a rant that has gotten some attention in the gay media.  Now, we may find his tone and rhetoric a bit overblown, but we do share some of his sentiments, having experienced the same intolerance from our supposedly very tolerant peers.  And a certain point, you become immune to their taunts and amused by their absence of imagination.  Just finding a different means of expressing the trite expression, “Jewish Nazi,” doesn’t make you original.

As GOProud Board Member Lisa De Pasquale detailed the other day in the Daily Caller:

Dan Savage, the “It Gets Better” project’s co-founder, has been just as vicious toward gay conservatives as schoolyard bullies have been toward their gay classmates. In an MSNBC interview, Savage referred to the members of GOProud, an organization of gay conservatives, as “gay Quislings and useful idiots.” He said they were just “window dressing” for bigoted Republicans. Like a schoolyard bully, Savage ridicules people who are different from him.

And Savage is not alone.

Fortunately, he is not representative of all of his ideological confreres.  Many of us have strong friendships with gay left-wingers, some of whom respect us as individuals despite our philosophical and political differences, others who delight in needling us for our differences — as we needle them for theirs. (more…)

Let me get this out of the way first:  I am no fan of Rep. Bachmann.  I would not vote for her and I believe her social views are out of the mainstream of American conservatism, not to mention mainstream America.

HOWEVER…. she has been a steady voice of reason on the disaster of Obamacare and the perils of our national debt.  Topics that the presumptive nominee, Mr. Romney, seems to avoid at all costs.  So for her determination to engage in these topics, both in Congress and in the GOP nomination race, I congratulate her.

And finally the real reason I am writing this post….

I am disgusted at the way Rep. Bachmann was treated by the (mostly left-leaning) media and the political punditry class.  She was routinely derided for her faith and for being a female candidate.  This has become a sad routine in American politics:  Female candidates and Christian candidates are the targets in the last bastion of mainstream media bigotry.  One can only reflect on how Sarah Palin & Hillary Clinton were treated in 2008 to be as disgusted now with how Rep. Bachmann was treated.

For all of the self-congratulatory praise that American liberals in the media heap upon themselves… their attitude toward women and Christians during the past 20 years has degraded toward barbarism.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

UPDATE (from Dan):  Uncanny yet again how similar our thoughts are.  Visiting my hometown (Cincinnati) right now and was driving around with my brother when I heard the news.  I outlined a quick post on her withdrawal which I will post later today.  You’ll then seen how Bruce and I have different ways of expressing similar thoughts.

Saw this on Jimmy LaSalvia’s Facebook page. We’ve all met guys like this short’s protagonist.

So, Republicans who oppose President Obama’s high-cost “Jobs Bill” are guilty of economic sabotage or pace the New York Times, “economic vandalism.”

Now once again, as Sonicfrog reports, some folks on the left are taking to calling conservatives “dumb”:

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across this silliness.   I’ve also seen the same applied to Victor Davis Hanson, and to Freeman Dyson.  Why are they “dumb“? Because they have differing opinions on issues than liberals do, such as Hanson’s views on immigration and Dyson’s refusal to march lock-step with the sky-is-falling global warming crowd.

Note to the smug liberal crowd  -  Just because someone has differing views than you do, that doesn’t mean they are dumb! You simply have differing views on things.  Period.

Emphasis added.  You know, they’ve been doing this at least since the 1950s.  It does seem that in order to spare themselves the difficulty of answering conservative challenges or intellectual rigor of addressing conservative ideas, they just label conservatives dumb so they can have done with it.

Wonder if this attitude comes from the paucity of conservatives on the faculties of our nation’s leading colleges and universities.

On Facebook, a liberal friend (in both the Facebook and real sense of the word) linked this video where U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), imagining conversations with Republican friends, repeated the Democratic talking point that Republicans are deliberating sabotaging the economy in order to hurt the Democratic president.

Note how Miss Sanchez refused to identify a single Republican who has said that he wants to sabotage the economy.

Her contention reeks of both dishonesty and laziness.   “To suggest,” as I commented to my friend’s post, “that because another political party has another means to address the nation’s problems, they are therefore deliberately hurting Americans” shows an incredible failure to appreciate opposing arguments.

“It’s one thing,” I added, “to say she doesn’t believe Republican policies will work; quite another to say they’re deliberately hurting people. Her remarks define narrow-minded. If we had an even-handed media, editorialists would be taking folks like her to task for this narrow, this nonsensical, talking point.”  Instead, we have the one-time paper of record echoing Democratic demagoguery.

Why are Democrats like Mr. Obama and Miss Sanchez and editorialists like those at the New York Times so unwilling to acknowledge the sincerity of Republican opposition to Democratic policies, particularly in the light of the cost of the latter and the emptiness of federal coffers?  Not to mention the failure of a plan similar to the president’s jobs bill (though slightly larger) enacted shortly after Mr. Obama took office to achieve its objectives.

Simply put, Republicans don’t believe the plan would work.  And if Republicans were trying to sabotage the economy, why did they insist on extending the tax rates set during the Bush administration (AKA the Bush tax cuts) and support “three free-trade agreements that the president also backed“.

Addressing the contention some gay liberals that “gay people cannot be conservative”, Naamloos wonders at their assumption “that since liberals are more supportive of gay rights than conservatives, that gays should be liberal and conservative gays are self-loathing,” faulting them for making “a flawed assumption“:

And that assumption is that gay people are one-dimensional, or that they have no other qualities, or perhaps their sexual orientation is the most important aspect of them.  While that may be true for some people, it certainly isn’t for others.  For them, it seems, gay rights issues trump all others.  So, it follows that, since liberals are better on gay rights issues, it doesn’t make any sense for a gay person not to be a liberal.

I would build on his description of this “flawed assumption,” adding that those who assume gays can neither be conservative nor support the Republican Party without hating themselves also have other concerns besides gay rights (as defined by the various left-leaning “equality” groups headquartered in our nation’s capital).

We believe that conservative policies better respect the separation of powers as set forth in the federal constitution (and elucidated in the Federalist) — and better provides for the common defense.  Not just that, we believe the big government approach favored by the Democrats serves to limit our freedom, reducing opportunities for all Americans, particularly those, such as gay people, who differ from the societal norm.

The freer the market, we believe, the better private institutions can address social change  – (more…)