Carrie Prejean recently became the most famous or infamous 21-year-old in America, depending on your definition of what a bigot is or is not.
When she was competing for the Miss USA title as Miss California, celebrity blogger Perez Hilton asked Prejean how she felt about gay marriage. Prejean gave her honest opinion: that it should be between a man and a woman. That, she added, is what she was raised to believe.
Inevitably, perhaps, the charges of bigotry followed. A student in my writing class at Johns Hopkins University dismissed Prejean as a “prejudiced woman,” except her second word wasn’t “woman,” but rather a well-known pejorative that begins with the letter “b.”
Hilton suggested that Prejean step down as Miss California, because her views on gay marriage don’t reflect those of all Californians.
In a column that I self-syndicate and send out nationwide (hey, a guy’s got to make an extra buck somehow), I compared Prejean to the unfortunate Maryland state official that former Gov. Robert Ehrlich fired a few years ago.
The man said on a cable television show that, as a Roman Catholic, he felt the gay lifestyle was sinful. I argued that his firing for expressing his personal religious views was unjust, since he hadn’t committed one discriminatory act against gays or lesbians in his job performance.
As I expected, that brought a couple of requests to stop sending the column to particular editors. I complied, or thought I had, but, my computer skills being what they are, a follow-up column, expressing the notion that the left slings around the term “bigot” much too liberally these days, brought this e-mail from a Midwestern editor who had requested that I stop sending the column:
“The point simply is that criticizing or ridiculing homosexual folks for being homosexual is more commonly seen as bigotry now. If people want to tell queer jokes, fine.
“But more people will find that offensive these days. While minstrel shows were regular entertainment in the 1950s, you don’t see your local Kiwanis Club staging them nowadays. And the common thread is bigotry.
“Condemning gays based on the biblical proscriptions is more complex. If one wants to condemn gay people to Hell based on his understanding of religion, have at it. I will defend their religious freedom while rejecting the dogma, same as I would if these enlightened souls started lining up to stone fornicators and adulterers.”
I was surprised that a guy who defined himself as a “conservative libertarian” wouldn’t be more leery of the way the forces of left-wing tyranny have tried to hijack the English language. When I sent him an e-mail asking him if Prejean’s comments about gay marriage rose to the offensive level of “queer jokes,” condemning gays to hell, minstrel shows or stoning anyone, I got no response.
That’s probably because Mr. Conservative-Libertarian knows that, a few years ago, Michigan Rep. John Conyers resorted to sheer demagoguery in the debate about affirmative action at the University of Michigan. (Conyers called the Bush administration’s position a “Plessy v. Ferguson moment,” knowing full well it wasn’t.) Left-wing thought police made similar comments when the Supreme Court shot down “diversity” plans for public schools in Seattle and Louisville.
All these charges of racism and bigotry are made to stifle debate about controversial issues like affirmative action and gay marriage.
Proponents of the blatant racial preferences that pass for affirmative action don’t really want to answer the question of why the child of a black family making $100,000 and living in, say, Howard County in Maryland should have an edge in college admissions over a poor white family in Baltimore making $20,000, whose child scored higher on the SATs and has a better grade point average.
So it’s easier to just dismiss those who raise the question as racists. It’s easier to dismiss proponents of traditional marriage as bigots than to answer questions about whether changing traditional marriage will lead to polygamy, or the lowering of the minimum age to marry.
“One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion not your own” is how Ambrose Bierce defined bigot in the late 1800s. Boy, was that guy born in the wrong century.
Examiner columnist Gregory Kane is an award-winning journalist who lives in Baltimore.
