You can’t beat the Left for the free exercise of ugly prejudices. Insistent voices signal their virtue about fashionable obsessions — race, class, and gender — but then let their own antipathies loose. There are verboten prejudices and permitted prejudices. But no principle.
Unrestrained contempt against Christians, for example, is not only allowed but encouraged. It’s especially applauded when directed against Catholics, for Church teaching is an impediment to the dogmas of modern secularism. It is therefore always open season on Catholics; just ask Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Catholicism is singled out even where its doctrines merely agree with those of other religions or, indeed, with those of humanism. Pro-abortion activists shout, “Get your rosaries off my ovaries,” as though civilized people (of most faiths and of none) have not abominated abortion since at least 400 B.C. It was then that the Hippocratic oath took a pro-life position with the words, “I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly, I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.”
The Left pretends that the facts fit its peculiar prejudices, but they don’t. Catholics are simply an unprotected caste.
Jew-hatred is also given indulgence and encouragement. It is ignorantly or disingenuously framed as mere opposition to Zionism rather than, in truth, being a recrudescence of an ancient visceral loathing. It is hard to square that pretense with pro-Palestinian demonstrators chanting, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas,” but the pretzel-logic Left manages it.
A different, peculiarly American, and particularly crude prejudice was presented as entertainment on CNN recently. Host Don Lemon was talking to two guests, Never Trump Republican strategist Rick Wilson and CNN contributor Wajahat Ali. Their subject was Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s ill-advised challenge to NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly to find Ukraine on a map. Naturally, she was able to do so.
CNN’s bien pensants used this incident as a springboard from which to mock President Trump’s voters. Wilson described them as the “credulous boomer rube” demographic, then mimicked them saying, ‘“Donald Trump’s the smart one — and y’all elitists are dumb.”
Ali chimed in, “You elitists with your geography and your maps — and your spelling … Your math and your reading! All those lines on the map.”
Lemon, for his part, simply displayed what is meant by someone “falling about laughing.” He collapsed forward, lowering his head to the desk, and gave full vent to his helpless mirth. Chortle, chortle! A good time was had by all.
Disdain for Trump voters has been parsed so many times that it would be tedious to rehash it. Suffice it to say that every time the great and good air their contempt, they show they don’t understand or don’t care about the biggest reason their gal lost in 2016; the belittling of “deplorables” is just too much fun to quit.
But what really struck me about the CNN mockers was how seamlessly they slipped into Southern accents as a way to convey stupidity. Long vowels tend to make Southern speech slower, and, to the Left, the people below the Mason-Dixon line are irredeemably tainted with the Confederacy, slavery, and racism. They are a caste beyond the protections of common courtesy.
Imagine if the speakers were Republicans or conservatives and they’d affected the intonations of African Americans to convey something similar. Sure, there was outrage about the Lemon gang’s juvenilia, but it was nothing compared to the detonation that would have followed such words being used to belittle a protected social group.
Any breath of bigotry directed against a protected caste is met with swift and condign punishment. The key is that prejudice must only be directed against unprotected people. If you are a member of an “out” group — white, a man, a person of a traditional religious faith, someone who believes what almost everyone believed just a decade or two ago — you are on your own, pal.
State this obvious fact and you’ll be accused of whining. The Twitter response to the insouciance of the Lemon luminaries was, naturally, mockery that complainers were behaving like the “snowflakes” they deride.
But that doesn’t cut it. What’s new about snowflakes is that they melt merely because someone expresses an opinion with which they disagree. A difference of opinion is not the same thing as braying mockery and deliberate insult. The former has always been accepted in open-minded and civilized society. The latter is something decent society used to reject. And, ironically, it is now used most often by those who think they are the conscience of the nation.
