BY DWEINER@LAW.HARVARD.EDU
If any conservative at HLS ever again tells me that he or she feels “silenced,” I think that I will be forced to make a trip to the emergency room or risk literally dying from excessive laughter. Yesterday I opened the RECORD to count not one, not two, not three, but FOUR right-wing editorials (with nary an unabashed liberal view in sight). Then again, perhaps my shock was a tad misplaced. It only takes one viewing session of Fox News to realize that catch phrases like “fair and balanced” are really nothing more than conservative doublespeak for “our opinion and nobody else’s because we are the only ones who value freedom, are patriotic, have religious values and love our mothers, unlike those godless, commie elitists on the other side.”
What I find particularly ironic is that I actually agreed with some of the opinions expressed. For example, I too think that black conservatives should be judged on their merits, not their skin color. I happen to think that Janice Rogers Brown is an un-mitigated ideologue who would be a disaster on the Bench, but that has nothing to do with her race. Similarly, I agree that it is offensive to assume that all white southerners are racist (particularly given the troubled racial history of many Northern cities), although I do deplore the choice of some of them to cling to the Confederate battle flag, a symbol of oppression and slavery for many.
Yet even when I agreed with the opinion being expressed, I found myself disgusted by these writers’ habit of engaging in rank personal attacks and distortion of the truth. Like the inestimable Vonn Christiensen, whose rantings we had the pleasure of reading a few weeks ago, the authors seem to be motivated less by a particular set of ideas than by bare animus towards people who may live and think differently than they do. Consequently they inhabit a strange bizarro universe where liberals are not just wrong, but “anti-freedom,” Judiciary Committee Democrats (and Prof. Guinier) are not just mistaken, but racist, and the ACS is not just intellectually lazy but a craven body made up of wannabe judicial dictators who hate ordinary people with every fiber of their being. This universe is presumably the same one inhabited by the gays and lesbians who are just using the stated desire to serve their country like everyone else without constantly have to lie about their significant others as a pretext to engage in non-stop public sodomy.
This is not a debate, it is a playground fist-fight. Conservatives don’t want to engage with liberals, they just want to beat us. Well boys and girls, you got what you wanted. The rest of us have left the sandbox. Enjoy.