I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.
The meaning of that sentence, written by Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in 1993, seems pretty clear; if all the haters and racists announced, "We're going to knock it off now," most people would be pretty happy about it. In fact, I don't see how you could read that any other way. That is, unless you tried to.Which is exactly what many on the right are doing. The rightwing media needs an outrage of the week, especially now. With "Drill baby, drill!" becoming "Spill baby, spill!" and an underregulated Wall Street all but standing trial for fraud, a distraction is called for. Those are not the big problems facing the US -- because they're big fans of offshore drilling and an unregulated Wall Street. The big problem is a Democrat in the White House, which is always a terrible affront to the Founders. Ever since Ronald Reagan, the presidency has been a Republican birthright. But American voters apparently didn't get the memo. We go ahead and vote for Democrats occasionally anyway. Democracy's biggest flaw is that, sometimes, people who aren't Republicans get elected. Then, not understanding their place, these Democrats actually have the temerity to do stuff.
So, a centrist president becomes a frothing communist. It doesn't make any difference how liberal or conservative a Democrat is, it's just automatically the case. You might have noticed that people like Bill O'Reilly spend a lot of time talking about "the far left," but no time talking about the slightly left of center. There's a reason for that. For the right, the center is right where they stand. And if you've got any liberal tendencies at all, you're far to the left of where they stand. As a result, there's no such thing as left-leaning -- if you're on the left at all, you're on "the far left," since those to their left are still conservatives... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
