It's time for my bi-annual serious post.
I read this evening over on TBOGG about a haunted house for teens that turned out to be one of those church-sponsored "Hallloween isn't nearly as scary as what's gonna happen to you in hell, sinner" kind of haunted houses, and a lot of more secular folks are pissed.
I was struck, as I am frequently when I read little political flareup stories like this, by how different the reactions between the left-leaning and rightleaning sites tend to be when the event is caused by a stereotypical boneheaded move from a left-leaning entity.
Oh, don't get me wrong, there was a lot of ridicule, and rudeness, and nasty things said about them; rudeness is gloriously bipartisan. But there's a fundamental additional level to the reactions of the mainstream right, when they disagree with your political or cultural stance, a serious and dangerous one, and one that I don't see anywhere other than on the fringes of the left.
Usually, those reactions take the form of people muttering that there's far too much free speech, and that some folks ought to be shut down, and maybe even hinting that our communities would be a lot better if some troublemakers were, from time to time, torn into pieces by wild dogs, if there are any in the area. This is at best undemocratic, and at worst unamerican. And, sadly, it's typical of the Limbaughs and Coulters and those who worship them.
I don't see this kind of eliminatioinst rhetoric from any of the spokespeople of the left. scroll through the comments pages on any blog, left or right, and and you'll see some real ugly people hiding out there. But I'll tell you, on this story, and a host of other like this, not one person of the few I read, nor their commenters, implied in any way that they should be silenced or shut down, much less imply that they somehow were not real americans.
That's a huge difference in how to observe differences.
Exercising your right to disagree with what someone else has the right to say: that's why I'm a liberal, my friends.
