re: #351 Salamantis

To claim that those who disapprove of intolerant and theocratic fundamentalists are guilty of anti-Christian bigotry is to enter the same Bizzaro World where people claim that those who disapprove of Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan are bigoted against blacks.

re: #352 jeremy1013

It is, and to say that I am making that claim is not a charitable interpretation of what I’m saying…Salamantis.

But this is why I proffered such an interpretation:

re: #349 jeremy1013

The context of the conversation (I recall you are big on context) is that Pat Robertson is often cited as the social conservative boogeyman that is responsible for good people like Arlen Specter leaving our party. Where I was going with the question is that I think, though I don’t know for sure, that most people who believe that social conservatives are the reason for the Republican party’s troubles are bigots.

Bigotry is the anger of men with no convictions.

I think that most people who believe that social conservatives are a major reason for the Republican party’s troubles is because so many of their purported spokespeople imperialistically advocate legislating their particular social perspectives, be they creationism in public schools, prohibition of abortion, prohibition of gay civil unions, prohibition of assisted suicide, prohibition of pornography made and consumed by consenting adults, prohibition of marijuana, prohibition of gambling, or prohibition of prostitution, into law, or maintaining their presently constricting legislation in law, and thus abusing the machinery of the State in order to impose their stances upon others who should retain the right to disagree and to live their lives according to their own views. Only in totalitarianisms, theocratic or otherwise, are all of one’s individual actions either mandated or prohibited; in a free constitutionally democratic society with guaranted liberties, ranges of choices must remain open for the adult citizen, including options that we would not choose for ourselves. Those who do not wish to make such choices are not forced to do so, but others who wish to choose differently should not be prohibited from themselves doing so because their choices pruriently offend. However, it seems that these spokespeople are indeed striving to impose such a puritanical theocracy, and even worse, that masses of fundamentalists who have ceded moral authority to such spokespeople are willing to vote to reify their religiously imperialist agenda.

My personal maxim is that all people should enjoy all freedoms that do not infringe upon the freedoms of others, and where conflicts between competing freedoms inevitably arise, they should be resolved via equal and proportional compromise.

Bigotry historically has been the anger of those who are religously, racially, sexually, or gender orientation intolerant. They are for some strange reason not satisfied with running their own lives, but demand to run the lives of others, and most often according to precepts that they unthinkingly absorb and parrot from some usually fundamentalist religious authority figure or other of dubious understanding and virtue.

So my point is that it is much farther from the case that most people who believe that social conservatives are the reason for the Republican party’s troubles are bigots, than it is that most people who believe that social conservatives are the reason for the Republican party’s troubles quite reasonably perceive the socons’ social issue political actions as puritanically intolerant, theocratically imperialist, and bigoted, and also perceive that many others also perceive the socons’ agenda to be thus, and thus electorally shun it, and the party that apparently embraces and is controlled by it.