LIBERALLY LOATHING: Attacking the slack-jawed yokels among us!

TUESDAY, APRIL 7, 2015

Part 2—In search of our favorite targets:
Just for the record, a lot of people in Indiana don’t approve of same-sex marriage, at least not yet.

If we lived in Indiana, that wouldn’t be our position. But a lot of people still disapprove, as can be deduced from Frank Bruni’s latest column.

In this passage, Bruni quotes David Gushee, “an evangelical Christian.” Gushee “openly challenges his faith’s censure of same-sex relationships, to which he no longer subscribes:”
BRUNI (4/5/15): “Conservative Christian religion is the last bulwark against full acceptance of L.G.B.T. people,” Gushee said.

Polls back him up.
A majority of Americans support marriage equality, including a majority of Catholics and most Jews. But a 2014 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute showed that while 62 percent of white mainline Protestants favor same-sex marriages, only 38 percent of black Protestants, 35 percent of Hispanic Protestants and 28 percent of white evangelical Protestants do.
As sometimes happens, the link Bruni provides doesn’t lead to the survey he describes. We continued to search. I

At the PRRI site, we found this survey from 2014. In its report on that survey, the PRRI cites figures similar to the ones Bruni published.

According to the PRRI, “only 27% of white evangelical Protestants and 35% of black Protestants support same-sex marriage.”

According to that same report, “Catholics who regularly attend church are in fact divided on the issue (50% favor, 45% oppose).” Across the nation, 39 percent of black Americans approve of same-sex marriage. Overall, 51 percent of people in the Midwest approve.

Based on those figures, we'd guess that a lot of people in Indiana don’t approve of same-sex marriage at this point. We thought Bruni was perhaps a tiny bit slippery in the way he slid past Catholics in that passage, especially since all Catholic officials disapprove of the practice.

Presumably, there isn’t a priest in the state of Indiana who will perform a same-sex marriage at this time. We'll guess that Indiana Catholics are evenly split on the question.

Why did Bruni seem to give Catholics a tiny pass in the way he did? We’ll offer a possible guess:

Bruni put the word “bigotry” at the start of his headline, then used it again in his column. And he largely seemed to be targeting white Evangelical Christians, one of the groups we tribal liberals have loathed for a very long time.

Can we talk? Unless you live on the dark side of the moon, you’ll understand a basic fact. The liberal world is frequently driven by loathing for white Southerners.

In our view, we’re frequently driven by dull-witted loathing of this type, as was the case in last week’s explosions about Indiana’s new law.

At this time, a lot of people still don’t approve of same-sex marriage. In a killjoy piece for the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf fleshed that out in greater detail:
FRIEDERSDORF (4/3/15): What do white evangelicals, Muslims, Mormons, blacks, conservative Republicans, and immigrants from Africa, South America, and Central America all have in common? They're less likely to support gay marriage than the average Californian. Over the years, I've patronized restaurants owned by members of all those groups. Today, if I went out into Greater Los Angeles and chatted up owners of mom-and-pop restaurants, I'd sooner or later find one who would decline to cater a gay wedding. The owners might be members of Rick Warren's church in Orange County. Or a family of immigrants in Little Ethiopia or on Olvera Street. Or a single black man or woman in Carson or Inglewood or El Segundo.

Should we destroy their livelihoods?
So many people and groups for us to loathe! But let’s be honest just for once. We will always direct our liberal loathing at white Southerners and evangelicals. Other groups need not apply!

The mainstream press corps tends to play that same demographic game. That’s how it worked in last week’s explosion of our liberal loathing.

You may recall what happened. An intrepid reporter for a South Bend TV station went looking for some restaurateur who might object, on religious grounds, to catering same-sex weddings.

By total happenstance, she stumbled upon a young white woman who identified herself as a “Christian.” No blacks or Muslims or even white Catholics need apply!

The young woman in question, Crystal O’Connor, is part owner of Memories Pizza, a small town pizza joint. She said the restaurant was open to gays, and no one has said different.

That said, O’Connor said she wouldn’t cater a same-sex wedding, presumably because she saw it as some sort of religious event. (As always, the TV reporter didn’t spend a lot of time exploring this young woman’s thinking.)

At CNN, Gary Tuchman made a similar play. He tramped the back roads of Georgia, interviewing southern white florists about their views on this matter. No blacks were approached during Tuchman's search.

Soon, we had the deluge from the “dumb aggressives” who lurk within our own tribe. We liberals simply love to loathe the nation's Christian hillbillies! The dumbest and meanest within our troop began harassing the small town pizza joint with phony orders of pizza. One teacher managed to get herself in trouble with the law for tweeting a threat to burn the pizza joint down.

Elsewhere, we pounded our drums. To see how dumb we can be in our reflexive liberal loathing, consider the heroic work performed by Salon’s Jenny Kutner.

Kutner got her start by writing about her affair with her eighth-grade history teacher. He ended up in prison. She found her way to Salon, where she entertains the kids with thoughtful pieces like this:
Website lets people anonymously ship vaginal cleansing kits to “basic b*tches”
Like "Dicks By Mail," but for vaginas—and (somehow) even cruder!
JENNY KUTNER
MONDAY, MAR 30, 2015 10:42 AM EDT
Whatever! The youngsters are working it out!

Kutner’s reaction to “pizza-gate” (Salon’s actual term!) was perhaps even dumber than that. She was soon posting the dumbest tweets she could find about the pizza-gate conflagration.

Kutner posted a series of brainless tweets which Salon described as “hilarious.” This is the first one she offered:
REPOSTING BY KUTNER (4/1/15): I had the single most horrific experience of my life!

I wanted some pizza after my Klan rally so of course it was Memories Pizza. I know we are supposed to be anonymous and all that but whatever!

I ordered a nice hot and steamy not gay and extra mozzarella cause I only consume white cheese because it is the superior cheese. And resting on top of my pepperoni was a tooth! I was shocked, but relieved it was a white tooth. Apparently it belonged to the girl behind the counter.

I went to return it to her and she was making out with this woman and screaming it was a choice!

It seems to me this restaurant has gone downhill.

I plan to tell my Klan friends about this and we will be eating our white cheese elsewhere!
–Rachel F.
Needless to say, Rachel F had instantly conflated opposition to same-sex marriage with toothless white bigotry. No other possible understanding of this position need apply!

In the next tweet posted by Kutner, a brilliant liberal named Michael N had performed the same conflation. He stressed the Southern theme:
REPOSTING BY KUTNER: This is a transparent attempt to fly the Christian martyr “mean Gays are calling us bigots” flag in the hopes that other mouth-breathers in the area will rally to them and their crappy pizza the way Southerners rallied to Chick Fil-A. Deny them the oxygen of your outrage, and their uninspired fare will put them out of business in due course.
—Michael N.
To Michael N., O’Connor wasn’t a toothless phony martyr. She was a mouth-breather!

When we engage in our liberal loathing, we do love dropping our bombs. To the occasional mouth-breather within our own tribe, it doesn’t seem odd to post comments like these while accusing The Others of hate:
REPOSTED BY KUTNER: They have a great pizza. It’s the intolerance special with toppings of hate, bigotry, stupidity, and old fashioned beliefs.
—Jarrett J.

I came in with my boyfriend a few weeks ago for a couple of slices. They told of us the good word of Jesus’s love. Which was all great until we told them we were engaged to be married, at which point they spit on us and bashed us upon the head and torso with pizza pans. They said it was all in the name of Jesus so I guess it’s not all bad. I choose never to give them my business anymore, because, ya know, that’s my choice.
–T. W.
TW writhed with tribal pleasure, imagining himself spat on.

This sort of thing was observed all over the pseudo-liberal world. It’s hard to overstate the way pseudo-liberals of this type have been able, down through the years, to heighten tribal divides and hold back progress.

At an earlier time, fiery “liberals” of this type helped create a generation of Nixon/Reagan politics. Like 45-year cicadas, they are active again!

We’ll only ask you to notice one thing about this sad display. Like the knuckle-draggers we are, we look for white “Christians” and white Southerners to land on at such times.

We ignore the fact that large chunks of our own coalition are opposed to same-sex marriage. None of our tribe need apply!

In fairness, the Kutner crowd may not know how the demographics work. But when they rampage after their targets, no blacks or Hispanics or even Catholics need apply! Our liberal loathing tells us which neighborhoods to ride through.

We get out our ropes and start dropping our bombs. We kick as far down as we can.

Pope Francis is opposed to same-sex marriage! But we go after the least among us, offering comments like this:
SKANNER (4/6/15): I don't think I've ever seen someone who so completely personified the term “slack-jawed.” You've probably got to work really hard to look that stupid.
She'll never be as brilliant as Skanner! That was our latest comment about the youngish O’Connor, who imaginably may be a Catholic doing what the Pope says.

At Salon, our own knuckle-draggers were conducting our own little pogrom. We savaged the “redneck families” who were donating to “dumb A-holes like the O’Connors.”

Poodleplay ridiculed O’Connor as “that slack-jawed yokel.” Aunt Messy captured the tone of this crowd with a blatantly inaccurate post:

“I have no sympathy for these backwoods morons, but I'm better and smarter than they are.”

Messy, please! No one will ever think that.

The Pope is opposed to same-sex marriage. So is every priest in the state of Indiana. According to the survey Bruni cited, most blacks are opposed to same-sex marriage at this time as well.

We don’t share their view, but we also wouldn’t call them “bigots.” When we liberals get a snootful and start displaying our liberal loathing, we avoid this contradiction by passing over such houses.

We liberals! Because our mental powers are limited, we can only imagine opposition to same-sex marriage as “bigotry” and “hatred.” Meanwhile, it seems we can only spot that opposition within certain parts of the world.

Our liberal loathing is unattractive, stupid, dumb. Politically, it’s often quite harmful.

But our liberal loathing just feels so good! Of course, this kind of loathing has always felt good, for mobs all over the world.

Tomorrow: Eight letters respond to David Brooks

Coming Friday: We play the Dr. King card

47 comments:

  1. Bob is mean. He KNOWS the troll won't go there on Southern Blacks and their views on gay marriage. Bob knows that's a hot potato. Bob knows that the troll won't touch it, because it burns. What a mean curveball. What a hot potato.

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    1. Only a dumb jock from the islands or the sticks on Performance Enhancing Drugs fails to lay off the mean curveball.

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    2. Green card please.

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  2. After raising over $800,000 for the pizza owner forced to close her business because of progressive bigots, the black man who set up the gofundme page, conservative Lawrence B. Jones, came in for days of racist, "Uncle Tom" "house nigger" abuse from progressives. It hurt them more than it hurt him but had to be done for the greater good.

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    1. Maybe he is neither but simply someone who opposes gay marriage? Do you even know what those words mean?

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    2. Calling it like it is, Jason is a racist.

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    3. like they say, no niggers to the right!

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  3. One reason Southern Christians make an appealing target is that they're nice. They aren't going to claim sympathy as a disenfranchised minority. They aren't going to sue their critics. They aren't going to make a terrorist attack against their critics.

    In short, the liberals Bob describes are cowardly bullies.

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    1. Sure, soft-pedal the Southerner on Southerner crime.

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    2. Absolutely 1000% correct and also why the gofundme page enraged the left. Righting a wrong through social capital and love for thy brother (a love which, believe it or not, has nothing to do with sex).

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  4. Oddly Bob has no sympathy for the young reporter (Alyssa Marino) who simply asked a reporter style question at Memories Pizza and is now sidelined from the death threats.

    And how does he feel about real bigotry like the FL evangelist who set up a bakery by asking for a hateful anti-gay message on a cake, and after the predictable refusal, then sicced his hoards of followers on them as being "anti-Christian"?

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    1. Marino did more than "simply ask a question." She wrote a newspaper story falsely painting the pizza shop owner as a bigot.

      Furthermore, there was no reason to interview the pizza shop owner on this issue. That person's opinion of gay marriage isn't newsworthy. The reporter was actively seeking someone who gave the "wrong" answer so she could blast that person.

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    2. Thinking the wrong thoughts will not be tolerated. Be careful not to reveal you are thinking the wrong thoughts, or your business that will never be asked to cater a gay wedding will be shut down. Be careful not to answer a hypothetical and moot question in a way that reveals your wrong thoughts.

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    3. Most employees who deal with the public are trained not to talk politics or religion because it invariability loses business. They will duck a question. This poor woman didn't know any better. How far afield does someone have to go to find someone stupid enough to talk to a reporter? Maybe the local McDonalds should have been asked. Like the pizza place, they don't cater weddings either.

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    4. David in Cal...You fail again. She did not write a newspaper report at all; She was a TV reporter.

      And your bias is made manifest by assuming that had pizza shop owners simply said no problem to sending pizzas to a gay reception, that would not have been a story unto itself.

      Fix your biases, you jerk.

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    5. "[A]ssuming that had pizza shop owners simply said no problem to sending pizzas to a gay reception, that would not have been a story unto itself."

      I think that's a fairly safe assumption. She was trolling white conservative religious business owners, looking to make an example out of a poor sap that would naively and, hopefully crudely, express some crimethink to her on the record. Finally she succeeded.

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    6. How pray tell how could she tell "conservative religious business owners" from others?

      And like your fellow jerk above, you obviously cannot see real bias such as seen in an actual case like the Florida religious kook who actually trolled to find an honorable shop that would not put a hate message on a cake, just so he could have them falsely harassed as anti-religious.

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    7. How could she tell? She could keep trying until she found one. If the first shop owner interviewed was OK with gay weddings, she just wouldn't report that as news.

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    8. I believe that Memories Pizza is a self-described "Christian" establishment. But regardless, what does that have to do with some kook in Florida? Memories was ratted out by a news reporter with an audience of millions.

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    9. Yes, that evil local ABC affiliate in South Bend, home of Notre Dame. They were just "trolling" to find one of those local businesses in their home state who supported the legislation just passed by their state legislature and signed by the Governor on their behalf. How dare TV try and find a local business which not only needed but liked this very important law.

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    10. Why would a reporter ask a pizza parlor whether they would cater a gay wedding?

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    11. 11:42 PM,
      What, exactly, was the issue that this law (proposed by ALEC to rile the rubes) addresses?

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  5. Warning to casual readers of this blog: These comments are unmoderated. They are infested by one or more trolls who routinely attack the blog author in a variety of ways, rarely substantive. Such attacks are not an indicator of the level of interest of other readers, the validity of the content posted nor of the esteem in which the blog author is held by others.

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  6. Perhaps it is not Evangelical Christians per se that liberals loathe, but rather their incessant attempts at codifying their beliefs into state and federal law.

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    1. Point taken but the Indiana situation is an example of codifying rights, not beliefs.

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    2. The language in the excerpts Somerby cited make it pretty clear it is the people being targeted.

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    3. Daniel – we legislate “morality” all the time and have always done so. Laws against murder are about morality. Laws about slander and libel are about morality. Laws about theft, burglary, and home invasion are about morality. Laws against arson are laws about morality. Morality has to do with right and wrong and what is in the best interests of society. The phrase, “you can’t legislate morality” is a tired old political slogan that is thrown out whenever someone doesn’t like a particular law being proposed. It is pure “spin.” It has no basis in reality. As to the question, “Is it right to legislate morality?” My answer is how you would NOT? We would have anarchy if we tried to eliminate all moral aspects of our law. The law is all about morality. That’s why we can claim to live in a civilized society.
      Sincerely,
      Senator Sylvia Allen

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    4. Robert Bork said, “‘You can’t legislate morality.’ Indeed . . . we legislate little else.”

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    5. People who say "you can't legislate morality" almost always mean sexual morality. It isn't clear why they don't say as much but they probably think leaving out the specifics makes the claim sound loftier or true.

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    6. I believe this was said in the context of racial segregation.

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  7. That's only a very minor drop in an ocean of antidemocratic political activity, and you know it.

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  8. America is now under a minor reign of terror by the self-appointed Social Justice Police. A tiny family-owned pizza shop was merely their latest victim, but it certainly won't be the last. Society won't be rid of them until a critical mass of individuals learns to collectively stand up to them.

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    Replies
    1. Decent society is reaching that critical mass. These misfits become less credible by the day. R-bombs just don't land like they used to.

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    2. Die Fahne hoch mother fuckers

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    3. Social media is the culprit. We need to ban twitter.

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    4. majneb,
      One man's "minor reign of terror" is another man's "deeply-held religious belief".

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  9. "If we lived in Indiana, that [don't approve of same-sex marriage] wouldn’t be our position." Yeah. Right.

    In fact, if you lived in Indiana anywhere other than the Motel 6, there's an excellent chance you would NOT approve of same sex marriage.

    If you lived in the Deep South in the 1930s, it's almost certain you would NOT have been Atticus Finch.

    Had you been a pony soldier in the Indian Wars, most likely you would NOT have been the one in sympathy with the Indians' plight.

    That only happens in the movies, where Errol Flynn plays J.E.B. Stuart as hater of slavery and G.A. Custer as fighter for Indian rights. That way, the eater of popcorn can imagine his hero to be something other than the average bigot he actually was.

    Then there's me. I live in the state that keeps sending Jim Inhofe back to the Senate. Well, I've never voted for the man in my life, and if Howler lived here, maybe he wouldn't, either. But somebody keeps votin' for the crazy sombitch.

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    1. Speaking for ourselves, had we lived in Rome in the First Century, we would not have approved of public gladiatorial spectacles.

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    2. In every age there are people who adhere to the mainstream views and people who oppose them. There have always been atheists (even in the most religious times). There have always been feminists. Just not that many of them, not highly visible. If you want to assess whether Somerby would have gone along with the mainstream or not, assess whether he is currently going along with the mainstream in his own time. I don't think he is typical of a liberal or a conservative viewpoint. I see him as a nonconformist intellectually speaking. That suggests he might have been supportive of gay marriage in Indiana. He attracts a lot of flak here for his opinions so what makes you think that would deter him from holding controversial views in a different time period?

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    3. For himself, had he lived in ancient Greece, Bob would have complained that Diogenes was too accommodating to the mainstream.

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  10. "At an earlier time, fiery “liberals” of this type helped create a generation of Nixon/Reagan politics."

    Bob Somerby, demonstrating why he knows absolutley nothing about history or politics.

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    1. You must forgive Bob. From his privileged perspective, every member of the Baby Boom Generation was just like him, Al and Tommy.

      But the truth is, the Boomers had its fiery liberals as well as its fiery conservatives, and a lot of people in between.

      Remember, there were Boomers on both sides of the guns at Kent State.

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    2. Interesting, too, because Somerby had recently told of a "millenial" making too many broad assumptions about his generation.

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    3. Somerby's favorite narratives are perhaps employed here as a cover up. He states liberals hate southerners and evangelicals. But he presents but one example each of comments aimed at southerners and evangelicals.

      He presents poll results aimed at various religions and ethnic groups on the issue of same sex marriage. He omits one group.

      The group most opposed to gay marriage across all the other demographics are people Somerby's age. .

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  11. Pope Frances? We finally have a female pope??

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