March 11, 2016 at 3:26 p.m.
Bradley's foul mouth; the Left's foul intentions
Bradley's foul mouth; the Left's foul intentions
No doubt about it, some portions of two letters to the editor and a column in a student newspaper were peppered with derogatory and clearly offensive slurs. Such language should be condemned when it is used - while supporting the right to say it - and Bradley has been contrite, apologizing for her conduct and acknowledging embarrassment.
In a sane world, that would be the end of that and everybody would just move on. Bradley was a young college student who was trying to be controversial, and sometimes when you try to be controversial you end up going over the edge. Add to that youthful naiveté and ignorance about the AIDS epidemic and you have the potential for, well, what she's facing now.
Many people will chalk everything up to youthful indiscretions that do not reflect her character now, and forgive her; others will hold a grudge. Either way, everybody has a chance to cast a ballot and express their opinion in the April 5 election.
But these incidents raise questions far more important than the youthful use of foul language. It raises questions about the leftist establishment's current mission to silence language it doesn't agree with, which by definition becomes offensive language.
That is to say, if the leftist establishment hates the language, it's hate language.
Before Bradley swallows too much humble pie, it's worth pointing out that, beyond the obvious slurs, a lot of what she said was the truth, bluntly delivered.
There's no doubting that Bill Clinton was a pot-smoking, draft-dodging, tree-hugging adulterer. There's nothing to apologize for there.
By choosing Clinton, Bradley wrote, people had voted for a national health-care system that would force those who need heart surgery to wait for months, while self-centered women could get abortions any day they wanted.
That was also true. Four days after he took office, Clinton did an Obama prequel, signing a series of executive orders that undid many of the Reagan-Bush abortion restrictions. Clinton promised to appoint only abortion supporters to the Supreme Court, and his own health-care bill would have served up the greatest expansion of legal abortion since Roe v Wade.
One can hold any view on abortion one wants, but it's hard to argue that Clinton wasn't for abortion on demand, which is the substance of Bradley's point.
Also about abortion, the mainstream media seems to think that Bradley's comparison of abortion to the Holocaust was a vile and hateful thing to write and something she needs to apologize for.
Why?
If you believe abortion is murder, then comparing abortion to "a time in history when Jews were treated as non-humans and tortured and murdered" is neither vile nor hateful; it's an apt characterization of what you believe is happening in the United States. If abortion is murder, then mass abortion is mass murder: a Holocaust.
In that viewpoint, abortion on demand is what is vile and hateful. Yet the mainstream media paints abortion as something akin to throwing away a pair of old trousers, while those who dare to debate the sanctity of life are labeled the horrible, crazy ones.
To be sure, the leftist establishment knows that blunt comparisons, such as comparing the thousands and thousands of abortions in this country to the Holocaust, are often needed to shock people into really thinking about what their society is doing. It wakes people up. And so they call such blunt comparisons hate language, offensive and worse.
The Left wants to blunt the edges, dull the knives, and minimize the sharp points of metaphoric language precisely to keep sometimes shocking truths from coming into focus. You can paper over the truth, but a paper cut stings.
So, abortion isn't murder, gay sex is normal and deserving of state sanction, climate change is a moral imperative, and anybody who thinks differently had better apologize for their crimes. All too often conservatives do.
Of course, when one apologizes for telling the truth or for voicing truly held opinions, the leftist establishment has won.
That's why the media is so mad with Donald Trump. Since he won't apologize, and indeed continues to pile it on the establishment, the media and the establishment hurl offensive names at him - he's a fascist, a racist, a buffoon, a con artist, a fraud, you name it. Apparently none of that is offensive.
That's because he must be silenced. He must be shut up at all costs.
The truth is, more dangerous to the body politic than foul language is the foul intention of the leftist establishment. That intention is to eviscerate the First Amendment.
It seeks to do so by accusing anybody who dares to speak an opinion it doesn't like of being intolerant, and intolerant speech, of course, cannot be tolerated. It must be banned and the perpetrator of said hate speech must be likewise banished, so nobody's feelings can ever be hurt again.
And so we have college students seeking to remove a Martin Luther King, Jr., quote from a wall because it's not inclusive enough. We have student governments petitioning to ban Republican political speakers because they might be offended by the thoughts expressed.
And, in Wisconsin, we have the Left calling for Bradley's resignation because she once slurred several groups of people. She has apologized and lived a different life than the one we would expect from those writings, but in the world of the establishment, apologies are never enough, remorse is only another admission of guilt, and a loving life can never make up for hateful words written or spoken once upon a fairy-tale time.
In the end, for the leftist establishment, the only thing that soothes hurt feelings is silence.
The problem with such a world is that it's only OK if you're not the one being silenced. And history is full of dupes who fell in with the book burners and the silencers, only to wake up one morning to find that they, too, were silenced, found to be offensive, and publicly scorned.
Which is precisely why all speech must be protected, even speech that hurts feelings and even obvious slurs.
This week we were treated to two different world views: one of a young naive college student 24 years ago, and one of an intolerant leftist establishment at work today.
One wanted to speak the truth as she saw it, to put her voice in the mix, no matter how callous some of it turned out to be; the other seeks to suppress all opinions about the truth but its own.
We'll take the former world view any day. Better to speak mistakenly and stupidly and even with hate and have to apologize than never to be able to speak at all.
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