One problem we have in our political culture is that we are being programmed to take joy in hating our foes. That's a problem on both sides of the aisle. The Elizabeth Edwards story below is one case in point where folks of the left show a blind spot; they're tolerant of everything but conservative non-hyphenated Americans.
Two posts are on my mind to start this; this Anchoress post on Edwards, Rosie and other intolerant voices of tolerance and this Peter Sean Bradley post on some College Republican shenanigans at San Francisco State.
I'll start with quoting some sage advice from the Anchoress piece
Back when the Edwards campaign was dealing with their “bloggergate” fiasco, they were talking a lot about their faith, blah, blah, blah. But they don’t seem to remember one of Jesus’ wisest (and perhaps slyest) teachings…that when you love your “enemies,” and you treat them well, you “heap hot coals upon their heads.” The shame of animus, then, belongs to them, and not to you.
That's good advice, not just for folks on the left, but folks on the right as well.
There's a school of thought in many corners of the right that makes folks on the left open season for ridicule and scorn. Sometimes this comes in the form of saying tacky and un-PC things just to tweak the left. Just because you have the right to say something doesn't mean you have to; some people seem to fight back from being on the wrong end of PC-dom by making fun of women and minorities.
This is most prominent on college campuses, where many young conservatives are, as the old country song goes, old enough to know better and young enough not to care. We don't go a week or two without College Republicans or other campus conservative groups pulling some sort of tacky politically-incorrect stunt and the college administration comes down on them like a ton of bricks. One archetype of the breed was the affirmative action bake sale, where women and minorities got their goodies at a discount.
The case from the Bradley piece involved a SFSU College Republican group trashing a Hezbollah flag. Major problem; the flag has Allah written on it in Arabic, and trashing the flag is taken as trashing Islam by the five-prayers-a-day crowd. As you'd expect, the school came down on the GOPers hard.
The problem with that is that worse things have been done by folks on the left at SFSU and the school opts not to do much about vandalism and hateful rhetoric of the left.
However, that doesn't justify the folks on the right to return the favor. Here's what I left on Bradley's post-
The young GOPers didn't quite grasp the Golden Rule; we don't like our flag being trashed, so we shouldn't do it to others.
Yes, it's a double standard, for trashing a US or Israeli flag would be ignored by the school's powers that be, but it still doesn't make what the young GOPers did right.
Here's Bradley's comeback
I don't think I agree.
I don't think that Hezbollah's flag and the US flag are equivalent in the same way that the Nazi flag and the US flag are not equivalent. Desecrating the Nazi flag, or the symbols of the Ku Klux Klan, for that matter, makes an appropriate statement about appropriate values: we ought to be disgusted with any group that encourages people to kill themselves, and their children, to murder anyone.
Further, we ought not to be complicit with hypocrisy. The left enjoys a cultural protection for its bad manners that the right does not. Given my druthers, I'd rather see the left grow up and show some adult sensitivity to the sensability of others, but until that day happens, the best we can do is to point on when the left tramples on the First Amendment protection that it so loudly claims for its adherents.
I'll agree that folks of the left deserve to be called on the carpet for their misdeeds; often times, vandalism of conservative property or treat to the foes of liberals go unpunished.
However, that doesn't mean that we need to respond to US flag burning with burning the flag (or other sacred icons) of our foes.
Firstly, our foes often don't have any icons to burn; our secular foes often don't have any sacred icons. For instance, how would you counter the radical AIDS activists' desecrating the communion wine and wafers in a Catholic church? Place Fred Phelps fliers in a gay bar or burn a pink triangle in effigy? It isn't an even trade.
Secondly, we have to remember that vengeance is the Lord's. We don't get even, we just take a deep breath and love our foes. We can critique their views, but doing an eye-for-a-eye, flag-for-a-flag routine isn't what Jesus is calling us to.
We don't respond to the Klan's burning crosses with burning swastikas and we don't respond to a Hezbollah torching of a US flag with burning one of theirs. We're supposed to turn the other cheek when we can, and this is one of them.
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