Letters to the Editor
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Being a white male liberal is harder than you think
I am a white straight male who has remained a steadfast liberal despite finding myself repeatedly insulted by other liberals over the years. Generally, it's not democratic politicians per se who drive me up the wall. Democratic supporters, as exemplified by the identity politics crowd, however, are another matter. They've been killing us.
Here are but a few examples of what I'm talking about.
Feminists have repeatedly and categorically stereotyped men as violent, domineering, misogynistic, racists whose favorite form of porn idealizes rape and dismemberment while at the same time ludicrously portraying themselves as fighting sexism. They even endorsed a literal witch hunt with the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysterial of the late 80s and early 90s in which they claimed that there was a national epidemic of wives and daughters, having to, among other things, eat their own fetuses and underg ritual sex with their fathers. So profoundly were feminists wrapped up in this hysteria that its supposed reality was affirmed by a cover story of the January 1993 Ms. Magazine entitled "Believe It! - Child Ritual Abuse Exists!" Men who questioned this insane bupkis were accused of not caring about or even endorsing rape.
Let me tell you that Rush Limbaugh started to sound awfully good to this boy after being put through that one. From where I sit, "feminazi" is a perfectly apt term.
Then let's take Al Sharpton. Shaprton was a featured speaker at the 2004 DNC despite the fact that his campaign was financed and, to a large extent, organized by Republicans(http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/conason/2004/02/03/sharpton/index.html)! Why would the GOP pay for a Sharpton run?
Well, let's see. The most famous thing Sharpton ever did was spend the better part of 1988 falsely accusing a bunch of white men of a rape that clearly never happened. During this time he literally compared New York's very liberal Gov. Mario Cuomo to Adolph Hitler and was guilty of whipping up a hysteria in which anyone who showed reasonable skepticism in front of his supporters was vehimently denounced as racist. A grand jury found the story to be a hoax and Sharpton was then successfully sued for slander in court. Today, Sharpton is treated like a hero.
Is it really so hard to see why a white man might be insulted by that?
More recently after Katrina hit, liberals were up arms about the atrocity of blacks being drowned in their own homes and left to fend for themselves. This was a perfectly just criticism for something truly deserving outrage. The only problem is that poor white southerners drown in their own homes just a good but you hardly heard liberals complaining nearly as much about them. Exactly what do you think a poor, white southerner is going to make of that?
What our side has repeatedly failed to do is to explain specifically to white straight males how the Republicans have been screwing them too and what Democrats are going to do to make sure they get a fair shake along with everybody else. When challenged, liberals explain that NASCAR dads will never vote Democratic anyway, so it's no use before turning around and complaining about what a bunch of bigots those stoopid white males are. Nice, circular reasoning that. And so completely free of racist, sexist stereotyping too.
Unfortunately, the identity politics crowd are our True Believers and, like the GOP's religious right, must be humored.
It isn't that we can't get the white straight male vote. It's just that we don't really want it.
Thank God for sexual perversion and hypocricy. Elsewise the situation might be hopeless.