The right stuff: These days that makes you a target
“They came for the conservatives, and I was not a conservative, so I said nothing.”
No, the famous quote from Martin Niemoller didn’t include “conservatives” in the list of endangered humans, along with the Jews, the socialists and the trade unionists. But the principle that this German pastor expressed encompasses all people who, because of a particular viewpoint, attribute or set of actions place themselves in physical or legal peril.
These days, that seems to include a lot of Americans who consider themselves right of center.
I know that will make some of my readers chuckle in disbelief, and enrage some others. I am certain that the residents of our fair county, the ones who have those rather cloying signs saying “Hate Has No Home Here” on their front lawns, would disagree with my suggestion that conservatives have any legitimate complaint. In fact, every time I’ve floated that idea in conversation or in print, I’ve gotten a lot of pushback. One person even said I was dishonoring his family members who had fled Germany to escape the Holocaust.
That, my friends, is how bad it’s gotten. You cannot point out to someone the hypocrisy of their position, “freedom and respect for me, but not for thee,” without eliciting a whole range of completely irrelevant and off-point reactions. Just because one person has suffered, it does not then follow that another person with diametrically opposed views cannot also bleed.
I’ve written about this before, in other venues. But what just happened to Ann Coulter this week convinced me that I have to keep beating the drum until I break a few resistant eardrums, the ones that belong to the selfsatisfied liberals who believe they have a copyright on civil liberties.
I am a conservative, and I have been one from the moment I first heard the phrase “a woman’s right to choose.” Yes, that is what pushed me over the edge into that vast right-wing territory where conspiracy theories fester and gentle Hillary-style villages are being pillaged. I have never made a secret of the fact that while I don’t share a lot of the right’s positions on immigration and a laissez-fair approach to government, I do embrace the idea (one that is increasingly under attack by the left) that the unborn child is entitled to respect, dignity and a chance. Chance, not choice, is my motto.
I have found that while some on the right call themselves “pro-choice,” there is a great deal more openness toward the idea of a culture of life among my conservative fellow travelers than among those in my former party. Whenever I say something like that, I will get the usual, tired response that liberals care for the child after it is born, and conservatives only care for him while he is still an annoying hindrance in the unwilling womb. That is not the case, as I’ve documented in this column many times. But it’s easy mental lifting for liberals, and so I won’t make them sweat by challenging them on the fallacy.
This is simply to say that I am a conservative born of circumstance (no pun intended) and I will remain one until my dying day. I am also a lawyer who respects the Constitution as much as the unborn child, and I would not deny any liberals, even the most rabid pro-abortion activist like Cecile Richards, the opportunity to speak. I’d even go to hear her, because it is much better to understand the enemy’s mind than it is to pretend that enemy doesn’t exist. Information is power.
Apparently, though, “information” from conservatives is kryptonite to a number of misguided, pampered millennials and their supporters across the country. They do not want to hear right-of-center discourse, because they are not secure enough in their own philosophy and principles to be able to withstand an assault of, let’s call it, common sense.
I’m not saying that people have to be forced to listen to someone or something that annoys, shocks or repulses them. We do not live in an Orwellian state where certain views are piped into our consciousness over a government loudspeaker. We can indeed close ourselves off to things that annoy us. But that makes us weak. And it makes us stupid. And it makes us undeserving of any serious consideration in any serious debate.
So it is with the students who stopped Ann Coulter from speaking this week at Berkeley, who used strongarm tactics to keep conservative views from being expressed in the birthplace of the “free speech” movement of the 1960s.
So it is with the hooligans parading as students who rioted and lit fires at that same campus when Milo Yiannapoulos tried to give a lecture (one which would have been much more incendiary and much less substantive than Coulter’s).
So it is with the students who physically assaulted a professor at Middlebury who had the audacity to invite conservative Charles Murray to speak.
Again, these students had the right to walk away, plug up their ears and confirm to the world that they were pitiful little children in search of a trophy or a pat on the head. No one had the right to force them to absorb views that shook them to the core.
But they cannot pretend to be valued, then legitimate players in the grown up world, where ideas are the most powerful agents of change. These are the weapons that get the job done.
It might come as a surprise to these pampered children and their solicitous elders that conservative ideas often surpass in value and effectiveness the weak pabulum that is offered up by their leftist comrades. It would be surprising, of course, because they have successfully walled themselves off from those ideas, either by keeping the messengers from speaking or, more frequently, by calling those messengers bigots, homophobes, racists, xenophobes and Nazis.
I, frankly, have no desire to persuade the unpersuadable that an unborn child is as human as the 2-yearold laughing with infinite joy at a butterfly, and floating bubbles. These people are a waste of my time and my breath, and I will devote my energies to changing the laws that keep that unborn child in peril of annihilation.
But it says something that those who consider themselves “liberal,” and who have for generations touted their tolerance for differences of opinions are, in the end, no better than the guards who stood watch at the gates of the gulags and the camps.
Sorry about the Nazi reference, but hey, sometimes it’s the only language these guys understand. Leave your comments online Use hashtag at