Liberal "Tolerance"

By Katie Poedtke
Poedtke@Fordham.edu

This morning, as I passed a freshman dorm on my way to the deli, a female student blew the smoke from her freshly lit cigarette in my face and snarled “I HATE McCain!” I assume that the sight of the small McCain-Palin pin I wear on my jacket sparked this disgusting reflex. Such knee-jerk, thoughtless reactions are inarguably much more common amongst liberals than amongst conservatives. Blogger and investigative journalist Michelle Malkin details this fact brilliantly in her 2005 book “Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Going Wild” in which she describes the outrageous behaviors of unhinged liberals after the 2000 and 2004 election cycles, as well as some of the unbelievably hateful treatment that she herself has been subject to as a crusader in the conservative movement.

In every major US city, police forces are preparing for the riots that are expected should Obama lose on Tuesday. Just as I could never imagine any conservatives I know blowing smoke in the face of an Obama supporter, I could never, ever imagine Republicans rioting if an underdog Democratic candidate for president were to win a surprise victory over a media-darling Republican (and I realize I’m pushing the limit of a hypothetical situation with that). Such irrational behavior is not in our nature and it is just plain wrong.

“There are crazies on both sides,” a friend told me in discussion of my run-in today, “take abortion clinic bombers,” he said. Abortion clinic bombers are not conservatives. They are radicals, and indeed, “crazies.” In no way does killing abortionists help the pro-life cause, and the vast, overwhelming majority of conservatives recognizes this clearly and condemn such crazies. Liberal crazies, on the other hand, get much more sympathy from their liberal cohorts in this country. Take Bill Ayers, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, for example. Conservatives have clear limits on what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, on what is right and what is wrong. Liberals tend to accept a wide “diversity” of philosophies, behaviors, and tactics as helpful in advancing liberal causes, which reveals the dangerous lack of rationality in today’s American liberalism.

Liberals often assert themselves as staunch proponents of diversity and tolerance, yet, in reality, the diversity they promote is a diversity of liberal thought and tolerance and that alone. Conservative thought is outside this spectrum. Conservatism is too diverse to be tolerated. And so we, conservatives, get smoke blown in our faces. Literally. Since our beliefs fall nowhere in-between the bounds of liberal thought, as diverse as that spectrum may be, I suppose we do not deserve their respect.

And they say conservatives are the “close-minded” ones?