Comment In Support Of Kathleen Parker
Writer Gets Email Threats After Writing Sarah Palin Column
chicagotribune.com — Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a Dumpster, but since she didn’t, I should “off” myself. Those are just a few nuggets randomly selected from thousands of e-mails written in response to my column suggesting that Sarah Palin is out of her league and should step down.
I find myself reacting to the same Parker phrases that Pash1994 quotes:
“The picture is this: Anyone who dares express an opinion that runs counter to the party line will be silenced. That doesn’t sound American to me, but Stalin would approve. Readers have every right to reject my opinion. But when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different than one’s own, then we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.”
A sizable portion of the Right grew up in the angry grip of a religion which maintains — at the very least, that if you disagree with their god (or with them) in general, you’re going to burn for eternity. At the most despotic extreme, the extreme Ms Parker saw, if you disagree with any of the picayune particulars of their dogma, you’ll burn in hell for eternity — what, really, can you expect?
The Christianists have harnessed a political platform into that dogma, to the point where that platform is doing religious work for them. If you attack the PLATFORM for doing the same religious work their dogma has done for centuries, you’ll burn. If this is allowed to continue, the Christianists, by hijacking our political system, will indeed have “put all of our freedoms at risk.”
It is up to US to push back.
In Christianist households, frankly, American freedom of speech has been suppressed for decades, if not centuries. My parents wondered why I chose a secular Ivy school a good distance from home in lieu of their close-to-hand favourite… it was the first place I could breathe, let alone speak freely.
But Ms Parker goes on: ” Our day of reckoning, indeed, may be upon us. ”
I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to reclaim the America where Freedom of Speech exists as an un-threatened right — where the current assault on it does not “have a crippling effect on our government” — without a serious fight. For decades, a religion whose moral tenets have lost what should be their *natural* appeal to the majority has sought to FORCE those moral tenets — with the belief that crippling a government of sin (in their eyes) is a prize to be won.
Those fingers strangling our freedom of speech and the rest of our rights went dead long ago. Prying cold, dead fingers from ANYTHING has never been an easy fight. But it’s always been a worthwhile fight.
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