“I beg to differ, Mr. Christopher. What makes us strong is that we are a nation that was founded by a group of extraordinary men who weren’t very diverse at all. Some of them were Christians, some were deists, but all of them were white and they all spoke English. What they were was brilliant. They created a nation that was based on Judeo-Christian concepts that emphasized justice and freedom for the individual. The diversity came later. But so great was their creation that it managed to accommodate wave after wave of immigrants, and to transform millions of people who had never experienced democracy into a nation willing to fight and die for a notion that was summed up by the Latin phrase, e pluribus unum.”

Mr. Christopher responded by directing me to a site where pictures of black lynch victims were posted. It was his intention to convince me that America was and remains a racist country where blacks must constantly fear for their lives.

I did as he asked and visited the site, and then reported back: “It would be easier to believe you when you insist that you don’t view the world through black-tinted glasses if you hadn’t started this exchange by defending a racist church, by insisting the Democratic party would self-destruct if it selected a white woman to be its standard bearer, and if you hadn’t directed me to a site that showed black lynch victims. You could have just as easily suggested that the world can be a vicious, nasty place and directed me to photos of Hitler’s victims or Stalin’s or Pol Pot’s or Saddam Hussein’s or Idi Amin’s -- millions of innocent men, women and children who had been gassed or butchered by monsters. As terrible as the lynchings were, the total number of victims between 1889 and 1918 was about 3,200, of whom roughly 2,600 were blacks.

“Furthermore, I realize that many black Americans seem to believe that the huge number of young black men in prison are only there because the legal system is corrupt and white society in general is racially bigoted. I, on the other hand, believe that most whites are pretty much colorblind. Otherwise, why would a black man with only two years in the U.S. Senate be doing so well in the primary elections? By the way, an anti-lynching bill was introduced in the House in 1918. In 1922, it was finally passed, but its forward progress was stopped in the Senate by the threat of a filibuster by Southern Democrats.”

“I hope,” Mr. Christopher wrote, “you notice that I haven’t once called you a racist.”

“Thanks,” I responded, “but if you had, I’d have just laughed at you. You see, I have such a passion for truth and logic that I can not be cowed by ugly labels. I attack hypocrisy wherever I find it, whether my targets are blacks and Muslims or my fellow Jews and Republicans. In fact, there is a reason that, as a conservative, as much as I’d hate to see a liberal win in November, I’d prefer Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama. On the issues, I don’t see a scintilla of difference between the junior senator from New York and the very junior senator from Illinois. But if Mrs. Clinton wins, even though she’s a woman, I think the Republicans in the House and Senate would feel free to oppose her policies and attack her credibility. However, if Mr. Obama were to win, I fear that a great many conservative politicians who lack my intestinal fortitude would bite their tongues rather than risk being branded a racist.”

In summation, let me just say, as I have in the past, that bigots are simply the laziest people in the world. After all, if you just make the slightest effort, you can inevitably find better reasons to despise people than their race, their religion or even their sexual proclivities, no matter how goofy they might be.