I once had a dog named Jake that I liked very much. He was a well-behaved dog. When I asked him to sit, he would sit. When I asked him to shake, he would shake. When I asked him to stay, he would stay. Because he was so eager for praise and approval, it was easy to control his behavior. That old dog was a lot like the liberals who read my columns.
Because I am very good at predicting the behavior of liberals, I did a very risky thing yesterday by taking credit for an email I did not actually send. It was all part of a little experiment on tolerance and diversity, which has yielded results much like I had predicted.
Those who read yesterday’s column read my spoof apology for an email I claimed I had sent to the Department of Sociology and Criminology at UNC-Wilmington. The email, sent under the subject line “Bin Laden Found!”, had a picture attached which showed the terrorist behind a cash register wearing a “7-11” vest. The responses to my apology were predictable. Here are a few of the highlights:
“You are not a conservative, you are a rude and insensitive bigot.”
“You should resign from your position as a professor immediately. Don’t wait for a conviction for hate speech.”
“You are a complete embarrassment to academia.”
“I hope Al Quada [sic] bombs your office.”
“You are an arrogant bigot.”
“I bet you’re not sorry you fraud. You just don’t want to lose your job.”
“What a childish bigot you are. You’ll get what you deserve. Finally.”
“You are a predicably [sic] racist Republican. Please pardon any redundancy.”
Of course, these are not all of the angry emails I got. But they do summarize the general sentiments of my numerous liberal readers – people who come back to my columns constantly because they are addicted to being angry. And now that I’m about to deliver the punch line of my little joke their anger is about to reach unprecedented heights.
For those who haven’t yet figured it out, I was not the person who sent the racially insensitive email to the entire department. It was actually sent by a self-proclaimed liberal and atheist who, get this, teaches a university course in race relations. And, after sending the email to the entire department, no one (myself included) responded with a denunciation. The reasons for the silence are twofold:
1. The lone conservative on the mailing list recognizes that the First Amendment protects speech that is controversial and inflammatory. If the First Amendment was meant to protect speech that is main stream and uncontroversial it would hardly be necessary.
2. The over two dozen liberals on the email list believe in the selective application of the concept of hate speech. Specifically, they only apply it to speakers they hate such as conservatives and Christians and, of course, conservative Christians. They really have no concern for the groups they claim to be protecting from offense. In other words, hate speech is an objectively meaningless concept created by ideological bigots who are incapable of defending their ideas without government intervention. That is why the same people who support the discriminatory application of speech codes also support the “fairness” doctrine.
The whole problem of speech codes could be solved if we could just find a way to make liberals happy. But that would be harder than finding Osama Bin Laden in a convenience store in New Jersey. So I think we should sue the enforcers of these codes when it is necessary to do so. And we should ridicule them even when it isn’t.
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