Real Change News | Drawing a line in the sandbox

August 22, 2007
Vol: Vol.14 No: No.35

Dr. Wes

Drawing a line in the sandbox

by: Dr. Wes Browning

Dr. Wes berates liberal wishy-washyness

Printer-Friendly Version

Like it? Share it!

Let’s talk about justice, equality, ethics and decency!

Ha, ha! Did I get you going? Actually, we’ll abuse wishy-washy liberals today. First, let’s define “wishy-washy” in the context of “liberal.” This may take space. I sure hope so.

Here’s my great insight. People of all political varieties, not just liberals, when faced with a situation that calls for a judgment, may miss the crux of the matter by letting themselves get lost in side issues. It only tends to look “wishy-washy” when liberals do it.

Take the mosque at Ground Zero debate. In 2000 the Republicans wrote and passed a law that prevents New York City or any other local government from stopping the Islamic Center. When Newt Gingrinch misses that central crux, he misses it much the way a tank rolling down the road overlooks a lame pigeon. There’s a crunching sound. We don’t call the conservative Newt “wishy-washy” when he annoys us in this way. We call him “belligerent” or “jerk-tastic.”

Whereas, when liberals annoy us by missing some point, we discover them playing in the liberal sandbox of ethical relativism respectfully disagreeing amongst themselves over whose rights take priority over whose needs, historical patterns of oppression, and whether one person’s offense offending another person’s offense is more offending than the offenses going the other way around and backwards.

So President Obama reminds us that the Imam has the right to build the center, and then turns around and says that saying so doesn’t necessarily mean building it would be the best thing to do. The best thing for who to do? Pee Wee Herman? Shut up.

So, by “wishy-washy” I’ll mean, that particular losing sight of right and wrong that happens by being blinded by dreams of a liberal paradise in which all that is best and perfect will poop out of a grand consensus that even conservatives will join. The lions lying down with the lambs, as it were, frolicking with them in the clover. And even the clover sees that what we, lions and lambs, all of us, will have decided, is for the absolute very best for every living thing in the world.

Conservatives rarely appear wishy-washy, simply because the conservative paradise doesn’t involve consensus. The conservative paradise involves you doing what you’re told. So conservatives that get sidetracked merely forget their own principles and tell you to do what they wouldn’t, if their heads weren’t also sidetracked to where the sun don’t shine.

“Hey! What brought this on, Wes?” Well, Anitra “Legal As The Day She Turned Eighteen” Freeman was playing with conservatives on the Interwaste the other day and dredged up a year-and-a-half-old story of two girls being expelled from a private religious high school, having been both successfully accused of being lesbianic, and she thrust it out, asking the right and wrong of it.

By the time I found the discussion Anitra began, there were some thirty interweaving comments all along the lines of, golly, freedom sure is complicated, isn’t it? How will we ever sort out the competing interests here? Freedom of religion versus the right to one’s sexual orientation?

Here’s how you sort it out. Forget the liberal sandbox. Forget freedom of religion. Forget sexual orientations. Forget competing interests. Forget that it was a school and a school principal.
When do adults have the right to traumatize minors by conducting inquisitions into their sexuality or their sexual feelings for one another?

If the religion sanctified child-rape and the parents consented to have their children go to a school that meted out rape in the principal’s office, would the parents’ consent stand in for the consent of the children? Newsflash: Grilling teenagers with prying questions about their sexual feelings amounts to emotional rape.

A judge ruled that the girls could be expelled based on grounds of religious freedom to believe that lesbians are “wrong.” The judge was wrong to allow that to even be the issue. The issue was and remains, you don’t harm children that way.

----