A Hierarchy of Hatreds

It is striking how the self-designated reality community has a distinct ordering of hatreds, though it's not a totally fixed ordering but one in which the same group of people can be hated and disdained one day and defended against a more hated group on another day.  The visit to the United States by Pope Francis is a case in point, they lurve Francis when he's talking about climate change and economic justice, they hate him when he's being Pope of the Roman Catholic church.   They defend him when he's being attacked on FOX "news" over climate change and economic justice, they loathe him when they're not concentrating on him being attacked by the FOX family of haters.

And there is a similar phenomenon when it comes to Muslims.  They adore the world population of Muslims when they are under attack by American "Christian" fundamentalists and, to a lesser extent when the aging white men of neo-atheism slam them,  they hate them for being Muslims in most other contexts, making quite similar and frequently inaccurate universal stereotypes about them that they do of, say, Catholics and Christians.

It wouldn't be nearly as annoying for the "reality community" to do this kind of thing if they weren't so dishonest about it and so cluelessly conceited and arrogant about it while they do it.   Most of all, their unequal treatment of other, huge groups of people, like Muslims, like Christians, is no less bigoted than the kind practiced by FOX liars and spinners.  And, for those with political pretensions, it is massively stupid since there are just about certainly more liberal Catholics in the United States than there are neo-atheists, by a very large number, alienating them is certainly divisive of the left.  When you expand that to the number of liberal Christians and even more to the liberal religious folk of any identity, the clear reality is that the left can far more afford to give up the splinter faction of bigots among us than it can even one of those religious groups.  

Liberals have been kow-towing to a tiny percentage of bigots among us when, as explored in a huge number of the posts I have written, those bigots aren't really liberals, at all and their ideology is corrosive of liberalism.  It is no great mystery that under that domination for the past forty or so years liberalism has corroded and lost its coherence as a force and has been without political power.  Just about every counterproductive stand which liberals have taken, the empowerment of lies, the alienation of huge numbers of voters, even the insane denial of the reality of free thought and free will on which liberalism is founded, has been the result of that domination.   If liberals continue to placate and accommodate those haters who don't really belong among us, the prospects of ever exercising political power are non-existent.  

P.S.

Bernie Sanders' address to Liberty University was brave, going into the lions den, sort of, though I found it quite frustrating.   He could have cited, literally, hundreds, thousands of verses in the Bible to support the contention that the natural result of taking the Bible seriously would be the basic program of liberalism in the United States.  Before he, or, in fact, any liberal Democratic politician speaks to such a group again, they should consult liberal clergy who are familiar with the Bible and who know all of those verses which swamp the ones popular with the Republican right in number, in force and in context.  That someone of Bernie Sanders intelligence didn't realize that was a fantastic opportunity to make a powerful case for liberalism can only, I would guess, be a reflection of his unfamiliarity with the Bible.  The Mosaic Law contains the basis of traditional American liberalism, the real liberalism that informed all of the great reform movements of the past three centuries.  Even if Sanders had ignored the Second Testament - which would have been very useful in sealing his case - there was more than enough to work with.   Sanders is too smart and too good a politician to have lost that opportunity to make an overwhelming case,  I hope his staff is smart enough to make that campaign correction,  the number of religion haters it would lose is tiny compared to the huge number of potential converts it could gain.