We live in a highly politicized (and therefore dishonest) culture, and this means that before you decide whether you are for or against any proposed measure, law, or pr campaign, you have to look past the language. “Hate crimes” is code. “Anti-bullying” is code. Invariably it turns out to be code for some aspect of the radical egalitarian agenda for human sexuality.
Things are so bad that the Left has lost almost all sense of irony or self-awareness. During the Q&A at the Bloomington event a week and a half ago, I was being asked about my blog defense of “bullying” at school. I had written a post defending the use of a phrase like “that’s so gay,” and it was read back to me by a questioner in a way calculated to make me ashamed of my defense of bullying, which it wasn’t. The post the questioner quoted from is here, and a couple of other related ones are here and here.
Anyhoo, I was explaining that, of course, I was against actual bullying, the real kind. In the course of this answer I used an example of mean girls ganging up on another girl, and I said something like “suppose they are being really catty and bitchy . . .” As soon as I said “bitchy,” there was an audible gasp throughout the room, and one woman starting yelling something along the lines of “Bitchy! What the effin’ razzum skazzum effin’ hate-monger effin’ HATE!” She apparently had a problem with the language I had been using.
The Left has no sense of proportion, no sense of irony, and no sense of humor. Whenever they propose hate crimes legislation, or anti-bullying legislation, or anti-anything legislation, they are doing so with the full intention of applying their peculiar (and contradictory) understanding of those standards, as soon as they get the chance, as part of a whipped up tolerance-mob.
Filled with hate, they march against hate. Angry at bullying, they bully. In support of free speech, they shout speakers down. Their punishment is that they have to be them.
This means the only reason they want tough anti-bullying legislation (for example) is so that they might have another blunt instrument to use in their ceaseless bullying of Christians.