And to show how your comments re replacing certain offensive words can cut both ways, I post for your viewing irritation a short essay I wrote last summer on GLP which attempted to make the exact same point, from the opposite direction.
Please accept my apologies in advance if I offend, but that was the point with this excercise.
___________________
Replace the term “****** lover” for “liberal” and you will understand what conservatives really mean
I ran across an article on the net in the last few weeks, where I no longer remember, which suggested that the vile with which conservatives spit out the term “liberal” can best be viewed in the context of the racial hatred left over from the U.S. fifties and sixties. I was taken back by this idea on first glance. Yet, when I read the headlines today about Kerry’s announcement of Edwards as his running mate, it all starts to sink in.
Just replace a few shelved terms from the sixties, and it all makes sense.
I grew up in Oregon in the sixties. White, working class, hard working, hard drinking, hard living Oregon. Where everyone was white, unless you, for some reason, went against the grain. Then you were a hippy, ****** lover, long hair, commie . . ., well, you get the drift. You were still white, yet somehow tainted.
Hippies and ****** lovers were considered, at least in my neighborhood, as one and the same. Rock and roll was, to put it simply, considered ****** music. Nothing more.
Hippies and ****** lovers. And, of course, if you fell in the hippy and ****** lover camp, there was that third category of redneck. Or pig. I’m sure there are a few more choice terms I’ve left out, but you get the drift.
And today? Where are we today?
Well, we no longer use those terms above, now square like groovy. Instead, in our kinder and gentler politically correct mode, the moral right claims the conservative high ground, kicking to the curb anyone they perceive as “liberal.”
Liberal. At least that’s what they say.
But you know what they really mean. Take any sixties term now politically death, plug that term in instead of the word “liberal,” and prepare to hit the bulls eye.
Now, just for fun, what you REALLY think that Jeb Bush meant when he says that Kerry and Edwards are too liberal?