I can see his patriarchy hanging out, for goodness’ sake!
Stunningly good rant:
http://toddseavey.com/2007/04/21/abortin…
I once had a notion that turned out, like most good conservative ideas, to have been better stated by someone else before me, in this case Irving Kristol. He observed, back in the 70s, before we’d even gotten in the habit of calling politicized campus speech codes “political correctness,” that feminist and leftist taboos are not so much opposed to traditional etiquette rules as they are a hastily-constructed, ramshackle substitute for traditional etiquette. To take a collegiate example: tradition dictated that young men shouldn’t walk around half-naked in front of women they hardly know, and the left demolished that taboo with the result that women - even smart, “liberated” women – found themselves quite alarmed by the naked men walking around their dorm rooms but unable to articulate their objections in (hated) traditional language (“boorish,” “unseemly,” “not gentlemanly”) and so had to concoct (proper) leftist rationales – not always terribly good ones -for a de facto return to the old order and in some cases separate bathrooms (“All those men are potential rapists!” “If we’re all naked, they may objectify me!” “I can see his patriarchy hanging out, for goodness’ sake!”). Being a leftist means, above all else, never admitting you made a mistake – or rather that predecessors thinking along the same lines as you made mistakes – and so we “progress” on to a new set of rules, learning almost nothing from the experience of abandoning the older, more nuanced set that preceded them. So it is with liberalism, always.
