How to Interpret Conservatives

This post by one E. Fulton on the Salon.com chat pages is making the rounds, and worth it:

Conservatives omit several important words in their whining about being oppressed, so in order to understand them you have to add those skipped words back in. For example:

Liberals are against people of faith forcing their faith on other people and intruding on the constitutional notion of religious freedom for all people.

Conservatives can’t say anything openly offensive to minority groups, factually incorrect, and otherwise lacking any substance these days without hearing other people say that hate-filled and meritless comments are inappropriate, which is really just more speech, not a limit on anyone’s free speech at all, and having to hide behind some faux-rebel posture by claiming victimization from non-existent political correctness being “forced“ on them.

We have to use wedge issues to spark a fight to distract from our inability to create sound economic, social or foreign policies and preserve our political dominance among people for whom morals is an easy shorthand for “homophobia,” and we hope that our family members and staff won’t expose our hypocrisy and lack of integrity, so that we can lie about doing things we say we’re against and continue our craven approach to the attacks by us against homosexuals and liberals, whose behavior is no more immoral than ours, but our agenda is more important, because it gives us power, even if our use of it will ruin our country.

Christians are most assuredly not the most persecuted group in the country, and what we want to do with liberals is to claim their call for social justice by making sure that we keep harping on false claims that no one can say “Merry Christmas” and insisting on inappropriate and sacriligious uses of our own religious iconography to force the prohibiting of any religious display by government entities, which we know shouldn’t be displaying religious messages anyway.

See? They’re really just using a shorthand that makes interpreting their messages a little trickier, but once you see what’s not being said in context, it makes perfect, if Machiavellian and totalitarian, sense.

• Share: