"Bigots Go Home"?

Last night, while babysitting for some friends, I was watching FoxNews and noticed a blurb about a pro-life protest march in San Francisco. The blurb was on what I call the news bar that's at the bottom of the tv screen. The pro-lifers were protesting the Roe v. Wade decision which has it's anniversary today. They were countered by pro-abortion marchers shouting, "Bigots go home", and that's what caught my attention.

We all know that the abortion debate brings out heated passions on both sides, but why, I wondered, did the pro-abortion demonstrators in San Francisco call the pro-lifers bigots? The abortion debate has nothing to do with race or even gender. Millions of pro-lifers are women. Indeed, judging from all the pro-life rallies and protests I've seen on tv, women are the backbone of the pro-life movement, yet the SF pro-lifers were called bigots. Having thought about it, I think I know why, and it gets to the bottom of why I'm not a liberal.

As I stated above, millions of women are pro-life. I'm one of them. My best friends are pro-life. I've had female co-workers who were pro-life. So I know that pro-lifers aren't bigots. Yet liberals are obsessed with making every issue about bigotry, or racism, or hate. Apparently, they think it proves their moral and intellectual superiority over their opponents, but I think it reveals their moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

It takes no great mental effort to dismiss your ideological foe with a pre-packaged rebuttal. This is especially true when the rebuttal has little or no relation to the actual issue at hand. Still, liberals do this all the time. And why do they do it? Because they lack convincing arguments for their ideas and because they're too arrogant to think they need them. Liberals are about discrediting the views of others rather than defending their own. They seem to really believe that all they have to do is smear opposing views for the gloriously obvious goodness of their own ideas to shine forth. And what better way to smear opposing views, and the people who hold them, than to paint them as bigoted, racist, or hateful?

This was brought home to me during the bitter debate over welfare reform during Clinton's presidency. Republicans were giving the public real stastitics on the failure of the old welfare system, most notably that it hadn't reduced poverty one bit in 30 years. And the Democrats' response? The Republicans were cruel! The Republicans were racists! The Republicans wanted to starve children! I'll never forget Congressman Charles Rangel actually saying that there were "similarities" between the Republicans' welfare reform bill and Naziism. Opposing a welfare system that kept people poor made you a Nazi??!! That's when I lost all respect for liberals. Truth and common sense didn't matter. Power mattered, and liberals thought they could regain it by launching a hysterical smear campaign they assumed the public was dumb enough to believe. They assumed wrong, and they're still out of power.

I realize that most people aren't going to change their position on the abortion issue, which ever side they're on. But the harshness of the debate could ebb if the pro-abortion side started showing a little more respect for the intellectual depth of the pro-life side. In fact, liberals need to show more respect for the intellectual depth of their opponents on all issues. It's time they started defending their ideas and stopped assasinating non-liberals' character.