Once upon a time, the press was virtually obsessed with the “with us or against us” foreign policy stance of the Bush presidency. Pundits swung from rhetorical chandeliers, screaming that such a dichotomous approach would alienate the rest of the world - that our “arrogance,” as they called it, would thin our list of allies dramatically.
But that doesn’t seem to apply to the media when the matter is domestic policy and the viewpoint is socially conservative.
MSNBC host Contessa Brewer posted on her Twitter feed this morning:
The Donald announces at 11am whether Miss California gets to keep her crown, though she hates gay marriage but likes to take her shirt off.Sigh.
Initially, and least important to the subject of this post, one would doubt very much that Carrie Prejean enjoys taking her shirt off for the cameras. One might assume that feelings of insecurity would plague her, much as they would any normal woman - no matter how beautiful.
On more substantive points, though, one must wonder why the with-us-or-against-us mentality is apparently foreign-policy fatality, but is regularly used as a moral club to bash social conservatism. Why must people automatically “hate” homosexuals if they think that gay marriage is morally wrong and unwise public policy? Why is there the assumption that social conservatives “hate”gay marriage proponents simply because they disagree with their political agenda?
If that is the definition of hatred, one might also argue that Brewer hates Prejean, simply because she disagrees with Prejean’s definition of marriage. It could also be that Barack Obama hates roughly forty-six percent of America for voting against him. There is the possibility that Keith Olbermann hates conservatives...well, okay - that’s a bit too obvious to apply here.
Could it be said that Harry Truman dropped two atomic bombs on Japan because he hated the Japanese? Perhaps, in this line of thought, it would be acceptable to say that two good friends might hate each other, because one believes the greatest sport known to man is baseball, while his buddy says the same of golf.
The logical absurdity is nearly unlimited, and always unbiased. Unfortunately, Contessa Brewer is not.