Recent Controversies Are Ink from the Leftist Squid

Glenn Reynolds puts today’s national culture-war controversy (revelations that the Duck Dynasty cast is… wait for it… Christian) in the context of a much greater scandal that isn’t being treated as such, quoting a commenter who wrote:

I suspect this is an attempt to get Obamacare off the front pages and I suspect that we are all falling for it.

Here in Rhode Island, we’ve been seeing our share of the phenomenon.

The two examples that come immediately to mind are the Union-Left attack on radio talker John DePetro and the liberal-Catholic petition for an apology from Providence Bishop Thomas Tobin, who didn’t wait as long as the mainstream hagiographers would have liked before pointing out that Nelson Mandela could use a bit of prayer for forgiveness for his support of killing unborn children.

It’s possible that it’s all a coordinated, top-down effort to create a distracting narrative.  Progressives, after all, are the real practitioners of “astroturf.”  It’s also possible that the reality-lite community is in a state of heightened stress owing to across-the-board failure of its preferred policies (see: Rhode Island) and is lashing around for targets, spreading distractions that make its members feel as if they’re ideologically safe, not unlike a squid squirting ink.

Either way, we’re being presented with a fantastic lesson in Progressives’ use of social issues.  They aren’t really a “wedge” for the right, in the sense that substantial numbers of conservatives disagree about the fundamentals and will throw away all common ground because of them.  Rather, they are uncomfortable issues, and mixed up with people’s (often inadequately reconciled) senses of morality, on the one hand, and liberty, on the other.

The goal is, therefore, not to highlight an area of disagreement, but to make people who want to avoid aggression step back a bit from those who aren’t so timid.

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