A Tweet of Which I Am Proud

My tweet:
@jjauthor @PeterLaBarbera If you despise women, think of them as breeders without brains, humans without rights, you might be a conservative.

In response to:
@jjauthor: If you despise the rich even though they pay your share of taxes for schools, roads, parks, the military & the poor; you might be a Liberal! [RT'd by @PeterLaBarbera]

You know, I'll just bet that precisely the same indignation over the word "despise" that occurred to me, occurred to my counterparts, though for different reasons: it's not that we liberals "despise" the rich for anything, let alone the responsible ones who actually pay their taxes. It's that we despise the system that creates them and the politicians who are thereby purchased.

It is (for me, at least) analagous to our views on religious people: liberals don't "despise" religious people; we despise them when they try to legislate their self-interpreted, self-contradictory morality on everyone else, trampling and ignoring history, reason, law, and constitutionality in the process of forcing women to undergo unnecessary, invasive, and ethically questionable medical procedures while simultaneously intimidating members of our esteemed medical profession.

We despise them when they hypocritically claim to be pro-life but behave as though this really means anything to them only until birth. Evidently, they don't seem to give a damn about children except for purposes of taxpayer-funded religious or pseudoscientific indoctrination, until they are of military age.

We despise them when they so obviously ignore some parts of "holy scripture" in favor of others by enacting and advocating for regressive, punitive, damaging pieces of legislation that serve to disenfranchise minorities, establish second-class status for whole swaths of the population, and invasively and tyrannically attempt to dictate what I as a consenting adult am or am not allowed to do with other consenting adults.

Peter LaBarbera and his ilk enjoy projecting their myopic views of OWS onto every single person that disagrees with them, displaying willful ignorance of the true meaning of those protestors and their aims. Hence his enthusiasm for the notion that liberals "despise the rich."

I have ready examples of every single one of my assertions about conservative legislative efforts, both at the state and federal level. I have dozens of tweets, blogs, radio shows, and interviews of LaBarbera and his comrades praising Santorum's misogynistic rhetoric and calling for a return to the days when women were thought of as little better than cattle to be bred for calves and milk. From polygamy to slavery to the mandate to marry my dead brother's wife and get her pregnant ASAP--whether I was already married or not--the bible and its fundamentalist expositors have shown time and time again that their barbaric proscriptions and prescriptions have little place in a society that fancies itself "the greatest nation on earth."