Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation was on the Ed Show on MSNBC (is that still on?) and this is kinda’ fun because Ed has no answer other than name calling in response to the truth bombs from Anderson. So he just cuts his mic. It would be infuriating if it mattered but it’s MSNBC so it doesn’t.
The thing that gets me about this religious freedom debate we’re having is that we’re not having a debate at all. It’s just demagoguery and hyperbole. Nobody’s talking about diners having segregated counters for gays. Nobody, that is , except liberals who are trying to win public opinion rather than get to truth. But that’s what they do. I don’t know if it’s always been like that but I remember as a young man seeing James Carville on television shows arguing for Bill Clinton’s innocence in some scandal. The thing is, he’d never actually argue Clinton’s innocence. He would argue either that everyone else does it too and/or the Republicans were mean spirited Nazis on a witch hunt. And guess what, on television, most people came away thinking along with Carville. It used to drive me crazy.
It doesn’t drive me crazy anymore because I’ve just accepted it, I guess. It’s not that people are stupid, it’s just that they’re not really paying all that close attention to these things. They’ve got a lot going on in their own lives so the time they devote to these issues is about the time they watch Carville on television. And then they see all the talking heads agreeing with Carville and they come away thinking that is a good indication of public opinion. And that’s how public opinion is swayed just enough so they win.
We think we’re having a religious freedom debate. The other side can only have an anti-gay debate. They literally can not let it be anything else. So what do we get? Demagoguery. Hyperbole. And mic’s getting cut.
So sometimes I’m happy to see guys like Ryan Anderson out there dropping some knowledge out there but other times I just feel like it’s tossing deck chairs off the Titanic, you know.
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