Monday, October 26, 2015

NO CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT NOT TO BE CRITICIZED.

On Saturday Hillary Clinton said, apparently in response to Bernie Sanders, "I haven’t been shouting, but sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting." Maybe you think the jape is right on; maybe you think it's pure quasi-feminist campaign cheese. If you're National Review scold Ian Tuttle, though, you think it's a violation of your rights:
If unfettered debate about public policy is to be vouchsafed, it requires being able to criticize public officials without those criticisms being reflexively labeled “racism,” “sexism,” etc. That is a necessary condition for self-government. If getting a woman/Hispanic/transsexual into the Oval Office comes at the expense of the freedom to criticize that person without being accused of sexism/racism/transphobia, then that’s not “progress” worth making.
Sorry, buddy, there's no "freedom to criticize that person without being accused of" anything. I prefer to believe, like any other other internet blowhard, that anyone who criticizes or characterizes me negatively is wrong. But I never think -- it never would even occur to me -- that if someone calls me racist, sexist, SJW, cuckservative, totalitarian, milquetoast, Albigensian, ne'er-do-well, feller-me-lad, or any other names that I find unfair, they have made self-government impossible, much less trampled on my freedoms. Because I'm not ten years old or a conservative.

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