In case you mistake me for a liberal

Until my last couple of posts anyway, it was my impression that many readers assumed I was a liberal. After all, I’m an atheist; I vote Democratic or Green; I support gay marriage and abortion; I’ve been in an open marriage and even a group marriage; I favor socialism over capitalism; I left the most conservative state in the Union for one of the most liberal; and am a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Yet, the truth is that I’m not an across the board anything, and many of my values would be offensive to both liberals and conservatives. For instance…

I favor early euthanasia for those who are born so severely retarded that they will always require 24-hour care. When I worked in a group home with such people, I would see 50-year-olds sitting bent over and drooling on themselves while strapped into wheelchairs, and wonder why the hell we were keeping them alive. Likewise, I favor euthanasia for anyone whom, later in life, has an accident or illness that reduces them to such a state—people with advanced Alzheimer’s for example.

I think prison overcrowding could be reduced with creative punishments. Specifically, I would favor less imprisonment and more humiliation. For example, teenagers who were caught going down the street knocking out car windows could be placed in prominently located stocks while wearing dunce caps.

I strongly favor gun control, yet I own guns. Some are hundred year old single shot shotguns that don’t work, but I also have a couple of handguns that do work, and when Peggy and I go camping to a remote area, or hear a bump in the night, I get one out.

If people are on welfare, I think they should be made to give something back to society. Under our current system, they can go on welfare, never hold a job, and run up their welfare checks by parenting a  houseful of children whom grow up to be as parasitical as themselves.

I don’t support people who demonstrate against what they consider racism on the part of police. Sure, I think criminals have rights, and that all people should be treated equally regardless of race, but the only situation I see people demonstrating against that involves obvious abuse is the one in which the man was killed with a chokehold, and even there, I don’t see any evidence that he was a victim of racism. But the biggest problem I have with these demonstrations is that instead of narrowing the racial divide, they’re widening it.

My only objection to capital punishment is that the wrong person might be killed. Aside from that, I could work as an executioner. The first criminal I would like to kill is the Boston bomber. If he’s found guilty, I would be quite happy to hang the bastard upside down by one ankle in downtown Boston and leave him there. I would do it in warm weather so he would last awhile, and I wouldn’t let anyone hurt him (so he would last awhile). I’d just let him hang, and when he died, I’d throw him in the garbage.

I oppose late term abortions in the absence of a pressing medical need.

I don’t regard panhandling as having anything to do with “freedom of speech,” and I don’t regard groups of kids who block sidewalks while loitering downtown as having anything to do with “freedom of assembly.” Neither do I think that people have a “right” to sleep in cars in front of my house or camp along the creek across the street.

I hate Islam, my politically incorrect opinion being that the crimes of Islam far exceed the actions of fanatics—unless you classify the citizens of every country run by Moslems as fanatical. Bombs, guns, female “circumcision,” the isolation and oppression of women, the persecution of homosexuals and non-Moslems, and the absence of freedom of speech are prominent among the fruits of Islam in the lives of millions of Moslems. I see it as a barbaric religion, and would be  pleased if we didn’t have a single Moslem living in America. (After the recent murders in Paris, I planned to make a post consisting of cartoons about Mohammed, but Peggy asked that I not do so, it being the only time she ever requested that I forgo a particular subject.)

I don’t “honor diversity” (a common bumper sticker here) because the more diverse the diversity, the more likely it is to be divisive. It’s one thing to live next door to someone who speaks English and moved to America from a country that holds similar values, and quite another to live next door to a houseful of Moonies, a black family that hates white people, a house crammed to the rafters with non-English speaking Hispanics, or a bunch of Moslems who despise the West and practice Sharia law. One of the pluses of moving to Oregon was the lack of diversity, but what did I find when I got here but people with no experience of diversity promoting diversity.

I’ll stop here with the thought that I’ve made my point. I’ve often felt badly that readers viewed me as something I’m not, but at the same time, I couldn’t think what to do about it. What inspired the answer was a recent remark by a liberal reader: “From Mississippi, are you? Please do not come near my blog again.” I considered his remark so stupid that I thought he was joking, but when I realized he wasn’t, it brought up for me the anger I have often felt toward people who make a point of boasting about how unprejudiced they are, how much they honor diversity, and so forth, only to have them turn around and trash me because I have a Southern accent. 

I came here from conservative Mississippi because I believed that liberals really did have a better way, only to find that I was forever running into people who couldn’t wait to tell me what an undereducated bigot I was, this without them knowing anything whatsoever about my schooling or values. These haters of bigotry were so overflowing with bigotry that they figured they knew everything they needed to know just from hearing my accent or having someone tell them where I was from. Clearly, not every liberal is this way, but a great many are. I even had a friend tell me that she didn't want me to meet her husband because he would make fun of me because I was from the South. When you run into that kind of thing enough, it makes you wary of liberals, and so it is that my opinions have been formed. Not all, or even most, liberals are notable for their bigotry, but enough are that they’re prominent here in Oregon, often in high positions. I'll say more about this in my next post.