Azelma wrote:
It shows you how truly fucked up the Republican Party is that their presidential candidates are too scared to come out and slam Rush Limbaugh for being a hateful bigot.
The best they can do is some soft language like "oh I would have worded it differently"
politicians make me sick.
And here I will prove to you that my opinions are the most correct and objective of anyone's on this forum and probably anyone you will ever meet in your life.
I agree with them.
Offensive speech is the ultimate test of our democratic freedoms. There is a fine, but definite, line, between making remarks which, although disgusting and tasteless, do no one any harm...and making remarks which devalue people as human beings or constitute an implied called to violence - e.g., racist epithets against blacks or Jews or other groups that have suffered violence and discrimination under such auspices in the past, or which call into question the fundamentals of our way of life (e.g, civil liberties and supremacy of the civilian over the military).
(And no, hurt feelings and wounded sensibilities don't count, sorry.)
Rush, in my mind, did not cross that line.
Was what he said offensive? Yes. Tasteless? Definitely. Irrelevant? Mostly, yes.
But calling someone a "whore" or a "prostitute" is not forbidden nor should it be. It is neither a call to violence nor a defamation of other people's humanity or our way of life. It is merely an assault on their moral character and good name - such an assault that, although tasteless, offensive, and almost invariably self-destructive, everyone has the right to make.
If we are to consider moral character a real and falsifiable thing - that individuals can be moral or they can not be moral - then we must agree that other individuals must have the freedom to voice their estimate of others' moral character.
Rush's remarks, while offensive and not productive, aren't entirely incorrect. The fact is, this woman is using sexuality, her gender identity, for political leverage. His metaphor may be gross and witless, but it is in a small sense correct: if what you are selling, for personal material gain, is sex, you are a prostitute. Whether you're selling that sex in the form of the sex act or imagery/seduction, doesn't change the reality of what one brings to the table.
The test of freedom of speech is not how it is maintained against mainstream society but how it is maintained against outliers. I may think that Rush is a fat, slovenly, stupid, hypocritical, ignorant, demogogical, hate-spewing despicable man, but I also believe that so long as he does not tread over that fine line I have laid down, he is entitled as everyone else to be offensive.
Short of prosecuting him, to stigmatize him or punish him because those who were his allies, supporters, or simply indifferent the day before don't like something he said today, calls into question our morality - our capacity to tolerate ideas and people which we simply do not like.
And this is important to us, too. I despise Rush and would lol hard if he choked on his own lard. But I do not believe that he should be subject to a lynch mob in the service of someone else's political agenda. Doing so would only distract us from the real issues and problems in this country. Ironically enough this is the very nature of the demagoguery that Rush himself has practiced.
But it is a far less dangerous thing for a man to undertake immoral acts than for a society to validate them by undertaking them as a collective.
Rush should be let off the hook.
And that's why my opinions are always right.
