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letterpolimorals

The Salt Lake City Weekly printed my letter this week:

I sincerely believe Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, simply made a poor choice of words with his 'black baby' remark, and did not have any ulterior racial message in mind. That said, it's a shame he'll probably go down for this instead of for the years of actual hate-filled insanity he and his ilk have pushed through the legislature in their crusade to bind our growing, advancing civilization under the chains of conservative pseudo-morals.

I'd initially sent it to the Trib, but they didn't give me so much as a "thank you for your submission." So, attention whore that I am, I sent it to the SLCWeekly instead. I hope anyone of conservative outlook ever sees it, they're not exactly the audience the SLCWeekly caters to.

The "pseudo-morals" part is perhaps the most important. We've let socially conservative forces run free and amok with the word "moral" for too long. It's endlessly frustrating to hear liberals, progressives, and secularists hide from the word, claim not to believe in it, or debate whether the concept even exists. Your pathetic attempt to maintain cred with a bunch of isolated Postmodern academics will hand victory to the conservative enemies of everything good. Liberalism, social progress, civil rights, free thought and speech... all these are moral battles, all historical progress on these lines are moral victories.

Liberals and conservatives think differently. They experience moralistic emotions under different circumstances. Various cognitive studies suggest liberals are more comfortable dealing with ambiguous or nuanced information than are conservatives. This may relate to the tendency of liberal thinkers to let the word "moral" be left in the hands of absolutists, as they've fallen for the conservative rhetoric that only absolutism can be "moral." Conservatives also attach much greater weight to concepts like hierarchy and purity than do liberals, who only experience moralistic emotions in categories of justice and harm. That's where we need to take up a moral discourse, because it implies conservatives may be willing to tolerate injustice and harm for the sake of purity, ingroup identity, and authority. We need to accept the language of morality to see to it that justice, freedom, and the general good are always prioritized in the democratic system.

1 comment:

Sra said...

At least the Salt Lake Shitty Weekly didn't infect your letter with embarrassing typos when they printed it, like they did mine. It's because I used the word "shitty", and when they edited it out, they forgot to proofread to see that the sentence made sense. So I looked like a dunderhead. The funny thing is that the letter I was replying to also used the word "shitty", and they didn't edit that one. Maybe it's cause that one was written by a guy, and girls aren't supposed to use words like that.

Ah well.

Nice letter :)

 
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