A column by Jonah Goldberg published in the dead-tree National Review (August 30) “A Muslim Gay Bar by the Mosque?” typifies the utterly infantile quality of our current movement conservative discourse. Goldberg writes in glowing defense of Fox News celebrity Greg Gutfeld, who had just advocated (presumably in a serious way) the creation of a Muslim gay bar in the vicinity of Ground Zero. Goldberg happily embraces this idea as a “tough-minded libertarian.” After all, freedom, he insists, “is a cultural institution that needs to be defended, even if that means offending people.” Moreover, “whatever you may think of gay bars, they’re not going away in the freedom-loving West. Pretty much everybody else in American life has learned how to live-and-let-live with such places to one extent or another.”
One might ask Goldberg, the “tough-minded libertarian,” why just one month earlier he had denounced Rand Paul in a column for raising hesitant objections to Provision Two of the Civil Rights Act, a provision that restricts an employer’s right to hire whom he wants for a job. According to Goldberg in one of the most ferocious tirades I’ve seen coming from his pen, unless the subject is the critics of Israel or “Obama fascism,” he let loose against the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Kentucky for “lamenting the lost right of bigots.”
Apparently the anti-discrimination mechanism created by Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave this country “economic freedom” for the first time, although it is not at all clear how it did so. But in any case why is my historic right to hire or accommodate whom I want in my business establishment less of a right than the right to run a gay bar, to the consternation of religious and moral traditionalists? Why should I have less of a right not to confer a job on a prospective employee than to scandalize devout Christians by establishing a sodomy recruiting agency in their neighborhood?
We all know the answer. Like his pals on FOX News and NR, Goldberg occasionally mimics a politically correct leftist even while working for GOP electoral victories. There is nothing noticeably rightwing about him or his chums, Rich Lowry, Glenn Beck, or the other movement conservatives who are working overtime trying to demonstrate their sensitivity to minorities and cultural liberals. Whether it is Glenn Beck quoting Martin Luther King and deploring the mildness of Reconstruction, Rich Lowry congratulating Abe Foxman and the ADL for taking a “courageous” position against building a mosque near Ground Zero or Laura Schlesinger ranting against the N-word, all of these personalities are as nauseatingly obsequious as they’re predictable. I’ve no idea why the only people who seem to notice this obvious fact are contributors to and readers of this website. Whenever I mention the same tics to white-bread Republicans or NR-subscribers, their response is to tell me they didn’t notice the offending behavior.
