The Orbis

Issue date: 11/9/05 Section: Undefined Section

"How does crushing a baby's skull become a constitutional right?" David Kupelian, managing editor of the conservative web site WorldNetDaily, earnestly asked his audience at the Heritage Foundation last Friday. "How does quoting the Bible become hate speech?"

How does fixating on outrageous scenarios that have never actually happened give you an excuse to write a left-bashing book?

That's what I wanted to know after I sat in on Kupelian's speech promoting his humble addition to the right-wing screed genre, The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom.

The trick seems to be a simple bait-and-switch formula that unfailingly conjures the right's motivating illusion that radical leftists are calling the shots and causing the problems in America.

The method, perfected by masters like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg, goes something like this:

1. Take an issue that a majority of Americans are legitimately concerned about.

2. Strip that issue down to a stark, black-and-white, moral-outrage-inducing parody of its former self.

3. Dredge up an almost totally unknown or powerless person or group whose views on the issue are still sufficiently inflammatory, or at least can be characterized as such when given the right spin.

4. Insist that this obscure straw man is not only well-known to American liberals but actually worshipped by them as little short of a god-and is, of course, leading us all down the path to self-destruction.

Kupelian's speech made liberal use of this formula (pardon the pun).

It's a maddening technique, because I often find myself agreeing with conservatives about their basic concerns and the silliness of the particular lefties they attack. But I take vehement issue when they brutally distort America's challenges, and contend that the marginal left-wing bogeymen they blame for our problems represent either a significant threat or the best and brightest of American progressive thought.

When abortion inevitably arose, for example, Kupelian ridiculed some advocates' characterization of this thorny moral issue as a simple, sunny matter of "choice." Such simplistic rhetoric has been bugging me for years, and American Prospect Deputy Editor Sarah Blustain expressed the same reservations last December: "To this generation, the 'choice' of a legal abortion is no longer something to celebrate. It is a decision made in crisis, and it is never one made happily."

Kupelian, however, put it slightly differently. According to him, the original abortion advocates cynically "figured out that it'd be easier to defend an abstract, positive-sounding idea like 'choice' rather than the unrestricted slaughter of unborn babies." And so he moved instantly from confronting a real issue to raging against a phantom free-for-all of infanticide.

This is the wonder of the conservative culture-warrior's art: that graceful leap from righteously ridiculing the no-nuance shamelessly embracing the no-nuance right. When Kupelian spoke as if "crushing a baby's skull" is representative of a typical abortion procedure, he abdicated any moral authority to critique the perceived excesses of the pro-choice movement. Meanwhile, he utterly failed to address the legitimate concerns of the tens of millions of Americans who see the value of abortion as a sometimes essential last resort, not an on-demand convenience.

This is the way most of the talk went: Kupelian bravely engaged obscure lunatics on the left with the latest lunacy from the right, blithely ignoring the sane concerns of everyone else.

In a brief foray into the subject of academia, he even dared to call out Ward Churchill as a nutcase-as if any left-winger with half a brain wouldn't do the same. But of course, the right-wing formula requires that such marginal bozos be recast as the cutting edge of liberal thought, and so he reminded his audience, "there are a lot more Ward Churchills out there poisoning your kids' minds than you can imagine."

No, there aren't. You know how I know? If there were, the Kupelians and O'Reillys and Hannitys of the world would make sure that everyone in America knew their names, just as they did with Churchill. The fact that they're instead still milking this one poor nut for all he's worth while conservative powerhouses are falling from grace on an almost daily basis seems a pretty clear indication of which side's 'poisonous' behavior is more endemic and widespread.

Kupelian's hands-down most obnoxious use of the left-bashing formula, though, came when he turned to the topic of teen sex.

Of course, all Americans are worried about teen sex-not least the teens themselves. But before you could say "bait and switch," Kupelian was wringing his hands over an issue that would make even the most libertine tweener balk: pedophilia.

"How does molesting 11 or 12 year old boys become man-boy love?" he asked, thus outing himself as perhaps the only person in America who takes NAMBLA seriously.

But then-you guessed it-Kupelian embarked on a grueling acrobatic exercise to demonstrate that touching our children, far from being the perverse dream of a few crazies who serve primarily as the butt of jokes on the Daily Show, is actually the secret agenda of everyone with sexual mores to the left of Rick Santorum.

He started, as expected, by summoning a left-wing demon to blame for this depravity. Apparently even he found NAMBLA too laughable at this point, so he moved on to another favorite right-wing target: Alfred Kinsey.

Kinsey is the sex researcher whom many credit with breaking American taboos against discussing sexuality. He also had a rather over-the-top personal sex life and some questionable research methods-all of which conservatives like Kupelian see as grounds to discredit any positive contributions he made, or worse.

"[T]he entire edifice of the sexual revolution in all its forms is based on" Kinsey's work, Kupelian warned, "...whether you're talking about rampant promiscuity, gay rights, or pornography-."

Okay, but he couldn't really be implying that because Kinsey interviewed some child molesters and the data was published as part of his bestselling book, every single homosexual, feminist, or other sexual revolutionary is actually secretly working toward an ultimate goal of legalizing pedophilia-could he?

"I hate to tell you, but the latest liberation movement which is coming fast down the pipe is the mainstreaming of adult-child sex," Kupalian boldly proclaimed.

Of course, there's a much simpler, stronger explanation of the sexual revolution: It's a hugely diverse movement, encompassing everyone from real rebels against an unnecessarily intolerant and hypocritical sexual culture, to countless youngsters who see it as an apolitical excuse to go wild before settling down (just as their parents did), to a few true sexual deviants, perhaps including Kinsey, whose despicable acts are at most footnotes in any book on sex except those written by a right-wing culture-warrior.

This analysis, however, isn't going to get anyone to support conservatives. As with abortion, academia, and so many other issues, Kupelian and his fellow right-wingers can only get the response they want when they change the cultural story from deep, complicated national struggles in which we all have a stake to the diabolical extremist agenda of a few leftist oddities.

It's easier to rally the right by nitpicking pro-choice rhetoric than attacking women who have had to make this difficult choice. It's easier to take on the rare academic who truly hates America than the countless others who are simply struggling to bring us to terms with the darker parts of our past and present identities. It's easier to rail against NAMBLA or Alfred Kinsey's tragic flaws than the gay man down the street who is denied equal treatment simply because he makes some of his neighbors uncomfortable.

Still, my conflicted feelings in the face of such rhetoric convince me that there's a lot more progressives could do to go beyond the culture war narrative. As Blustain and now Senator Barack Obama have suggested, this won't be achieved by moving left or right; it will be achieved by explaining the basic humanity of what we're fighting for.

Progressives should make abortion rights about women's health, not a Supreme Court case; make college inquiry an earnest examination of our national soul that will help shape our future, not an academic exercise that only sullies our past; and make the sexual revolution a broad search for sexual health, not a narrow celebration of self-indulgence.

Only when we rediscover the humanity of our message will the right's raging against inhuman leftist demons lose its effectiveness.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools