Ingraham Insufficiently Deviant For Leftists To Defend Her Speech
The world has about come unhinged over Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham for daring to poke a little fun at a petulant youth known to excoriate with the vilest of profanities those reluctant to embrace his policy proposals demanding the abandonment of centuries of constitutional theory deemed fouler than his acute potty mouth.
The font of deliberative political contemplation, GQ Magazine, has posted a column in support of the Ingraham boycott titled “Boycotting Ingraham Is Patriotic”.
Yet those assenting to this sentiment are the very sorts of thinkers that would condemn the Census for tabulating how many within the boundaries of the United States are actually citizens.
But if it is inappropriate to classify who is and is not of a particular jurisdiction --- the most basic of functions in establishing the foundations of a nation/state --- isn't the concept of patriotism --- the idea that a set of principles in large part derived from a particular geography inhabited by a specific sort of people is superior to all others --- even more verboten?
GQ is celebrating the decentralized justice inherent to a boycott as about the purest form of free expression imaginable.
After all, consumers are not obligated to bestow their funds upon someone advocating a set of values that they find abhorrent.
Likewise, Ingraham is not entitled to be lavished with these funds.
Interesting, though, how amongst postmodernist hordes this realization is a one way street.
For would the editorial staff of GQ Magazine as eagerly applaud a boycott organized by a Christian cabal seeking to impose their particular ethical idiosyncrasies in a way that would implement comprehensive revolutionary change across the entire culture even if a significant percentage was still not amenable to such a fundamental alteration of the social compact.
After all, those now threatening social upheaval are the children of many who denounced Pat Buchanan's culture war oration at the 1992 Republican convention.
At the time, opponents of the pious populist insisted that absolute objective values did not exist and, even if they did, it was not the place of cultural institutions to advocate on behalf of or to enforce a hegemony of values.
Of Lady Ingraham's status within the ongoing civic discussion, the enlightened archons of GQ assure the unsettled of weak mind, “Laura Ingraham remains as empowered as ever to impart her bad takes, whether to viewers on Fox News or to passer-bys on the street, without fear of being arrested by agents of the state.”
But for how long?
Already the right of free expression --- deliberately enshrined among the first protections of the Bill of Rights --- is restricted in the presence of those seeking an abortion --- a procedure that honest jurists are compelled to admit cannot be found clearly delineated anywhere in this charter document but rather only in interpretative penumbras of it.
In the case of Lara Ingraham still enjoying her innate liberties as a free citizen despite being economically inconvenienced, how is that less of an outrage than the gay couple denied the wedding cake by the Christian baker?
In the transaction dragged before the judicial system, no one prevented the couple from the state granting its official recognition of their unnatural liaison.
The only thing they would have had to have endured was the search for a baker willing to provide it, which would have cost considerably less that the advertising revenue rescinded from Fox News.
So why are some forms of speech worthy of protection and some not the part of the most vociferously insistent that the most egregious imposition imaginable is to somehow insist that someone else's truth might not be quite as true as initially suspected?
Frederick Meekins is an independent theologian and social critic. Frederick holds a BS in Political Science/History, a MA in Apologetics/Christian Philosophy from Trinity Theological Seminary, and a PhD. in Christian Apologetics from Newburgh Theological Seminary.
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