Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts this weekend penned a column identifying a new hate group: the Republican Party. Pitts accused the party of being race baiting for years and now believes that they meet the definition of a hate group with the KKK and neo-Nazis. The column is the latest example of how we no longer recognize good-faith differences in opposing views in our age of rage. It also reflects how hate speech often is defined in highly generalized terms that allow for arbitrary designations, particularly for those who espouse different views than your own.
Pitts used the definition of The Southern Poverty Law Center which has been sued for labeling conservative groups as hate groups. The group has reversed some of its prior declarations of hate groups, but has not changed the loose definition that allowed it to capriciously select such groups or individuals as “extremists”. The Center defines the hate groups as denoting “an organization that — based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities — has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”
So any group can be declared a hate group if either its beliefs or practices “malign” any group? Yes, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
That made it easy for Pitts who concluded that “For half a century, then, the GOP has taught white voters racial resentment, taught them to prioritize concerns about white prerogative over concerns about shuttered factories, dirty water, lack of health care, foreclosed futures. It did this in code — “Willie Horton,” “tax cuts,” “welfare queen” — which, while obvious to all but the most gullible, still allowed respectable white men and women to maintain fig leaves of deniability.”
With Trump, Pitts asserts that the GOP “fits [the definition] with room to spare.”
Under the SPLC definition, doesn’t Pitts’ column constitute maligning Republicans as a group? It is not an immutable characteristic (though I wonder with a few Republican friends), but such immutability is noted by the DPLC was merely “typical” and not essential.
The column could well have been tongue in cheek but suggesting that an entire political group qualifies as a hate group is hardly a light satire and Pitts seems entirely serious.
Pitts simply declared that “they are now is the party of “Send her back!” — of outrage over Colin Kaepernick kneeling and April Ryan asking questions.” Well, they do have a few other issues that define them. One can disagree with the party’s stance on global warming, immigration, military budgets, or other issues but those issues exist as core differences with the Democratic party. Moreover, the opposition to Kaepernick is shared by a majority of Americans in many polls. I am one of those who disagree with the protest during the anthem. Are we all a hate group because our opposition could be viewed as maligning those NFL players?
I have joined in the criticism of Trump for his tweets (like the highly offensive call for members of Congress to “go back” to where they came from). I have also criticized the GOP for not denouncing Trump on that and many other occasions. However, I do not view the GOP as a hate group or think that it is appropriate to do so. It is an example of how we no longer debate issues but label those with whom we disagree. It is not enough to disagree with the Republican Party. You must declare the entire party to be a hate group. Such arguments only highlight the subjectivity in such definitions — and the danger that such ambiguity holds for free speech.
The column is the latest example of how we no longer recognize good-faith differences in opposing views in our age of rage
Not true. It is actually part of US history. Catholics have long been derided by those in the majority simply due to their Catholicism.
The following excerpt is from a long read but a very good one with generous references to truly great Catholic writers like Flannery O’Connor and others
The Catholic Writer Today
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/12/the-catholic-writer-today
Anti-Catholicism has also been common among the intelligentsia. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, “anti-Catholicism remains the one respectable form of intellectual bigotry.” During the ceremony when O’Connor was posthumously awarded the National Book Award, her editor Robert Giroux recalled one literary celebrity complaining, “Do you really think Flannery O’Connor was a great author? She’s such a Roman Catholic.” Would anyone have made a similar remark at the ceremonies honoring Philip Roth or Ralph Ellison? As poet-historian Peter Viereck commented, “Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals.” But the left enjoys no monopoly on anti-Catholicism. Despite some ecumenical progress in recent years, it remains a persistent prejudice among Southern fundamentalists and Evangelicals. A New York leftist and an Alabama Pentecostal may not agree on much, but too often they share a dislike of Catholics.
Sixty years ago, Catholics played a prominent, prestigious, and irreplaceable part in American literary culture. Indeed, they played such a significant role that it would be impossible to discuss American letters in the mid-twentieth century responsibly without both examining a considerable number of observant Catholic authors and recognizing the impact of their religious conviction on their artistry. These writers were prominent across the literary world. They included established fiction writers Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Jack Kerouac, Julien Green, Pietro di Donato, Hisaye Yamamoto, Edwin O’Connor, Henry Morton Robinson, and Caroline Gordon. (Sociologist Fr. Andrew Greeley had yet to try his formidable hand at fiction.) There were also science-fiction and detective writers such as Anthony Boucher, Donald Westlake, August Delerth, and Walter Miller, Jr., whose A Canticle for Leibowitz remains a classic of both science fiction and Catholic literature.
There was an equally strong Catholic presence in American poetry, which included Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Isabella Gardner, Phyllis McGinley, Claude McKay, Dunstan Thompson, John Frederick Nims, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Thomas Merton, Josephine Jacobsen, and the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel. These writers represented nearly every aesthetic in American poetry. There were even Catholic haiku poets, notably Raymond Roseliep and Nick Virgilio.
Meanwhile the U.S. enjoyed the presence of a distinguished group of Catholic immigrants, including Jacques Maritain, Czesław Miłosz, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Henri Nouwen, René Girard, John Lukacs, Padraic and Mary Colum, José Garcia Villa, Alfred Döblin, Sigrid Undset, and Marshall McLuhan. Some of the writers came to the U.S. to flee communism or Nazism. (Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
You are not a victim, move on.
I can’t evaluate how accurate the rest of your list is, but Walker Percy wasn’t Catholic. His viewpoint characters spanned the range from high-church Anglican to Roman Catholic to agnostic, but Walker Percy was raised in genteel agnosticism, and later became associated with liberal Presbyterianism. One odd phenomenon we believing fans of Walker Percy share is wanting to claim him as “one of our own”, and for a while I claimed him in all sincerity as Episcopalian.
He and his wife were converts to Catholicism shortly after they wedded having studied Catholicism together. He was born in an agnostic family. He received the prestigious Catholic award from Notre Dame University Laetare Award in 1989.
He was decidedly Catholic.
His speech follows…
https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/papers/walkerpercy.pdf
Laetare Medal Speech of Walker Percy
You know, in the part of the South I come from, there are not many Catholics. My wife didn’t see a Catholic until she was nineteen. I knew a few more. My cousins in Atlanta, the Spaldings, were Catholic and we visited back and forth. By happy chance, their father, Jack Spalding, received this same award in 1928.
You might be interested in my first encounter with Notre Dame. It is one of my earliest recollections. I must have been five or six. My father was a great football fan. Every fall he would receive a batch of tickets to football games, like Alabama vs. Georgia, Ole Miss vs. Tenessee, Georgia vs. Auburn, Southern Cal vs.—and then came that strange name unlike all the others—Notre Dame. What is that? I asked. I don’t recall any satisfactory explanation of what it meant.
Then came that movie, let me see, was it Pat O’Brien and Notre Dame? Something like that. Later, in medical school in New York, two of my best friends were graduates of Notre Dame.
One of them is here today, Dr. Frank Hardart, with his wife and daughter Tracy, who is a member of this graduating class. My two friends had the peculiar custom—at least it seemed peculiar in that medical school at that time—of going to church. Attending Mass they called it, every Sunday. I accepted it as yet another Yankee eccentricity and thought no more about it. Yet it stuck in my mind.
To make a long story quite short, years later I found myself a Catholic and a writer, writing novels and articles about science, philosophy, religion and such, and had long since discovered in my readings that this peculiar name referred to a community of scholars, a great university. Perhaps there are advantages to being an outsider. One gets too accustomed to names. At any rate I found it extremely touching that a university, a community of scholars, a great football team, should call itself quite simply and by the two lovely words, Our Lady. I still find it so, and it is one of the many reasons I am so pleased to be here.
The motto of the Laetare Medal is, I understand, Magna est veritas et prevalebit. I like to think it applies even to the humble vocation of the novelist. In my last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, I tried to show how, while truth should prevail, it is a disaster when only one kind of truth prevails at the expense of others. If only one kind of truth prevails, the technical and abstract truth of science, then nothing stands in the way of the demeaning of and destruction of human life for what appear to some to be reasonable short term goals. It is no accident, I think, that German science, great as it was, ended in the Holocaust. The novelist likes to irritate people by pointing this out. It is his pleasure and vocation to reveal, in his own allusive and indirect way, man’s need of and his openings to truths other than scientific propositions. He is one of the lowliest handmaidens to the truth of the Good News, but if he, or any of us, succeeds even a bit in this task, then I say laetare indeed, let us rejoice.
The ignorance and illiteracy of Liberals these days. It’s as if they haven’t read Orwell’s 1984 and don’t understand that we are all aware of their effort at Oceanic Party Newspeak, now supported by a gullible and willing MSM Press.
Mr. Pitts is just a projecting Democrats constant hatred of those who disagree with them. The liberal Dems smear machine rhetoric has created a violent Always-Fa, ICE center bombers, baseball shooters, haters of Christians and high schoolers, teen mobs, violent hat stealers, screaming hysterical protesters, etc.
Dr. Turley – again I ask you to stop equivocating and to start condemning these liberal haters. Democrat hatred and violence is 95% of the political hatred and violence we’ve seen over the last 8 years …middle-class, college educated women like me are sick of it. It’s time to state the truth in order to fix the problem.
Let me guess:
“Hate speech” is not free speech. Speech is violence. Therefore censorship and prosecution for such hate is admirable and necessary.
Actually “hate speech” is anything the left does not like.
Did I miss anything?
antonio
Unfortunately, this is nothing new, It should have been called out a long time ago. The MSM has been integral in the DNC’s re-branding the GOP as a “hate group” for decades.
I’m Leonard The 8th I am!
Leornard the 8th I am I am.
I crawled out of a pitt next door.
It was called a manhole before.
But now my itShay don’t stink.
I live in a sink.
Sex crimes, race baiting, and rock and roll. Leonard Pitts is a big fat troll.
Excellent essay, great observations.
With a last name like Pitts one has to be full of it. What do I mean by “it”? Do not assume that I meant the itShay word. No. That would imply that Pitts stinks. Or. That he is brown. No. Pitts means the end of a manhole. The word “manhole” is now outlawed in some California city because it is sexist. When you go down the open lid of a Pitt and fill it with sewage then you are a Pitt full of “it”. If ya know what I mean, Jelly Bean.
Next I will work on the word “Leonard”.
We should all ignore Leonard Pitts. He’s just spouting what the DNC says and he gets a big megaphone for it. Plus being a Pulitzer Prize winner means absolutely nothing. It’s a group of liberals scratching the back and applauding another group of liberals.
Striking that it was Trump, not Obama.
President Donald Trump has nominated the first African-American woman for promotion to general in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Col. Lorna M. Mahlock will be promoted to the rank of brigadier general, if confirmed, the U.S. Department of Defense announced on Tuesday.
She is the first African-American woman nominated for promotion to the rank of general in the U.S. Marine Corps
https://time.com/5237828/first-african-american-woman-general/
I have enough respect for the US Marine Corps and for Colonel Mahlock to believe her nomination to flag rank wasn’t political, but a recognition of the skill set she gained while the Corps’ deputy director of Operations, Plans, Policies, and Operations Directorate. The right Marine in the right place. Her nomination, however makes accusations that Trump’s decisions are driven by racism less believable,
The SPLC is a fraudulent hate group and anyone who cites its “definition” is a dishonest fraud by extension.
Actor George Clooney and his lawyer/activist wife donated $1 million dollars to SPLC last year, so the SPLC could continue to “fight hate” in the wake of Charlottesville. Yes, these dum dums intend to fight “hate” (as defined by them and SPLC) with more “hate.” Fools and their money….
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2017/08/22/george-amal-clooney-donate-1-m-southern-poverty-law-center-combat-hate-groups/590033001/
Founder of SPLC Morris Dees ousted for harassing women and “people of color”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-reckoning-of-morris-dees-and-the-southern-poverty-law-center
Pretty much tells you what you need to know. But here’s a little more:
https://cis.org/Sussis/SPLC-Grows-Assets-Over-Half-Billion-Cracks-Begin-Show
the SPLC has an admirable “offshore asset location” operation. Admirable for people in the “private banking” wheelhouse that is.
Much like crying wolf the never ending charges of racism have diminished it’s meaning. Useless in public discourse and detrimental to someone that my truly be a victim of racist behavior.
Interesting how Pelosi avoided lumping The Group of Four (AOC & pals) into this immature hate group category: “We’re family,” clearly confirming the idea that “belonging” necessitates forgiveness, understanding and allowing for differences of perspective. Will the words “family” and “belonging” become the next two words indicative of hate, bias, racism & misogny?
Pitts is aptly named.
mespo….Wasn’t he christened “Ira D. Pitts”?
Leonard Pitts is exactly what Marc Lamont Hill called Jim Brown and Martin Luther King III, during a panel discussion on CNN, when they visited Trump after the election.
Newspaper columnists have the positions they do because they can turn in copy on time. Some of them have demonstrated skills in other venues – George Will was a college professor, Jennifer Rubin was a lawyer, and Megan McArdle was an IT tech – but most are lapsed reporters. Perusing the issue of reporters deprived of their templates – see the clown posse on Washington Week in Review – will cure you of the idea that these people are capable of doing more than plumbing the shallows of a subject. That Pitts is a Pulitzer winner is of no consequence. These baubles are handed out by journalists, who are shallow, and, in addition, as addled by the affirmative-action mentality as any occupational guild outside of academe. What you’re telling us is that someone from a guild chock-a-bloc with mediocre people said something stupid. This is not news. And the incapacity of partisan Democrats to intelligently process opposition isn’t news either.
Thanks for sharing wonderful information.
Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts ….
Pitts has a lot in common with Walter Duranty:
Both deny the slavery of Blacks / Ukrainians to Democrat / Soviet apparatchiks
Both defended Marxism
Both had access to communist dictators (Obama / Stalin) and in turn favorably reported on them
Both earned a Pulitzer Prize
Both are liars
Lying as a Reporter beats having a job
Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent from 1922 to 1941, once called Josef Stalin, “the greatest living statesman.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, Moscow correspondent for the Manchester (England) Guardian, once called his colleague Duranty, “the greatest liar I ever knew.”
In 1929, an exclusive interview with Stalin secured Duranty tremendous influence in his profession. In exchange for continued precious access to the Kremlin, he agreed to report favorably on Stalin’s plan to raise industrial and agricultural productivity and the standard of living for citizens of the USSR.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2003-06-25-0306240411-story.html
Estovir, he’s an opinion monger, not a foreign correspondent. He’s not lying about discrete facts, although the column is mendacious in its way. Mostly, he’s lying to himself and doing so in ways that are bog standard for liberals.
Pitts got his break with the Miami Herald as a music critic, then his own column and finally published a few books, hence he is a journalist and novelist regardless of his “specialization”
Yes he does include some factual tidbits – even a broken clock is accurate twice in a 24 hour period. But his conclusions are outrageous like his truly racist column about conservative blacks and Hispanics. So typical of the intolerant Left
Trump’s black and brown true believers are blinded by the white
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article233028992.html
Leonard Pitts is the epitome of racist. I read his tripe for more years than I should have and found he hates white people with the fervor of Farrakhan
The Republican Party Platform (RPP) of 2016 opposes certain people for what I believe are immutable characteristics: being gay and being atheist. It would deny gays and atheists their right to the same liberty that non-gays and non-atheists enjoy. Both the SPLC and the ADL definitions of a “hate group” are satisfied by the anti-gay and anti-atheist positions found in the RPP. I’m not arguing that the definitions are correct, but if they are applied to the RPP, the Republican Party is a hate group.
Trump has been in entertainment for decades and has depended on gay men and women to perform in theater, musicals, restaurants, hospitality and other venues where gays excel in these circles. The lies the Left perpetuates with Trump being a hater originates in haters like SPLC. Obama and Hillary hated on gays during a time when Trump employed them in his many businesses.
The Republican Party Platform (RPP) of 2016 opposes certain people for what I believe are immutable characteristics: being gay and being atheist. It would deny gays and atheists their right to the same liberty that non-gays and non-atheists enjoy.
What you ‘believe’ is of no consequence. You’re just wrong. That aside, lavender PZ Myers wannabes might do everyone a favor and quit lying to themselves and others and pretending they have a natural right to harass others who decline to do business with them or applaud them.
This is BS
Leonardo Pitts is a manhole full of BS. By “BS” I mean Bull Sewer.