Taking Offense
I’m offended. Actually offended. I’m not the easily-offended type. I don’t think I’m even the regular-offended type. It takes a lot to truly offend me. I may not agree with you. I may not like what you say. But to find something at which I actually take offense just doesn’t happen every day.
And then along comes Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s choice to be the next Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States of America. She’s a far-left liberal who’s interpretation of the Constitution differs from my own in nearly every way. But that’s not offensive; that’s just life.
She doesn’t support gun rights, even though they are guaranteed by the Constitution she is sworn to uphold. Irritating, but not offensive. She doesn’t believe that helpless unborn babies have any rights at all. That is just horrifying, but not a matter of personal offense to me.
No, I’m offended because she said that she thinks, and I quote, that a “wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
The great civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is spinning like a top in his grave right now. His dream of a nation in which his grandchildren could be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character just took a giant leap backward.
Now don’t mistake what I’m saying. My outrage is not so much because one woman made a racist remark eight years ago. The real problem here is that no one (outside of the Rush Limbaughs of the world) seems to care. Where is the anger? Where are the cries for the President to withdraw her nomination? (Other than day time talk radio, that is.)
I’m not ashamed to be a white male. I was born this way; I’ll die this way. There is nothing I can do to change who I am, and there is no reason to want to. Political correctness has run amok for too long. This is one wise white male who has had enough.
