Published: PolicyMic (May 10, 2012)
My fellow American liberals,
I would like to make a modest proposal.
For far too long, we have been accused of terrible things. In the last decade alone, our opponents have said that we’re un-American, that we’re Communists, that we’re a “tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show.”
It’s time we ‘fessed up to it.
I know that’s asking a lot, but what’s right is right, and if the right is right and the left is wrong, then the left needs to leave its leftist wrongness so that it can start doing right by the right.
All right? So with Jonathan Swift as my guide, here I go:
1. We hate the Constitution.
Hell, we hate the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and just about everything our Founding Fathers believed in. In part, that’s because we’ve seen too many Michael Moore movies, but mostly it’s because …
2. We hate freedom.
The state is our God and we know that if we just give ourselves over to it, all of our problems will be solved. That is why we support health care reform, financial industry regulations, and consumer protection measures. There is just nothing we want more than an all-powerful, all-encompassing nanny state guiding us through every step of our lives. Just look at how much …
3. We love taxes.
After all, none of us really contribute anything to society on our own, so what better way to punish the most productive members of society (i.e, the rich) than by forcing them to give their money to lazy layabouts through entitlement programs?
I’m guessing it now goes without saying that …
4. Joe McCarthy was right all along.
Academia, the media, Hollywood, and the Democratic Party are full of covert Communists gradually inching America toward the Soviet system, one liberal program at a time. In fact, I wasn’t even allowed to register for my first PhD course until I’d sworn to take an oath on a copy of Marx. Technically I’d be violating that oath by telling you all of this, but luckily I switched “Das Kapital” with “Groucho and Me” at the last minute.
Speaking of things that are funny …
5. We love killing babies.
Abortion, stem cell research, those death panels in Obama’s health care reform bill … you name it, we’re laughing at it. True story: Jon Stewart’s entire audition for “The Daily Show” gig consisted of telling dead baby jokes.
Do you know what we take very seriously, though?
6. We want to ruin the institution of marriage.
This is why we want gay people to be able to marry each other. With the institution of marriage forever sullied, we can have lots of frenzied hedonistic dirty hippie sex free of any sense of restraint, propriety, or guilt. Who wouldn’t want that?
Oh yeah …
7. We’re persecuting members of the Christian Right.
They’re right about our “secular-socialist” agenda. I personally spend the first half of my day mulling over how I can ruin at least one person’s faith in God (although when I succeed, I usually spend the second half trying not to get shot). I mean, we’re liberals, so we already know we’re going to hell (it was the baby killing, wasn’t it?), and we get bored pretty easily, so we’re trying to take as many people down with us as possible. I heard the weed down there is great.
I feel like I’m leaving something out. Eight has always been my lucky number, so I probably need one more thing …
8. We already know Barack Obama wasn’t born in this country.
Back in 1961, when the liberal establishment heard that a Kenyan graduate student in Hawaii had just married a white teenager who was three months pregnant with their illegitimate child (and she had only become a legal adult nine weeks earlier), we knew that that biracial baby would grow up to become the perfect instrument for our socialist schemes. That’s why we ignored the fact that segregation was still around, told them that we were setting their child up to be president, insisted that they make the 21,458 mile roundtrip from Honolulu to Nairobi so he could born in Kenya instead of Hawaii (don’t ask), and then planted fake birth notices in the “Honolulu Advertiser” and “Star Bulletin” to throw everyone off the scent. Later we also passed a law prohibiting Hawaii from releasing the official birth certificates of its residents, so that way when Obama was only able to provide the obvious forgery we called a “duplicate,” we’d have an excuse.
Of course, there is another possibility. It could just be that liberals have a different interpretation of the Founding Fathers’ intent and the Constitution, generally oppose expanding state power but believe that it is necessary when there are greater social problems that can’t otherwise be effectively addressed without it (injustices in the medical industry and on Wall Street, consumer safety), believe the wealthy should pay more in taxes because they can afford it (even though they generally pay less in aggregate), believe that there are far more people who benefit from welfare and genuinely need it than there are those who abuse it, think women should have the right to decide for themselves what to do with their bodies, believe homosexuals should have the exact same rights as any other adult couple, simply want the Christian Right to stop trying to blur the separation between church and state, and elected a president who – regardless of what you think of him – has already proven as much as can be reasonably expected of him that he was born in this country.
Nah. That would be ridiculous.