The offense one takes is the same one should take–liberal or conservative– when somebody uses the word “Jew” as a pejorative for a Jew. A person may be literally Jewish, but it’s dishonest and disgraceful to gloss over the fact that in each case a sigifier of ethnicity is singled out and deliberately used as a slur. It’s unquestionably repulsive when anyone compares Bush to Hitler. But the things that distinguish us ethnically or religiously, even if technically undistorted, can contextually be insulting and are sometimes intended to be.
During a disagreement I recently had with a friend of a different ethnic and religious orientation from my own, I was referred to as a ‘Protestant.’ My supposed ‘Protestantism’ has been as diluted by modernity and multiculturalism as has Barack Obama’s name. I do not subscribe to any tenet of belief that might be called ‘Protestant,’ though if somebody asked me what culture my background forced me to claim, a childhood in Bretheren and Baptist church life would delineate me as ostensibly Protestant. However, I was no fool to detect that my background was being contextualized so that it might cast a bad light on my ideas. The clear implication is that these ethno-cultural labels carry with them some essential negative moral quality and therefore merely saying them triggers the connection–a connection that can only be made in the minds of those who make such assumptions. Functioning as it does on this unspoken presumption that an ethnicity or culture could be essentially evil or flawed, it appeals to the least evolved intellectual habits of our species–habits which good people of both liberal and conservative persuasion have been nobly trying to stamp out for the last few centuries.
