04/26/05

On Saturday night, I celebrated Passover ... with my family in northern Virginia. On Sunday morning, Bill Frist, majority leader of the U.S. Senate, took to the airwaves alongside a group of evangelical leaders ... for a 'Justice Sunday' telecast, which was designed to show that those who oppose the right's agenda on the federal judiciary are discriminating against 'people of faith.' On one level, this is funny. The appeal to identity politics is like a crude parody of some of liberalism's darker moments from decades past, complete with the deployment of the Newspeak term 'people of faith.' Even in imitation mode those on the right can't seem to muster a modicum of serious thought about what they're doing, blindly copying the 'people of color' construction (despite the fact that 'religious people' is -- unlike 'colored people' -- a perfectly workable substitute)...

http://www.prospect.org/web/view-web.ww?id=9593

from The American Prospect, by Matthew Yglesias


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp