In regard to Terry Gross’ interview with Hillary Clinton last week – in which the eternally-overrated Gross spent ten minutes badgering Clinton about the “evolution” in her views on same-sex marriage – I’m of two minds, depending on who you are:
If You’re a Liberal: Gross showed Hillary! up as the hypocrite she is. Clearly Elizabeth Warren is the only person fit to run for President in 2016. To accept any less would be to short-sell this nation.
If You’re a Smart Person: This piece in The Federalist by Mollie Hemingway sums up nicely the things – not by any means good things – that Gross’ badgering says about modern “progressivism”.
She badgered Clinton for an answer that Gross was tacitly demanding – self-abnegation over her history on the issue – that Clinton is too smart to give.
Gross pretended that all of American society outside the NPR-infused ultra-left hadn’t largely changed their minds on the issue in a blazingly short time.
Gross was also engaging in the ritual that is emerging on the left, the Orwellian need for all “progressives” to show that they were exhibiting PC correct-think on every issue from the very beginning.
And worst? Gross is showing how very unskeptical and unenquiring her breed of “journalist” is when revealed dogma is involved.
Now, I know the popular view among our deep thinkers in the media is that recognizing [the definition of marriage as being an institution where one or more man and one or more woman raised children has been remarkably consistent across societies, systems, religions and eras througout human history] should probably be a capital offense. But to paraphrase and quote something I wrote in “The Rise of the Same-Sex Marriage Dissidents,” marriage is historically understood as being based on the reality that all humans have complete biological systems in their body save one. That one for which we all have only half is the reproductive system — the means by which we propagate the species. Humans have all sorts of relationships but marriage was about sexual complementarity for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with bigotry, obviously.
Now if one wants to change marriage laws to reflect something else, that’s obviously something that one can aim to do. We’ve seen the rapid, frequently unthinking embrace of that change in recent years, described one year ago in the humanist and libertarian magazine Spiked as “a case study in conformism” that should terrify “anyone who values diversity of thought and tolerance of dissent.”
Here in Minnesota, the main persuasive approach of the same-sex marriage crowd (“if you don’t support it without stint or question, you’re a bigot”) was the sort of thing that gave Orwell indigestion seventy years ago.
I do urge you to read the whole thing.
Gross was letting Hillary know who was in charge of the progressive ideology.
It would have been more constructive, all around, for Gross to have quizzed HIllary on what the demise of the DLC says about the Democrat party of today versus the Democrat party of two decades ago.
These people aren’t anything like moderates, and this ain’t your father’s Democrat Party. They have gone so far left that they consider Obama, the most liberal president in the history of the United States, to be a “moderate”.
Actually, Terry Gross is generally a softball interviewer. Kind of like Charlie Rose. I think this was more a case of Hillary assuming she was being accused of something she knew she was guilty of and reacting. She decided she was being accused of taking positions based on politics. Terry was really giving a softball question that would allow Hillary to say that her opinion had evolved over time, just like the rest of the country’s opinion. Everyone should have been happy. It seems more like Terry was surprised that Hillary wasn’t taking the perfect setup pitch, and became confused because she had to keep lobbing it. Something along the lines of, “Didn’t Hillary read her script?”
Hillary! has always been the thin skinned thug of the pair – the living embodiment of the phrase “if you’re captured don’t let them give you to the women”