Reply #22: thanks for the thoughtful post [View All]

Welcome to DU GaYellowDawg.

I agree that bashing the South and Christianity is wrong. It is also not very smart.

Why would we not want to support our beleaguered liberal friends in communities where they are out-numbered, rather than demonizing and bashing the whole community? Why would we want to reinforce Falwell's propaganda - "those liberals hate Christians" - and the right wing propaganda - "those New England liberals hate regular people" and give them more credibility?

I was in a coffee shop in Detroit a few years ago and heard a couple of elderly women speaking a Slavic language and asked them if they were speaking Polish. "No, no, Croatian!" one of them said enthusiastically. The concept of a "Croatian language" is itself radically nationalistic, by the way, since the Serbian and the Croatian language are identical for all practical purposes. Then she says "we are celebrating today because the Croatian army has beaten back the Serbians." I said that there were 100,000 innocent men, women, and children evicted from their homes in winter weather fleeing for their lives as we spoke, and asked her if that bothered her. "They did it to us!" she replied indignantly.

The thinking there is that it is OK to hate people if you can convince yourself that they hate you. If you asked a Serbian the same question, you would get the same answer.

The Southern states go Republican because they are more rural, it seems to me. There are plenty of rural Republican counties in the North, but they get offset by the Democratic vote in the large cities. Take Detroit out of Michigan and you have Alabama, politically. Take Cincinnati and Cleveland out of Ohio and you have Mississippi.