Absolutism: Or How I Learned to Stop Thinking and Love Hypocrisy

Mannion is absolutely right (har har):

Right Wingers are in love with their own image of themselves as moral absolutists these days.

They, and they alone, are grown-up and tough enough to know there's RIGHT and there's WRONG. Liberals, those damn namby pamby, criminal coddling, terrorist-therapy-offering, decadent, dirty movie-making, rap song-singing, drug-taking, blow job-enjoying moral Relativists, don't know right from wrong and don't care that they don't.

This is what’s so hard for conservatives to understand: It’s not that liberals don’t know right from wrong; it’s that liberals believe in context, which means that some things are right in one situation and not in another, or right for one person and not another, and we believe that each person should decide that for him- or herself, as long as that decision doesn’t infringe on the rights of someone else. The curious and frustrating thing about this is that, as Mannion astutely points out, conservatives believe this, too, in certain situations (they don’t seek to punish a soldier who kills an enemy combatant in battle with the death penalty or life imprisonment, because they know that killing someone isn’t always murder), or for certain people (President Bush not going to church on Sundays is excusable as long as he cites security concerns, even though the Clintons managed it).

Mannion sums it up nicely. The unfortunate thing is that those who are intellectually lazy enough to embrace absolutism don’t give a shit how often it’s pointed out to them that their vision of the world is incomplete at best.