Quote of the Week

Peter J. Wallison, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in today's National Review Online:

[If Democrats wish] one day to return to power in this country. . . , they will have to jettison the likes of those smug liberals — liberals who have probably never met a born-again Christian, yet still know in their hearts that such people are intolerant and ignorant, focused entirely on imposing their religion and lifestyle on the rest of us. This liberal attitude is the true intolerance, and it is what will keep the Democratic party in a position of permanent minority until it can rid itself of this bigotry.

Wallison also addresses liberal columnists fretting about conservative Christians:

[M]ost liberal bias in the press does not arise from a deliberate effort to distort the news for political purposes, but from an essential ignorance that others can reasonably hold views different from theirs — an unwillingness, in effect, to accept differing views as legitimate. . . .The fact that Christian fundamentalists hold different views from their own means that, in their eyes, the fundamentalists are divisive and intolerant — as though the views of [Tom] Friedman and [Garry] Wills have a legitimacy that makes all others' unworthy.