(Fort Wayne) News-Sentinel
Who can deny the intense polarization between the left and the right in America today? The degree of separation, some would say, is akin to the divide that led to the Civil War.
“I think that the crisis in America is the greatest in my lifetime and the greatest since the actual Civil War,” nationally syndicated conservative radio talk show host and writer Dennis Prager said in an interview on the Glenn Beck radio program.
We would argue that the division between left and right is morphing in many cases into actual hate, which is being fomented by a lack of civil discourse and bipartisan cooperation as well as the kind of blanket attacks against the right that are akin to Hillary Clinton’s branding of Donald Trump supporters as “deplorables” in the 2016 presidential election campaign.
Former Vice President Joe Biden took the same tack Saturday at the same forum Clinton used in her slander of Trump supporters. Biden was speaking to LGBT rights advocates at the annual Human Rights Campaign dinner in Washington, D.C., branding those who support the White House as “virulent people” and the “dregs of society.”
Clinton was speaking to the same group two years ago when she said, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” And she topped it off by saying all these people are “irredeemable.”
Trump followed up on her comments by asking, “How can she lead this country when she thinks America is full of racists, deplorables and irredeemables?”
So how did that all work out for Clinton? Not so well, since Trump supporters staggered the left by electing the Republican candidate to the highest office in the land when the pundits insisted Clinton was a shoo-in.
Even so, potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Biden took the same approach at the LGBT fundraiser.
“These forces of intolerance remain determined to undermine and roll back the progress you all have made,” he declared. “They are a small percentage of the American people — virulent people — some of them the dregs of society.”
What’s ironic is that Biden told the Independent in an article earlier this month, “It’s about time we start talking to each other like we’re civilized, and deal with one another with respect.”
Biden’s attack is an insult to conservatives and Christians throughout the country, and, as Family Research Council President Tony Perkins stated, is “revealing about the hostility that conservative, Christian citizens and others who oppose their radical agenda will be subjected to if the left succeeds in their goal to reclaim power here in Washington and in state capitols around the nation.”
As if we aren’t already on the receiving end of that hostility as it is. What we have to do is make sure that we maintain our own integrity and don’t resort to the same divisive tactics as the left.