It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.
——George Washington’s Letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island
I went to bed late, but woke up early because I can’t believe it, but it’s true: America just elected a black man named Barack Obama under a deluge of rumors that he was a secret Muslim, a terrorist sympathizer, a socialist, a baby-killer, and that he and his wife were secret dissidents that planned to dismantle the country. And America said, “Fuck that bullshit.” I’m proud of us today, even though I suspect backsliding will happen pretty quickly. (In fact, we backslid in the same election with the Prop 8 vote.) But even when we regress to the mean, it will have moved an inch closer to not just tolerance, but towards the goal that Washington laid out for us in 1790: giving bigotry no sanction.
But even though you should give bigotry no sanction, I suggest enjoying your schadenfreude before this sinks in. Michelle Malkin is the best—-her choice of metaphor for “surviving” their improved tax status and perhaps even getting universal health care is “gird your loins”. That tells you everything you really need to know about the wingnut mentality, that it’s fueled by a basic and irrational fear of emasculation. She has a list of goals for conservatives, and it amounts to, “Make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else, fuck your fellow citizens, fuck the union, and basically punish the country for thwarting the entitled piss-ants that make up the tatters of the conservative movement.”