It's a Hard Thing to Do 

So you wanna be a moderate. You consider yourself in the center of the political spectrum do you? You believe in some stuff on the right, and you believe in some stuff generally considered of the left. There is one true test of the moderate person however... and I admit its a skill that I am still mastering. When you hear a story, or listen to someone speak, you have to be able to separate what they're saying from who is saying it. You have to be able to evaluate the words based on just that... the words.

Granted, you also need to look at the person speaking, and evaluate what they're saying from the viewpoint of their motivation, and their beliefs. But far too often, people will dismiss what someone is saying out of hand simply because someone from the other side of the aisle is saying it. Sometimes even worse is when you accept what someone is saying because they share an ideological cause with you.

Frank Rich wrote a particularly stupid column in the NY Times recently, and Ann Althouse brings up an excellent example of just the phenomenon I'm talking about.

But didn't you notice that the feminist concern about sexual predation, a huge deal circa 1992, fell into steep decline shortly thereafter? The people of the left had a keen eye for the sexual subordination of women in the late 80s and early 90s, the era of the anti-pornography movement. They gasped about sexual harassment around about when Clarence Thomas was nominated as Supreme Court Justice. And then it all just suddenly went away, because party politics outweighed whatever real concern about feminism they'd ever had, and Bill Clinton needed help beating Paula Jones into submission. Feminism has never recovered! Oh, abortion politics still remains, because it works well as a campaign issue, but there's not much serious attention to feminism on the left anymore.

And I don't mean to say that the conservatives have been fine feminists through all of the flap about the flopping breast. I only mean to say that I once thought I could rely on the Democrats to take the feminist side of things, until a big lightbulb went on right around when I read this article in 1996.

The article she points to is very long, but also very interesting, and a side to the story you don't hear to often. The two stories have largely been forgotten, except for the occasional mention on VH-1's I Love the 90's. As I said, this sort of automatic belief or dismissal in a story is something that we're all guilty of from time to time. The trick is to recognize your problem so maybe you can move past it in the future. That's certainly my goal.