The Acceptable Prejudices of the "Enlightened."

There is nothing quite so bracing as the assumptions and stereotypes held by America's elites, deployed out in the open and without guile. Professor Douglas Laycock wrote this gem about a fellow law professor's open prejudice toward her inferiors (in this case, gun owners) in 1991, and it remains a relevant--no, required-- read. Needless to say, it's one of my favorite law journal articles.

Moreover, it goes a long way toward explaining the likes of Zampolit Dickerson and Commissar Aho. Here's some excerpts to whet your appetite:

"Among the educated classes that have been most sensitized to the dangers of the most widely condemned stereotypes, other stereotypes and prejudices flourish. Respected academics and journalists, and respected journals who pride themselves on their tolerance, publish extraordinary statements about groups that have generally failed to engage the sympathies of intellectuals....

"One group that can still be safely insulted is the seriously religious. Fundamentalists, evangelicals, and Catholics remain fair game in many circles. Michael Smith has collected numerous antireligious passages in Supreme Court opinions, one of them a quotation from an anti-Catholic hate tract.

Suzanna Sherry, writing in the Michigan Law Review, equated fundamentalist legislators with racist school boards: "There are still racist school boards in a nation that generally finds racism intolerable, fundamentalist legislators in a nation that rejects a national religion, and so on." The skillful parallelism of the sentence packs powerful implications...."
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I won't spoil the gun owner anecdote for you. Share and enjoy.