I was listening to a radio show on the way home from work last night and the host and guest were talking about the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight. The host pointed out that some movies are generally conservative (Braveheart, Gladiator) while others are unabashedly liberal (In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Rendition, and Syriana).
One of the things that came out was that in conservative movies, we don't care why someone is a bad guy (the guest was arguing that he wanted to know what made the Joker into the Joker). We simply understand that evil is evil and there aren't excuses for that. Whereas, in liberal movies, we have to come to understand the bad guy and even sympathize with him, understanding his motivations (unless the bad guy is a conservative, then the motivations are obvious: he's just evil).
This discussion made me think about the shooting at the Knoxville Unitarian Church Sunday. There are plenty of people wanting to plaster the blame onto others besides the gunman.
You killed them, Pat Robertson. You killed them, Pastor Hagee. You killed them, Ann Coulter. You killed them, Dick Morris and Sean Hannity and the rest of you at Fox News.
Yet, in the end, it wasn't Ann Coulter who killed those people in a church. It wasn't Pat Robertson. It wasn't Sean Hannity or Michael Savage, regardless of how you feel about their rhetoric or politics. Millions and millions of people listen to, watch, and read these people on a daily basis and yet do not succumb to violent tendencies. So, why blame those pundits when violence erupts?
The fact is, there is real evil in the world. It walks into churches and shoots unarmed and innocent people. It attacks people who disagree with it. It tries to shame people into silence by attaching evil to good.
I'm willing to say that what the man in Knoxville did was evil. But trying to attach blame to the authors of books he read is just stupid. Did he own a dictionary, as well?
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