I'm a Bigot

I know I'm a bigot because tonight (11/7/05) Senator Dan Coats, self-proclaimed "Sherpa" for Alito during his confirmation process, made this abundantly clear. It was during an interview on All Things Considered, the question being about the nominee's nickname, "Scalito." Coats laid my bigotry open with his answer, "he (Alito) resents it for the implication against his Italian-American heritage." Now I'm not just a bigot, I'm a super-bigot because I hadn't even thought of this nickname being related to his ethnicity.

No, I'd unthinkingly thought that it had to do with the fact that Alito's judicial philosophy was very similar to Antonin Scalia's, the most famous, powerful and eloquent proponent of strict constructionism in the land, and it was just dumb luck that Alito's name combined so easily with Scalia's. Now I find out that all along I was really using "Scalito" as a synonym for (insert your most despised Italian ethnic slur here). Whew, I'm glad the party of Lincoln is around to remind me that every time I oppose anybody, it's because I'm a bigot.

This exact thing happened back in '03 when Senator Orrin Hatch explained that those who opposed the appointment of Bill Pryor, a Catholic, as an appelate court judge did so because they were anti-Catholic. I did oppose it, so I guess I must be. More recently, David Brooks informed us that people who used the term "neo-conservative cabal" were anti-Semitic. And while I'm not sure that I ever said "neo-conservative cabal," I'm pretty sure that I'd said all three words close enough together to count. This is mounting and condeming evidence of my bigotry for sure.

And not only am I a bigot, I'm the worst kind of bigot; the comfortably blind bigot--much more insidious than your typical liberal "soft bigot." I wander around thinking that I make my choices based on facts, consequences, contingencies, equality, ethics, etc., when really I've always been relying on early 1960s stereotypes to guide all my beliefs and decisions--and that's at my most contemporary moments. Yep, if that Alito isn't a papist then he's for sure an anarchist, or worse!