After Oklahoma City: Talk Radio Responds : New Terms Needed

There is no connection between the conservative cry to reduce government and far-right gangsters who believe that bombing government buildings and murdering innocent people is the appropriate response.

To argue for such a connection is analogous to arguing that those on the left who attack the Catholic Church for not ordaining women priests or for its stand on homosexuality “create an environment” for people to blow up Catholic churches. Such arguments are meant to end debate and criticisms, not to end bombings.

This is not to deny, however, that rhetoric has consequences. On the right, the constant labeling of abortion as murder and declaring that abortions in America are morally indistinguishable from the Holocaust in Europe must lead some people to kill abortion doctors.

On the left, the constant labeling of America as racist must logically lead to blacks and others hating this society and must provoke some to try to burn it down or at least to sympathize with those who do. Both the pro-life right and the anti-racist left need new terminology.

Let those who claim a direct link between anti-big government rhetoric and the Oklahoma City atrocity be aware that depictions of the government as evil emanate as widely from the left.

During the 1980s, many on the left used the term “Reagan-Bush” as synonymous with all the meanness that they could identify in our society. And no conservative commentator has depicted the American government as sinister as the leftist director Oliver Stone did in his film “JFK.”