Intolerance never sleeps

Dear Editor:

Whenever I hear the words “radical Left,” I reach for my keyboard. 

In a fit of rhetorical overkill, Rep. Matt Regier injected the facile crutch five times into a 450-word essay in The Anaconda Leader as if begging for a response. The Republican lawmaker intended “Media’s Attacks on Legislature Attack the Voters” (June 9, 2023) to be an attaboy for the supermajority on its copious legislative victories in 2023. The petty screed succeeds only in tossing tiresome partisan vitriol and demonizing already victimized populations.  

Who are the shameless liberal agitators and their elite fellow travelers — lefty editorializing staff at the Leader and Lee Enterprises chain, I gather — that Regier intimates have put white Christian heterosexuals’ rights in a vise? Name names if you can. 

Or at least define your terms. Keeping the labels straight gets confounding, what with free-range New Deal Democrats, Socialists, Marxists and Communists running wild in the streets.

Regier, a leader of the radical reactionary Right in Helena, ascribes all manner of war crimes in what he terms “culture wars” to amorphous leftist actors. The expressions “sexualizing kids” and “indoctrinating students” never appear in Regier’s commentary, but the subtexts are transparent. 

Montana Republicans sprang into action, Regier informs us, because runaway surgeons give sex-change operations on demand to tweens, and wolves in sheep’s clothing shower with actual sheep. Neither is true in Montana, of course, or anywhere of which I am aware. 

Worse yet, according to the House Speaker, “biological” males and girls are sleeping together, somewhere, evidently under the permissive eyes of Montana school officials. A telephone request to Regier for details of each alarming culture skirmish he cites went unanswered.  

Addressing serious issues is not the point of extreme Right legislation. Securing favor with an easily misled electorate is.

Let’s face it. Tumultuous societal changes sweeping the war-torn landscape make a number of influential voters supremely uncomfortable. Drag queens are icky, and they, along with gun haters and antifascists, rob so-called “normal” Montanans of sleep and common sense.  

The difference between the modern Left and Right in the United States is simple: Progressives strive to expand rights to every citizen, however insignificant. Reactionaries prefer a mythical America of 100 years ago, when LBGTQ+ people and other powerless minorities lived quiet, hidden lives and civil authorities could jail instructors for teaching heterodox concepts.  

To the majority of Montana legislators, freedom is a zero-sum game. Somebody must lose so someone else can win. In such an antisocial calculus, the religious zealot comes out on top over the queer youngster and the gullible parent over the career educator. 

Do not delude yourself, Representative. Intolerance never sleeps. 

The radical reactionary Right has displayed naked hostility toward contrary voices. Leaders show no interest in stopping at abridging the rights to vote, exercise free speech and independent thought, love openly and choose to terminate a problem pregnancy. 

Dispossessing personal liberties of one class of individuals to assuage the fears and discomfort of a different class is tyranny cloaked in freedom.

Craig Schmidt lives in Opportunity. He is a journalist and card-carrying member of the radical Left who supports repealing the Second Amendment.

Craig Schmidt

Opportunity