Left confuses good guys and bad guys
By Doug Patton
web posted November 28, 2005
"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter."
- Isaiah 5:20
Just when I think I have seen all the silliness that political correctness can wreak upon society, another dose of reality lands on the front page of my local paper.
In recent years, the media and other self-appointed arbiters of our social mores have forced upon us such inanities as the celebration of so-called alternative lifestyles, while simultaneously ridiculing all things Christian. Any depiction, in movies or on television, of men or women involved in same-sex relationships is invariably portrayed as positive, and the trend toward sensitivity training in corporate America has become almost a given. Contrast that with the prevailing attitude toward monogamous, married Christians, who usually are depicted as backward rubes with boring lives.
Lazy, able-bodied welfare recipients who produce nothing for themselves or for society are pitied, while business owners, who risk everything to produce capital and create jobs, are scorned as greedy and taxed into oblivion.
Walking clichés of anti-Americanism like Cindy Sheehan are promoted as thoughtful and newsworthy, while young men and women serving in uniform are represented as suckers at best and war criminals at worst.
Illegal aliens have free run of our country, and those who dare to point out the porous nature of our borders are labeled as racists.
And then there are the contradictory and hypocritical attitudes regularly displayed toward criminals on one side of the law versus law-abiding gun owners and police on the other. Because liberals tend to view criminals as "basically good," they like to explain away anti-social behavior as society's fault. Conversely, since they believe that guns, not people, do, in fact, kill people, they distrust the motives and behavior of anyone who professes to want to own or use a firearm for peaceful, constructive reasons.
The latest example of this kind of PC stupidity is the policy of disarming campus police officers at three out of the four University of Nebraska campuses. In Kearney, at the Omaha campus and at the university medical school (also in Omaha), officers are required to face potentially armed criminals using only Mace and a baton. Only in Lincoln are campus police officers permitted to carry sidearms.
"I feel that my safety is jeopardized, as well as the safety of the students," Officer Dawn Adams of the Kearney campus said recently. "Each year we have to qualify with firearms. We know how to handle them. I don't understand why they (administrators) don't want their officers to have them."
This sounds like plain common sense from a commissioned law enforcement officer certified in the use of handguns. But the university administration sees it differently.
"We believe we are doing the best for our students and our community without carrying firearms," said an administration official.
Samuel Walker, a criminal justice professor at the Omaha campus, says that firearms are "unnecessary" for campus safety officers.
"I think it creates an image that it is a dangerous place," Walker said, adding that campus lighting and keeping shrubbery too small for criminals to hide behind were more important to security.
No, really. I'm not kidding. That's what he said. And therein lies the problem.
The propensity to assume the best about the dregs of society while assigning the worst possible motives to honest, law-abiding Americans must be countered with common sense by people of good will who simply are not willing to allow it to continue. Otherwise, as Isaiah warned, woe to all of us. 
Doug Patton is a freelance columnist who has served as a political speechwriter and policy advisor for federal, state and local candidates, elected officials and public policy organizations. His weekly column can be read in newspapers across the country and on selected Internet web sites, including www.TheConservativeVoice.com and www.GOPUSA.com, where he also serves as the Nebraska editor. Readers can write him at
dpatton@neonramp.com.
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