My syndicated column today looks at the outbreak of Obama-esque discourse across the country. Couldn’t even mention some of the misogynist sleaze prompted by the Tea Party movement because newspapers wouln’t print it. And they call us an “unhinged mob?”

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Civility and tolerance in the Age of Obama

by Michelle Malkin

Creators Syndicate

Copyright 2009

They told us if Barack Obama were elected, the nation would come together. Souls would be fixed. Spirits would be healed. Public discourse would be elevated. Welcome to civility and tolerance in the Age of Obama:

* Celebrity leech/trash blogger Perez Hilton took to the Internet and TV airwaves to humiliate a beauty pageant contestant who gave what he considered an “offensive” answer about gay marriage. Hilton, inexplicably serving as a judge of the Miss USA contest, had asked Miss California Carrie Prejean whether she supported the legalization of gay marriage. Prejean respectfully answered: “I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.” President Obama, by the way, defines marriage the same way Carrie Prejean does.

No matter. Hilton immediately lambasted Prejean as a “dumb b*tch” in a viral YouTube video he taped after the pageant Sunday night. He apologized the next morning for the attack, then retracted his apology, then escalated his divisive rhetoric. On Tuesday afternoon, Hilton told an MSNBC female anchor that he was thinking of an even more vulgar epithet – the “c-word” – as he listened to Prejean’s answer. The female anchor said nothing. Basking in his new role as thought and speech enforcer, Hilton told CNN’s Larry King that beauty pageant contestants must bow to the tolerance mob: “Yes. I do expect Miss USA to be politically correct.”

And apparently, the Miss USA organizers agree. Instead of apologizing for pageant judge Perez Hilton’s vile behavior, the pageant director of the Miss California contest, Keith Lewis, sent a note to Hilton throwing Prejean under the bus: “I am personally saddened and hurt that Miss CA USA 2009 believes marriage rights belong only to a man and a woman…Religious beliefs have no place in politics in the Miss CA family.”

But gutter profanity and misogyny do?

*At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last week, former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo came to speak against legislative proposals to provide illegal alien students in-state tuition discounts not available to law-abiding Americans and legal immigrant students. Protesters at the institution of higher learning responded by blocking Tancredo with massive banners and screaming “No dialogue with hate.” Adults in the room stood by while students smashed a window a few feet from where Tancredo stood. Physically threatened, Tancredo was forced to leave without delivering his remarks.

According to campus reports, leftists had prepared for a week to mount a speech-squelching demonstration. The same thuggish tactics have been used at Columbia University, Georgetown University, and Michigan State University to shut down speakers who support strict immigration enforcement. The UNC administration apologized for the students’ tantrum, but took no steps to examine its own culpability for fostering a climate of intellectual vandalism and intolerance.

*The nightly airwaves turned into a soft-porn cesspool last week as liberal journalists derided and slimed hundreds of thousands of Tea Party protesters across the country who oppose reckless taxing and spending by both major political parties. Award-winning CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, mimicking his bottom-of-the-barrel competitors at MSNBC, smugly indulged in sexual puns about “teabagging.” MSNBC devoted the entire week to sophomoric sexual slang and innuendo with references to “nuts,” Dick Armey, and “full-throated” protesters.

And White House adviser David Axelrod calls the Tea Party folks “unhealthy?”

Speaking of unhealthy, angry white liberal actress Janeane Garofalo venomously played the race card: “It’s about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up and is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks.” The theme was echoed by Jeffrey Kimball, a professor emeritus of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who castigated the “extreme right” for organizing against President Obama because “he’s black and he’s liberal.“ Tell that to the thousands of activists in South Carolina who practically booed and heckled white Republican Rep. Gresham Barrett off the stage at a Tea Party in Greenville last Friday night for supporting the trillion-dollar TARP and embracing the pork-laden stimulus law after voting against it. “Go home!” they shouted. The only color that mattered to protesters: the red ink of government debts.

But in the age of Obama, there’s no room for such nuance and inconvenient truths. A decent young woman is a “dumb b*tch” for holding the same view of marriage as the Obamessiah. A conservative campus speaker is bullied as a hatemonger by wild-eyed hatemongers. A grass-roots movement is debased as a bunch of racist vulgarians by a media mob of racists and vulgarians. Civility and tolerance have taken a left-hand turn down a one-way street. So much for changing course.

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B. Daniel Blatt at GayPatriot:

Why do so many refuse to acknowledge the legitimate objections some people have to state recognition of gay marriage and hesitate to challenge them on the level of ideas? Why do they resort to name-calling as a means of discourse?

Their preference for slurring gay marriage opponents parallels the way they and their peers respond to the Tea Parties. Instead of listening to their adversaries’ arguments and acknowledging the sincerity of their concerns, they treat them as a bully treats the defenseless kid on the playground.

They think they can get away with it because the MSM encourages their insults. And doesn’t hold them to account for their mean-spirited attempts to demean their adversaries.

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Our society could gain by a serious discussion of gay marriage. Gay people in particular would benefit from such a conversation. Yet, the supposed advocates of this change would rather score points in some imaginary contest with conservatives than make a point about the social benefits of extending the benefits of marriage to same-sex couples.