"How I Was Smeared"

An essay in the current City Journal.

A powerful piece by Harry Stein:

It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. After all, as a conservative of fairly recent vintage, I’ve seen how easy it is for liberals, assisted by a compliant press, to cast ideological foes as moral reprobates and thus avoid engaging their ideas. Hadn’t it happened to a slew of judicial nominees, from Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to, most recently, Thomas Pickering and Priscilla Owen—as well as to a long line of conservative politicians and social critics? Such attacks, coming as they do from those who assert their passionate tolerance, succeed because they are so hard to respond to. They are like the classic below-the-belt question: “When did you stop beating your wife?” But today’s underhanded question—“When did you become a sexist or a homophobe or (worst of all) a racist?”—is even more lethal: the accusatory word cuts short any argument and puts the target on the defensive, as those whom you’d expect to stand firm for principle melt away.

Again, I knew all this theoretically. But I truly didn’t know how bad it could be.

Then it happened to me....

As was the case with so many others, I began to rethink things seriously only after I became a parent. I described how, in my case, the pivotal event was my wife’s decision to stay home with our baby, a choice all but unheard of in our circle of driven New York professionals, full of feminist moms spouting the then-prevailing wisdom that day care was actually best for infants. So when my editor at Esquire wondered if I might want to contribute to the magazine’s upcoming issue on women, I suggested a piece that would examine those assumptions, based on interviews with prominent pediatricians and child psychologists. In retrospect, the resultant piece was pretty mild, doing little more than posing questions about the possible long-term effects of early day care; but instead of bringing about the meaningful conversation I’d expected, the article prompted a ton of mail denouncing me as a vicious woman-hater....

(Thanks Peter Sean.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 10/29/02 09:38:08 PM
Categorized as Media.