The Left Vs. the Redskins

Dennis Prager

The online magazine Slate announced last week that it will never again refer to the Washington's National Football League team, the Redskins, by its name.

The name, according to Slate, offends American Indians, and therefore should be dropped. And until such time, Slate will never mention it. It will become, in effect, the R-word.

The article, to its credit, acknowledged that the term "redskins" was not coined as a racist epithet:

"The word redskin has a relatively innocent history. As Smithsonian linguist Ives Goddard has shown, European settlers in the 18th century seem to have adopted the term from Native Americans, who used 'red skin' to describe themselves, and it was generally a descriptor, not an insult."

Argument Four is the key argument, offered by the Atlantic, in its support of Slate:

Response: "Whether people 'should' be offended by it or not doesn't matter; the fact that some people ARE  offended by it does."

This is classic modern liberalism. It is why I have dubbed our age "The Age of Feelings."

Teaching people to take offense is one of the left's black arts. Outside of sex and drugs, the left is pretty much joyless and it kills joy constantly. The war on the "Redskins" name is just the latest example.

Second, it is the left that specializes in offending: labeling the Tea Party racist, public cursing, displaying crucifixes in urine, and regularly calling Republicans evil (Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column last month, wrote that the Republican mindset "takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable." For such people to find the name "Redskins" offensive is a hoot.

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