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Liberal, therefore, essentially means that the persons so charged might upset — or even slightly tilt — the political and social apple-carts, a mortal sin in the view of the “vast Majority” of conservative Virginians.
Like heresy, it is an all-inclusive indictment.
It can be used to mean that the person charged is a big spender, a welfare do-gooder, a gun control advocate, a supporter of gays, a social integrationist or anything else which the indicter doesn’t happen to like.
Whatever its meaning, it scares the daylights out of your average Old Dominion politician. In Virginia, to paraphrase a saying from another era in another context, one drop of liberal blood makes a liberal. Those hunTing for votes had best not forget it.
But liberalism has another meaning, too. It’s the one Tom Jefferson had in mind when he invented the Republic and started us on our long and still unfinished march toward the fulfillment of the promise of our Constitution.
It is the fulfillment of that promise that today’s super-conservatives fear most because with it would come an even further emancipation of the human spirit, and an emancipated spirit is hand to program, hard to keep ignorant, and impossible to intimidate.
And all of these are necessary if liberalism is to continue to be a dirty word in the minds of that “vast majority” of The Virginia Electorate.
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