Dan Nordberg

It’s time to pose publicly the question being asked around millions of the silent majority’s dinner tables: Whatever happened to decorum in the year 2017, particularly from the liberal left?

As a father of two little girls, logging into my social media feed to see Kathy Griffin hoisting a mock, severed head of our president was beyond distasteful; it was gut-wrenching. It wasn’t gut-wrenching only because of its gore. It was even more unsettling because it’s so symbolic of how horribly low discourse has descended in the United States. It underlines the immense double standard maintained by the liberal establishment. By these and other examples, I can see the direction we are all headed, and for my children’s futures, it is incredibly disconcerting.

What on earth has happened to American society and our values? Has our common moral compass – our shared sense of basic rights, common-sense wrongs – been shattered under the feet of a crazed social media mob, fueled by celebrities looking to elevate their fame with the next grandstand?

That image accomplished exactly what Griffin hoped it would – going viral. It was evidence of the times we live in, an anything-goes era that too often disregards the welfare and feelings of other human beings, like, say, 11-year-old Barron Trump.

What we are doing to our future generations – teaching them this new, amoral standard of how we should treat one another – is abominable.

Need another example? In May and June, across the span of 11 nights in New York City’s Central Park, Public Theater’s annual Shakespeare production portrayed Julius Caesar as Donald Trump – yes, including his assassination – on stage in front of the crowd. Wow. Classy.

Sadly, this new, degenerative norm from the left predated Trump’s election. In fact, one of the earliest examples of distasteful, violent rhetoric from a person in a public position came from right here in Colorado Springs. Former American Civil Liberties Union co-chair Loring Wirbel posted on Facebook in 2015 that he would have to “shoot” anyone voting for Trump. Wirbel later resigned from the ACLU, but he still regularly writes for the Colorado Springs Independent.

I began with a question, so perhaps it’s best to close with a few. Do you think a conservative would still be writing articles for newspapers if they had pulled a stunt like Wirbel’s against supporters of President Barack Obama? Would Griffin be able to show her face publicly had she held Obama’s head high? Would New Yorkers have allowed Public Theater to continue assassinating Obama on stage night after night?

The answer to all these questions is, of course, no, because one of the left’s specialties is public shaming.

Should we allow liberals to continue to use the tactics of character assassination, public mockery, vile behavior and violent speech to accomplish their goals? My answer – for my children’s future and the future of this country – is a resolute no. I hope you will join with me in calling out anyone, regardless of party or political beliefs, on each new instance of this behavior that, sadly, is surely coming our way from the left.

Lois Fornander

The GOP’s crescendoing cry that liberals need to accept blame for the attack by James Hodgkinson on Republican Whip Steve Scalise is hypocritical and fatuous. What about Jared Loughner, who shot Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011? What about Robert Dear, the shooter in the Planned Parenthood attack in 2015? What about Jeremy Christian, the white supremacist who killed two good Samaritans defending Muslim girls last month? For every left-wing wacko, we can find 3 right-wing wackos, according to Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “In the past 10 years when you look at murders committed by domestic extremists in the United States of all types, right-wing extremists are responsible for about 74% of those murders.”

The right portrays Hodgkinson’s actions as the direct and inevitable outcome of left-wing speech. Ruben Navarrette opined that “Democrats refuse to take responsibility for a wayward disciple like Hodgkinson” and that Democrats defend themselves claiming it wasn’t “their hate speech that caused this . But guns, or mental illness.” Did Republicans take responsibility for Loughner or Dear or Christian? Perhaps most outrageous was the GOP attack ad in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District runoff election falsely asserting that Democrat Jon Ossoff applauded shooting Republicans.

The truth is there are simply too many mentally ill people not getting help, but they are finding ready access to weapons – made easier today by Donald Trump’s removal of the restriction on selling weapons to mentally unstable customers.

At some point, inspired by the notion of the “Moral Majority,” conservatives gave up trying to understand different perspectives, comforting themselves by assuming that those “others” were, after all, immoral. Poverty is deserved; homosexuality is perverted; abortions are equivalent to murder. Why bother with developing a well-reasoned ideology, unifying perceptions and beliefs?

It’s much easier to embrace the notion that your opponent is immoral and, therefore, always wrong.

Trump has capitalized on this reductionist strategy. His unceasing attacks on “political correctness” and his obsessive need to insult anyone with whom he disagrees has opened wide the floodgates of incivility. Trump’s attacks on immigrants, on Muslims, on a Hispanic judge, on a disabled reporter inspire copycats. Trump’s promise to pay the legal fees of any supporter who would “knock the crap out” of a protester, and boast that he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and no one would care, or the crudeness and arrogance revealed in the “Access Hollywood” tape encourage mindless emulation. Today, incivility issues from the Tweeter-in-Chief.

There has been a shift in political debate from a focus on the issues to ad hominem attacks, from opinions to the people who hold those opinions. Fareed Zakaria on CNN’s “GPS” summed it up, describing his experience. Zakaria has always received lots of criticism for his famously “other” commentary, but the criticism was directed at the substance of his talks. Today, he is personally attacked, his ethnicity disparaged and his motives impugned. This is the result of the moralizing refusal to accept the right of others to hold their own, differing opinions.

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Dan Nordberg represents House District 14 in the Colorado state House of Representatives. Lois Fornander is a retired educator and a former Democratic nominee for Colorado state House District 15. Both live in Colorado Springs.

Dan Nordberg

Lois Fornander