Extremists

Whenever someone in politics calls someone else "extreme" or "extremist" it's safe to assume that all they mean is that the person to whom they are referring disagrees with them. The word has, like the word "racist," been used so much it has lost its meaning and its punch.

The latest target to be vilified by the term is Paul Ryan, the GOP candidate for vice-president. Ryan, and others for that matter, have been labelled "extreme" because they hold the following views:

• They believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.
• They believe that the second amendment grants the right to own and carry a firearm.
• They believe that abortion kills an innocent life and should be reserved for the most dire of circumstances.
• They believe that a nation should control its borders and that people who are here illegally should not be granted the same rights as are granted to citizens.
• They believe that terrorists should be treated as threats to society and to innocent people and that taxpayers should not be required to subsidize a comfortable existence for them in prison.
• They believe that we can't continue to spend money we don't have and that if we're going to save entitlements from going bankrupt we have to fundamentally change the way we do them.

If you believe any of these things then you, too, are an "extremist" and as such your views deserve to be dismissed, disregarded, and even suppressed by those who deem you to be so odious as to hold opinions as reprehensible as these.

Ironically, those who hold the opposite views are never called extremists. For example, those who want to change two thousand years of tradition by allowing gays to marry, those who wish to ban firearms in the hands of private citizens, those who would extend "abortion" even to living infants, those who advocate open borders and unrestricted immigration, and those who believe that we can continue to borrow and spend and hang an anchor of debt around the necks of our children are never called extremists.

Yet if anything in our current political landscape is extreme those positions surely are.