Home / General / The “It’s Not <i>My</i> Bigotry” Dodge

The “It’s Not My Bigotry” Dodge

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I don’t want to devote a lot more time to someone who’s not going to run for president, but the overclass moral panic reaction to Chris Christie’s potential run does reveal some interesting things.    First, the preferred line of the “Christie’ weight is relevant” brigade here seems to be the very familiar bigotry-once-removed argument.   That is, “I’m not saying that I wouldn’t vote for a person of color/woman/LBGT/overweight person, but lots of other people wouldn’t, so we’d better confine ourselves to slender white guys.”   Aside from the fact that this involves projection about 99% of the time, in the case of Christie (who did, after all, get elected governor of a blue state) there’s no actual evidence that it’s true.   Although admittedly people who prefer to ascribe their bigotry to third parties will have some empirical evidence should an overweight woman seek a major party nomination.  Since I’m not a reactionary, I’m not inclined to blithely accept this status quo either.

I would also note that this is completely irrelevant to the arguments made by Kinsley and Robinson.   They didn’t argue that Christie couldn’t become president; they argued that his weight makes him unqualified to be president.   Bigotry just doesn’t get a lot more stark.    Christie’s size isn’t evidence of some moral failing, and as governor he’s been all too competent at achieving his ends.   There are plenty of good reasons why Christie shouldn’t be president, but whether people have the guts to make the argument themselves or pretend to be discussing someone else this one is very dumb and very offensive.

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