{"id":449,"date":"2007-07-05T00:36:05","date_gmt":"2007-07-05T00:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/jwalking\/2007\/07\/thank-a-liberal.html"},"modified":"2007-07-05T00:36:05","modified_gmt":"2007-07-05T00:36:05","slug":"thank-a-liberal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jwalking\/2007\/07\/thank-a-liberal.html","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;thank an L-word&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While I am increasingly against &#8220;conservative&#8221; and &#8220;liberal&#8221; as terms because I think that they are increasingly meaningless, I was particularly struck by this post from PatientWitness. I don&#8217;t agree with every item and I don&#8217;t think it is fair to say that liberals deserve all the credit for things mentioned below. That being said, I don&#8217;t think they were written as Gospel truth but rather to prove a point about &#8220;liberal&#8221; accomplishments &#8211; though with hyperbole.  Regardless, a great post:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nIf your workplace is safe and you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a 40-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights without being fired, beaten or lynched, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you have not died from tainted meat, or been prescribed something useless or poisonous by a quack doctor, have not given your children cough syrup which turned out to have heroin as its secret ingredient, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you ever drank a beer or a glass of wine without being thrown in jail, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you are not a land-owning white male, but have voted, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you or your parents or grandparents have ever used Medicare, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you&#8217;ve ever driven on an interstate highway, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you have ever breathed clean air or drank clean water, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you grew up in a family of less than 12 kids, like the idea of being able to choose if you have 12 kids or not, if you don&#8217;t live in an overpopulated third world slum, or just think birth control is a good idea, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf your family benefited from the GI Bill of Rights, FHA or VA mortgages, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf your children go to school instead of working in the fields, a factory or the coal mines, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you&#8217;re part-Irish, Catholic, or Jewish and are allowed to live in America, and are not harassed and attacked for failing to be born white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you&#8217;re not a slave or &#8220;indentured servant&#8221; (white slave), don&#8217;t think protection of slavery belongs in the constitution, if you&#8217;ve never been chained to a boat where half the passengers die, been whipped, had your family split up, been forced to &#8220;breed&#8221; with another slave you&#8217;ve never met, been raped by your boss, or killed for not being profitable, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you have never been lynched, or had your children firebombed in a church, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you have ever done anything that is a religious or superstitious taboo (think oral sex, shaving your beard, backtalk your parents, wearing clothes made from 2 types of fabric, etc.) without being stoned to death or cast out as a heretic, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you have never been raped, and then had the rapist escape punishment on the grounds that he marry you, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you are glad that the Nazis don&#8217;t control half the world (conservatives opposed joining World War 2 until it was forced on them &#8211; look it up!), thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you don&#8217;t have to walk through ankle-deep sewage in the streets (because sewers are big government), thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you have ever eaten food (agricultural subsidies), flicked on a light switch (rural electrification) or benefited from programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you do not have skin cancer, and have ever stood outside without having a peeling sunburn within moments, thank the ozone layer, thank the ban on CFC&#8217;s, and thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you have not died in a heat wave, drought, hurricane, flood, wildfire, or other climate change disaster, and like the idea of your children and grandchildren not living in desert wastelands, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you are glad we don&#8217;t live in a right-wing dictatorship along the lines of what conservatives overtly and covertly created in Iran, Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Domican Republic, the Congo, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, El Salvadore, the Phillipines, Indonesia and others, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you have ever visited or bought anything from Europe, and are glad the Marshall Plan kept it from remaining a bombed-out shell or falling to communism or neo-fascism, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you&#8217;ve ever seen a national park, and it hadn&#8217;t been strip mined and clearcut into a desert wasteland, thank a liberal.<br \/>\nIf you kind of like freedom of speech, and don&#8217;t want the government to be able to censor you &#8211; (you think the 1st and 14th amendments are good ideas) &#8211; thank a liberal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While I am increasingly against &#8220;conservative&#8221; and &#8220;liberal&#8221; as terms because I think that they are increasingly meaningless, I was particularly struck by this post from PatientWitness. I don&#8217;t agree with every item and I don&#8217;t think it is fair to say that liberals deserve all the credit for things mentioned below. That being said,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>&quot;thank an L-word&quot; - J Walking<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jwalking\/2007\/07\/thank-a-liberal.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;thank an L-word&quot; - J Walking\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"While I am increasingly against &#8220;conservative&#8221; and &#8220;liberal&#8221; as terms because I think that they are increasingly meaningless, I was particularly struck by this post from PatientWitness. I don&#8217;t agree with every item and I don&#8217;t think it is fair to say that liberals deserve all the credit for things mentioned below. That being said,&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jwalking\/2007\/07\/thank-a-liberal.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"J Walking\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-07-05T00:36:05+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"David Kuo\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"\"thank an L-word\" - J Walking","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jwalking\/2007\/07\/thank-a-liberal.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"\"thank an L-word\" - J Walking","og_description":"While I am increasingly against &#8220;conservative&#8221; and &#8220;liberal&#8221; as terms because I think that they are increasingly meaningless, I was particularly struck by this post from PatientWitness. 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