What will and what won’t get you banned from conservative publications

Two days ago a reader sent me an article by Christopher Hitchens at FrontPage Magazine, reprinted from City Journal, about the Barbary Wars. I wrote back to him:

You will probably disapprove of me for saying this, but I regard Christopher Hitchens as so evil I will not read anything by him.

There are plenty of people I generally disagree with whom I nevertheless read regularly. I won’t read Hitchens.

That a vicious hate-filled leftist like him has gotten himself ensconced in the “conservative” movement is a disgrace. I don’t want to do anything to add to that disgrace.

This evening I was reading a Don Feder article about the rise of “secularism on steroids” in Europe and came upon this news about Hitchens:

Among other signs of an increasingly assertive impiety, the article cites a debate in London last month, where atheists and believers squared off over the proposition: “We’d be better off without God” (according to a vote of the audience, the atheists won by an almost 2-to-1 margin), a spate of belief-bashing books (including Christopher Hitchens forthcoming “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything’) …

This evil man, who writes about how religion poisons everything (though his real target is of course Christianity), is welcome to publish in almost every “conservative” venue in America. Why? Because he supports President Bush’s supposed war on terror. Just wondering, but if Hitchens wrote a book called “How Free Enterprise and the Rule of Law Poison Everything,” or if he wrote a book called “How the Belief in Universal Human Freedom and Equality Poisons Everything,” or if he wrote a book called “How Civil Rights for Blacks Poisons Everything,” or if he wrote a book called “How Mass Third-World Immigration Poisons Everything,” or if he wrote a book called “How Homosexual Liberation Poisons Everything,” or if he wrote a book called “How Bush’s War on Islamic Fascism Poisons Everything,” does anyone think that FrontPage Magazine or City Journal would continue publishing his articles?
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 23, 2007 12:42 AM | Send