On that foul, stinking red / pink "equal" sign everybody is changing their Facebook profile to

I was glad to see Chris Wysocki at WyBlog mention it (and link to a more direct addressing of it at a Catholic cultural-observation blog).  I'm kind of surprised none of my fellow rightie bloggers are taking it on yet, though.  (As Wysocki notes, maybe it's because Cyprus and North Korea, dang those pesky little nations, are vying for their attention.)

The Freedom-Haters have found their ultimate weapon: the cultural dare.  The obnoxious "equal" sign is the most obvious example of it.  (By the way, it is also emblematic of the whole fixation on "branding."  The surest way in post-American popular culture to inspire fanatical loyalty is to give something a logo and make it ubiquitous.  Early-twentieth-century Russians and Germans discovered this marketing tool in the hammer and sickle and the swastika respectively.)

The cultural dare is a passive-aggressive tactic.  It's in your face with the fiercest kind of militancy, but presents itself as the most benign of invitations to be a virtuous person.  You're for inclusion, aren't you?  You don't want homosexuals to be marginalized, do you?  It's presented in such a smiley-face way that the "average" person, that is, the person who doesn't filter sociocultural developments through a set of bedrock principles - the low-information voter, if you will - sees his range of choices for reaction as binary.  You're either on board with this, or you're a hater.

I don't often go local in these blog posts, but longtime readers are aware of my occasional rants about the omnipresence of the cultural dare in my city.  We're so damn with it around here, if you have misgivings about taxpayer-funded preschool, or using stimulus funding for eat-your-broccoli posters in those preschools, or the usefulness of junior-high "environment clubs" (I know these to be cesspools of indoctrination; the kid who was president of one of them last year wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper opposing the Keystone XL pipeline) or bang-the-drum-and-dance-for-peace gatherings sponsored by the Interfaith Forum, you are the turd in the punchbowl.

Wysocki is correct.  The point of the equal-sign push, the movement it represents, and the larger usurpation of the role of arbiter of what is normal is to obliterate and scatter that which had revealed nobility, humility, truth, beauty and goodness to humankind.  There is no room for such things in FHer World.