![\"Concord](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2017\/05\/Place_de_la_Concorde_from_the_Eiffel_Tower_Paris_April_2011.jpg\")
<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n
A provocative figure on the political Right, Andrew Breitbart<\/a>, died suddenly, of natural causes, somewhat more than five years ago.\u00a0 He was forty-three years old. \u00a0(Please note that he\u2019s not to be blamed for the Trumpist and sometimes rather xenophobic direction in which his successor at Breitbart, the execrable Steve Bannon, eventually took the operation.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A remarkable number of bloggers and tweeters on the political Left vocally celebrated<\/a> Mr. Breitbart\u2019s death, which left his wife a widow and his four young children orphans.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Reading Jim Geraghty\u2019s reflections<\/a> on this distasteful phenomenon, I couldn\u2019t help but be reminded of the (to my mind) truly extraordinary personal hostility that I and other believing Latter-day Saints have encountered from many ex-Mormons of a secularizing bent.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Once or twice, I\u2019ve started to keep an unsystematic file of some of the epithets and insults that have been hurled my way \u2014 many of them too obscene to cite here \u2014 but I\u2019ve never followed through with the effort, and I\u2019ve long since mislaid most of them.\u00a0 Here, though, are three relatively mild samples from the single surviving file that I can locate:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cDan Peterson is a condescending, passive-aggressive douchebag.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cone of the most evil and degenerate people that the Church has ever produced\u201d<\/p>\n \u201ca mean self-important ego-maniac\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Unfortunately, I\u2019ve misplaced or lost the ones that call for my early death, lampoon my appearance, propose various plans to get me fired and ruin my career and\/or engineer my excommunication from my church, and pronounce me a pervert, and I\u2019m deliberately excluding the comments about my children, the obscene remarks about my wife, and other charming things of that sort.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been threatened with law suits.\u00a0 I\u2019ve actually been sued, for $4.5 million dollars (good luck with that!)<\/i>, on utterly frivolous grounds.\u00a0 (Incidentally, the case was ultimately dismissed by the judge \u201cwith prejudice,\u201d but not before it had consumed considerable time and money for approximately two years.)\u00a0 I\u2019ve been described for well over a decade now by a certain class of my critics as a sadist, a slanderer, an incompetent pseudo-scholar, a fantasist of homicidal violence, a Nazi-sympathizer, a deliberate destroyer of families, a racist, a religious bigot, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a madman, a \u201chomophobe,\u201d a voyeur, a conscious wrecker of the careers of others, a theo-fascist, and etc.\u00a0 And, of course, many more times than I can possibly count, as a liar.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I think I can honestly say that I feel no such hostility toward those with whom I disagree, and have never felt it.\u00a0 In fact, I\u2019m on friendly terms with a number of very negative critics of my religious beliefs, as with many who don\u2019t share my libertarian-leaning conservative political views.\u00a0 And \u2014 my writing is on public display, easily accessible for inspection \u2014 I simply don\u2019t write such things about other people.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The reactions of some Left-leaning bloggers and tweeters to Andrew Breitbart\u2019s death also reminded me of the late Christopher Hitchens\u2019s graceless remarks on the death of Rev. Jerry Falwell<\/a> back in 2007.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Hitchens had, famously, been a Trotskyite for much of his life, and, although he later came to be associated by many people with the Neoconservative Right because of his support for \u201cthe war on terror,\u201d he pretty clearly remained a man of the Left.\u00a0 (I myself support the poorly named \u201cwar on terror\u201d in general and in principle, but I often suspected, rather uncomfortably, that Hitchens\u2019s enthusiasm for it owed as much to his deep hostility to religion in general and to Islam in particular as to any political ideas we might share.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019m guessing \u2014 it\u2019s a reasonably informed guess \u2014 that most if not all of those who rejoiced in the death of Andrew Breitbart are not only on the relatively far Left politically but religiously secular.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Which leaves me wondering whether this vitriolic personal hatred might be a peculiar characteristic of some on the secular Left, and, if so, why that would be.\u00a0 (I honestly don\u2019t know.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n So far as I\u2019m aware, few if any on the Right or among strong religious believers responded with glee to the announcement of Hitchens\u2019s ultimately fatal esophageal cancer.\u00a0 (Quite the contrary, in fact:\u00a0 Many Christian believers included him in their prayers.)\u00a0 I\u2019m not aware of anybody who chortled with repulsive joy at his death.\u00a0 (If anybody did, it was surely not in the conservative or religious equivalent of Slate<\/a>, where Christopher Hitchens published his reaction to Rev. Falwell\u2019s death, or on CNN, where he voiced similar sentiments<\/a>.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n And, although there are more than a few believing Mormons who, under the anonymity of the internet, allow themselves to say things that they shouldn\u2019t, I genuinely don\u2019t think that I see the level of vitriol and venom among online Mormons that I see all too often among their opposites online.\u00a0 Somebody can probably find a few exceptions but, in my experience, real bloodcurdling nastiness is, at a minimum, far more common coming from the other side.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n (Several years ago, seated at an open air cafe in Vienna, I found myself only a few feet away from Bill Maher<\/a>.\u00a0 I\u2019m not, to put it mildly, a fan of his.\u00a0 I don\u2019t even think he\u2019s particularly funny, just mildly clever and strikingly shallow\u00a0 And he\u2019s been quite vicious in his mockery of my religious beliefs.\u00a0 But, even though I had a plate of Hungarian goulash in front of me that would obviously have looked very nice dripping from his head and even though the thought did admittedly cross my mind, I found it easy to resist the temptation, and I didn\u2019t even say anything to him.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n