Can we call someone like Christopher Hitchens a bigot and be right about it? He uses non sequiturs and smear tactics; ad hominem and special pleading; insinuation and belligerence all to paint religious believers as deluded, evil, scum, etc. I think this is bigotry. Am I wrong?
Depends on your definition, I guess. If you look at the definitions of he word ‘bigot’, a word the emergences from them is “intolerant”, alongside “prejudice”. Perhaps it’s an “American thing”, but my impression is that the term “bigot” carries that connotation of intolerance; the support of Jim Crow laws in the South, for example, wasn’t just prejudiced, but a “bigot” in the sense that the prejudice was compounded by intolerance. Having black skin wasn’t just something one had an opinion on, but one which was used to support official sanction; black people could not sit at the lunch counter, or had to sit at the back of the bus, etc.
I think Hitchens’ animus is not in dispute, although in admiring his writing and much of his ideas for a long time, I think I’d say Hitchens is scrupulous about going after ideas as ideas, and people only as they become sufficiently known as people by their public actions to yield grounds for judgment (here I’m thinking of his harsh treatment of Jerry Falwell). If you read people who’ve dealt with Hitchens, he’s uniformly regarded as warm and polite, generous and genial, even and especially to those with whom he disagrees (here I am thinking of the relationship Hitchens developed with Douglas Wilson when they went on “debate tour” together).
Hitchens is not a bigot in the sense of the Southern racist, and not just because his grievances are (usually) not about race; he doesn’t want to censor his opponents, but just to scold them, or to use them as a handy foil for pointing them at good things.
Maybe that’s too picky a definition of “bigot”, but
I reserve the word for those who would use their animus and ideological grievances to effect actual sanctions or punishments on their opponents. Voting for a ban on gay marriage is wrong headed and prejudiced and unethical, etc. but it goes beyond that into bigotry, because it is the active support for state enforcement of inequality under the law, the abridgment of the rights of other Americans by use of American law.
But that person’s neighbor, even though he be even more vehemently opposed to gay marriage and angry at homosexuals for their choices, offended at their sin, etc., but who even so respects their freedom and equality (and thus wouldn’t presume to vote for such a law as the ban), I would not call that person a “bigot”. The second person could be much more vicious and antagonistic, and use every fallacy that Hitchens hadn’t even got to yet, but so long as those convictions don’t get him to escalate that to outright intolerance – real restrictions on the freedoms of his opponents, I don’t think the term “bigot” fits.
Which is not to say there aren’t a lot of pejoratives for the man you might use.
-TS
EditedToAdd: Thinking about this a moment more, IIRC Hitchens signed up for the effort to “arrest the Pope” in the UK for “crimes against humanity”. For a crime with some grounding in its charges (had the pope murdered someone, for example), the call for arrest would be obligatory, noble, I think, but the substance of that charge I’d say was flimsy enough, “political enough” that one might say that that effort constituted bigotry; this is the effort to punish or suppress an opponent by official sanction, as a result of one’s hostility. So in that case, I think Hitchens may well be pegged as a bigot. That’s not his stance, generally, though. He’s one to support free speech and to rely on his scolding tongue, rather than official powers, as his weapon.
) are anti-Catholic bigots, when really what they are are ‘opponents’ as much caught up in the theatre of events as the CAF commentator.