It’s always satisfying to post a Comment of the Day from a new commenter on this forum, and such is the case with Mrs. Q. She, like Isaac before her, authored her response to the original post about Andrew Sullivan’s observations on “intersectionality” and its emergenec on the Left as virtual religion.
Here is Mrs. Q’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Catching Up On “Instersectionality,” And Finally Paying Attention”:
I’m amused that the main discussion in the 45+ comments so far is about identity politics. I’m also guessing, including the kind host of this blog, that the majority of folks having the discussion are somewhat similar in identities. Fun to watch.
What I find most interesting in Sullivan’s remarks is the similarities to various religious and religion-like movements that have been mostly totalitarian in nature. There is always a good guy & bad guy/sinner & saint/better or worse. Intersectionality is a fancy way of saying “stuff overlaps sometimes and from it develop new challenges.” Indeed racism is in that bad/sinner/worse category – until those attempting to correct racism become a new form of racist, as we are seeing much of. Look up sports commenter Sage Steele to see how some liberals wanted to trade her in the racial draft (it was a funny but not funny joke) for a prime example.
I have 4 categories in which I qualify for minority. I can tell you without fail, white liberals have been as oppressive if not more so in how I’ve been treated than white conservatives. Why this is I don’t know. Time after time I’ve put my so called oppression to the test & found in spite of it all that:
A: I have way more advantages than some people both because of race, class, sex, sexuality, ect…and also…not because of those things.
B. I have way less advantages for the same reasons as above.
C. This is the human condition. The end.
What I think we need to be much more concerned about is the general malaise in respectfulness and respectability. Without fail when we begin to dehumanize no matter much “they deserve it” or how much “they started it” we as a nation or nations bring about terrible changes. This we must talk about.
Ethics Alarms 
Like I said in thread-
Nice succinct and elegant response.
This we must talk about indeed. And no one is talking: only yelling, posturing, mindlessly supporting their own ideologies without really listening to different facts and opinions. This is a dire state of affairs, I agree. There is grave danger here.
I’m honored! Thanks Jack.
I hope we can start talking more about this new religious flavor to modern activism. It’s far more troubling than a band-aid or traffic stop.
Excellent comment. Rather insightful, in fact.
Well, I left a comment for you in another thread, but I’ll leave a shorter version here.
Outstanding comment. The SJW/”white privilege”/identity politics adherents are essentially identical to the Global Warming Alarmists. They believe that every fact, regardless of how antithetical it may seem to their argument, proves their point. Seemingly every argument they produce is a tautology. It is, for all intents and purposes, identical to religious zealotry.
Nobody disputes intolerance and bigotry exists, but neither is it only on one side of the equation. But intolerance and bigotry are not the be-all and end-all of human misery, nor are they even a particularly significant contributor taken on a global scale. They deserve and demand discussion and action, but when you throw away the paintbrush and just dump the can on one group, it’s hard to say it isn’t exactly the same thing as what they purport to decry — which is pretty much your point, I think.
Again, well done, a deserving CotD.
I find ironic the whole distinction game the intersectionality mentality is playing. Just like the use of the “proper” pronouns for your “gender”, in order to properly recognize and classify your differences.
It’s as if they are rediscovering the age old classification problem, where by trying to improve your system by continually adding new classes (ie categories), you end up having as many classes have you have elements to classify, making it useless.
In fact, that problem had been solved millennia ago through a special pronoun called… …a name (funny enough, in French, noun and name are the same word – nom – making pronoun and noun more obviously related – nom et pronom).
Ironically, to, classification serves a clear goal: grouping, or, if you prefer, un-individualize. That’s it’s goal. So the idea that a pronoun, which serves to depersonalize a sentence into a more generic form, should be strongly personalized is, to say the least, amusing.
Should they have the slightest idea what problem they’re actually trying to solve, they’d recommend the abolition of gender specific pronouns altogether. This could take two forms: reducing to a single unisex one, or always using a person’s name… Only our name truly encompasses our uniqueness.
But I’m asking for way too much coherence.