ROY EDROSO

The American Right has in recent years attracted some prominent members of minority groups--most visibly gays and blacks--traditionally averse to conservatism. Good for them. As long as conservatives are going to run the country, it is better that they have some such voices around to temper their tendency toward Willie Hortonism than otherwise.

This wavelet of nonwhite and nonstraight immigration has already had a softening effect on conservative discourse. Even the National Review says nice things about Martin Luther King on his birthday. In fact, they sometimes claim King as one of their own--a hilarious development, considering how violently NR fought the civil rights movement throughout the '50s and '60s, as documented in this fascinating article at the white-power web site American Renaissance.

But this leaves an open question for the newly inclusive conservative establishment: What to do about those prominent Whitey-Righties who have not gotten with the program? Recent columns hint at several approaches.

1. Blame the Left. It works for everything else, why not racism? For one example, see this February 24 column by Jonah Goldberg, an apple of right-wing firebrand Lucianne Goldberg who seems not to have fallen from the tree at all. Goldberg does some ideological aikido on Pat Buchanan's latest racist screed, "The Death of the West," redirecting its force onto liberal straw men. Goldberg does admit that Buchanan and his buddies (including Samuel Francis, who has "argued earnestly for 'imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites'") are "dismayingly obsessed" with race. But he relieves them of some responsibility for their obsession by turning to what the social scientists might call its "root causes":

You could point to a lot of things, but the most important is that it is a response to the left. Seriously. As the left has sunk ever deeper into multicultural absurdity, many white folks have come to buy into the tribal logic of Afrocentrists, feminists, La Raza fanatics and the like. Perhaps the most recurring theme of resentment on the racial Right goes like this: "If Afrocentrism is great, if Asian pride is great, if Hispanics can champion la raza (the race), then how come a preference for Eurocentrism, white pride and the white race is evil?"

As long as Goldberg was making up leading questions such as the one quoted, I don't know why he didn't use the better-known equivalent from all-white schoolyards: "How come they can call themselves niggers but we can't?" It makes just as much sense--which is to say, none.

2. Cite a language problem. No, I'm not talking about Spanglish. I mean the tendency to forgive racist sentiments on the grounds that their author really meant something quite unobjectionable, but for some reason used slurs to express it.

At OpinionJournal.com, Tunku Varadarajan mops up after Pat Robertson and his latest verbal jihad against Islam (and, by natural extension, its millions of adherents here and abroad). The subhead on this apologia is "Pat Robertson had a point. That's why he should have kept his mouth shut." This really says it all--Keep it down, Pat! We're supposed to be compassionate conservatives now!--but Varadarajan persists in picking golden kernels out of the preacher-man's shit: "If this was a commentary on the kind of Wahhabi Islam emanating from Saudi Arabia..."--we can skip the rest of Varadarajan's lengthy list of qualifiers, I think--"...then one can have no quarrel with Mr. Robertson...Now why did he have to ruin a perfectly respectable assertion ('Islam is not a peaceful religion') with this hackneyed claptrap about immigration?"

Um, maybe because--to paraphrase James Brown--he said it; he meant it; he means to represent it.

3. Ignore it, it'll go away. At his site (Feb 26), conservative gay assimilationist Andrew Sullivan approvingly quotes "post-gay" writer Rex Wockner in the Sacramento Bee: "In urban environments in First World nations these days, the people who actually care if you're gay are limited to some (not all) fundamentalist Christians and some teenage boys who dislike their own homoerotic impulses. As far as I can see, tell, hear, feel and sense, nobody else gives a damn...We won and I'm over it."

Of course, the key words are "urban environments in First World nations." Presumably this includes Montgomery, Alabama, where the state Supreme Court recently refused custody of three children to their mother. The reason: said mother now lives with her female lover. Chief Justice Roy Moore cited the "inherent evil" of homosexuality in his decision.

Crank Watch has not been able to learn whether Chief Justice Moore and the eight other judges who supported his decision are "fundamentalist Christians" or "teenage boys" (not small, irrelevant populations, by the way). They certainly are not "over it" in the Wocknerian sense. Ditto for the homophobic authors one may find in even a casual scan of FreeRepublic, National Review Online, and many other conservative sites. But one need not dig too deep to see that not every same-sexer has the luxury of living a post-gay existence.

It's still nice to see conservatives getting a little diversity training--at least at the pundit level. But whether they get past the tokenism stage depends on how the rank and file takes to it. From what I've seen, they still have quite a ways to go.