Today I am thinking about all the reasons William K. Black detests me. Last Tuesday, I reported how MSNBC promoted the findings of June Carbone and Naomi Cahn, co-authors of Red Families v. Blue Families, without acknowledging their affiliation with the Roosevelt Institute, a left-wing think tank. On Friday, Black, associate professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, devoted almost 1,500 words, in an article cross-posted to the Huffington Post, to assaulting my character, dismissing me as a "divider," positing that I "have unresolved difficulties with gays," and claiming I have "sex fantasies" about the book.Black, pictured from an April 30 appearance on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal, is also Carbone's husband.
Asserting that my analysis "combined fiction and ad hominem labels," Black proceeded to dig up all the dirt he could find to malign me as an extremist. His investigative work unearthed an article I wrote as a sophomore in high school for a blog I haven't looked at in years.
Testifying to his wife's credentials as a "bridge builder," Black described how her book pits the so-called "Blue Family Paradigm" against the "Red State dream." Black then made a truly bizarre and creepy observation: "In their book, rather than in Mr. Fitzsimmons' sex fantasies about a book he has not read, June and Naomi show that the sexual revolution began in the 50s."
Excuse me for failing to realize a book couched in the terms of liberal families versus conservative families actually contains a unifying message.
Neither Carbone nor her book were the focus of my post. Rather, the post concentrated on how MSNBC failed to put the co-authors in proper context, an omission commonly referred to as labeling bias. As evidenced in his meandering rant, Black either failed read my entire post or is guilty of the destructive divisiveness he pretends to condemn.
