At How Appealing, I just saw a pointer to this article about the controversy at UNC over the assignment of a book on the Quran as summer reading to incoming freshmen. I loved this quip:

What you don’t understand is that in the United States, the defense of liberty has become sophisticated. So sophisticated, in fact, that it has become its opposite. Here, nobody openly persecutes anybody anymore. If I want to persecute you, I don’t say I’m persecuting you. I say you’re persecuting me.

I’m ashamed to say that it was liberals who invented this practice (as a somewhat natural outgrowth of resisting and decrying legitimate forms of persecution), but it’s the right wingers who have taken it to its most absurd extreme. When I hear people whining about the persecution of Christians in this country, or the way white males are treated unfairly these days, it just makes me ill.