Who Is 'Boo' Burnham? - Peggy Noonan's Blog - WSJ:
It is astonishing and cannot go unremarked that Mississippi’s Gov.
Frank “Boo” Burnham, the conservative who won a 2011 landslide, gave an
interview Friday in which he demonstrated all that is wrong in American
politics—all its division, its intolerance, its ignorance and sickness.
Burnham damned and removed from the rolls of the respectable everyone
in his state who is pro-choice, who is for some form of gun control, and
who supports gay marriage. In a radio interview marked by a tone of
smug indignation and self-righteousness, Burnham said “extreme liberals”
who are “for abortion, who hate guns, who want homosexuals to marry—if
that’s who they are they’re the extreme liberals, they have no place in
the state of Mississippi because that’s not who Mississippians are.”
The problem with this kind of statement, obviously, and whatever your
politics and wherever you’re from, is that a great and varied nation
cannot function like this, with its own leaders declaring huge swatches
of voters anathema and suggesting they should go someplace else. It is
an example of the kind of government-encouraged polarization that can do
us in. Democracy involves that old-fashioned thing called working it
out. You don’t tell people who disagree with you they’d be better off
somewhere else. And you don’t reduce them to stereotypes; you address
them as fully formed people worthy of respect. You try to persuade
them.