You should respect him, they said. Listen to him. Don't dismiss him, engage him. Why are you so unkind? He deserves a hearing. In a magazine exchange, I'd called a cantankerous reader's racist statement racist and other readers jumped on me for saying so. When I repeated the point, another reader declared that I sounded "self-righteous."
When I was younger, I might have taken them seriously. Now, having grown old and calloused from decades of public discussion, I don't. They're bullies. The two claims — "You must respect him!" and "You're self-righteous!" — attempt to manipulate. The people who use them want to stop you from speaking without defending the statement they're implicitly defending.
