Some things are just bad ideas. Period.

Like suggesting enforced or coerced re-education and indoctrination.

Like many, I was disturbed by the reaction against Phil Robertson back before Christmas.  So many people who hadn't even read an interview that cherry picked and misrepresented his actual words were upset by someone or other said he said and demanded he be fired on what amounted to rumour.  But then it got a little more absurd:  Phil needed re-education, according to GLAAD.

“We believe the next step is to use this as an opportunity for Phil to sit down with gay families in Louisiana and learn about their lives and the values they share,” the spokesman said.

Mark Steyn reacted thusly to those words:

Actually, “the next step” is for you thugs to push off and stop targeting, threatening and making demands of those who happen to disagree with you. Personally, I think this would be a wonderful opportunity for the GLAAD executive board to sit down with half-a-dozen firebreathing imams and learn about their values, but, unlike the Commissars of the Bureau of Conformity Enforcement, I accord even condescending little ticks like the one above the freedom to arrange his own social calendar.

 I actually agreed with these words.  Like Steyn, I noted that the GLAAD statement recognized no responsibility on their part to learn and understand Phil's views, or why he said what he did.  Phil and Phil alone needed to be re-educated.  Phil and Phil alone needed to have his horizons broadened. An appalling position, I thought.  Good thing us Catholic bloggers would never say anything like it.

Then I read Lizzie Scalia on the subject of Jamie Stiehm's recent article:

:And then perhaps they (Stiehm's publishers) might help Ms. Stiehm to get to know some Little Sisters of the Poor, and spend some time watching them work; they could commission a feature article from Stiehm on what she saw and what she thought, after going out begging with the sisters, or watching them tend — with great love, — to human beings our society would just as soon forget, because Catholics do not throw people away.

To her credit, Scalia does not suggest Stiehm be fired for airing her views.  But as for the rest of it, can you see the difference between this and GLAAD's position on Phil Robertson?  Beyond the fact that this time we're the ones saying someone who doesn't agree with us needs some re-idjumacshun rather than, you know, those other people?  How can someone endorse the one but not the other?  How are those who endorse both Steyn and Scalia not guilty of hypocrisy?

If someone knows a way out of this mess, I'd gladly hear it.