A couple of weeks ago, after yet another nasty column I’d written about Catholicism, I received a disturbing missive.
It was in e-mail form. It was anonymous. It contained only one word but the word was huge, about a 72-point font if memory serves. The word in the e-mail was “bigot” and it was so big, it damn near filled up the entire computer screen.
Now I’ve had this word used against me before, but never so large, and never by itself, which always made it easy to dismiss. After all, how could I be a bigot? I’m the bigot hater. I detest bigotry with all the marrow in my bones.
But this e-mail was different. There’s just something about seeing a 72-point-font insult, hovering before you like an alien spacecraft in the middle of the night, that makes you start to wonder about things. So against the better judgment of my lizard brain, which had spent a lifetime building up a wall of denial between it and my conscious brain, I looked up the word “bigot” (multiple times) and, according to just about every definition I read, my neo-cortex is screwed.
