THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Most of our readers are not in South Carolina, so some may not know of the big stores' boycott against Maurice Bessinger. Bessinger has a big Confederate flag in front of his bar-b-cue stands and a lot of right-wing pamphlets inside. Big grocery chains used to carry his sauce all over the South, but, because of his political views, most of them have taken his sauce off the shelves. This is an openly political move.

The Wal-Mart line on boycotting Maurice Bessinger's bar-b-cue sauce now is that they object to one of his pamphlets.

In the 1960's, I went into a grocery store in Georgetown, DC. It was a low-price place where hippies and students shopped, an alternative to capitalism. You brought in your own bag. Its theory was that capitalists were taking so much money by markups that it would be easy to undercut them. It didn't last long.

There were pamphlets in those stores with quotes from Chairman Mao, who was then ruling and killing in China, and Che Guevara, who had been killing in South America.

What would the liberals say if such a grocery store existed in Columbia, and big companies wouldn't sell them anything because of their pamphlets that openly praised leftist totalitarians and murderers? Liberals, with the State newspaper leading the way, would raise hell. To these overage hippies, freedom of speech for the left, and only for the left, is sacred.

But no one is going to ask if these people would allow a restaurant to be boycotted for leftist views. This is a question the right never asks. It is taken for granted by now that you can do anything to suppress the right, and the left has freedom of speech.

I know a lot of regular conservatives, and every single one of them seems to be angry at Bessinger for challenging our rulers in this way. Not a single legislator from the Republican Party -- that "more conservative" party, you know -- is supporting his rights. Nor is any businessman.

In the meantime, these same conservatives are shocked that more and more facilities are being closed to the Boy Scouts because they won't take homosexual scoutmasters. Conservatives ask, "Where did the forces of Political Correctness get such power?"

The correct answer is, "They got it from you. Every time they condemned someone as an extreme rightist, you were on their side, as with Bessinger. Then they went after somebody a little less radical with the same tactics, then less radical, until now they're after the Boy Scouts."

Liberals won't let anybody pick on the extreme left. They know that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. The right has not learned this. That is why the Boy Scouts and other traditional institutions are in trouble.