This post at the Comics Alliance goes into detail about the myth Dixon peddles that liberalism is some creeping disease that only recently infested comics, that right-wingers can’t get work (as noted at the link, Bill Willingham isn’t having any trouble writing Fables) and that Dixon has shown any particular concern for kids in his past writing (his Punisher stories, for example).
I’d like to touch on another point, though, to wit the title of the original Dixon/Rivoche piece: “How Liberalism Became Kryptonite for Superman: A graphic tale of modern comic books’ descent into moral relativism.” Moral relativism is a popular bugaboo for conservatives, running along the line of how America used to have clear moral standards, then liberals came in and started being all tolerant and saying things weren’t black and white and now we’ve totally lost our moral compass. This is, as I’ve noted before, the authoritarian take: Things are black and white, no grey areas and even questioning the lines is bad.
The obvious problem to me is that any system of morality has some sort of relativism. I shoot someone just to watch him die, I’m bad; I shoot him because he’s coming at me with an ax, I’m morally acceptable.
Another problem: Those fixed rules of morality sometimes sucked. A world where black people were absolutely not supposed to have equality with whites and where even “a single drop of black blood” made you black (no fudging of the lines there) is horrible even though the lines are clear cut.
And that world certainly had its own share of moral relativism: it was perfectly acceptable to treat blacks completely differently from white people. (I’m not accusing Dixon of being a racist, only of not thinking through what he’s saying). Likewise the moral relativism where men could cheat and women couldn’t; in Texas, for a long time, it was legal to use “my wife cheated!” as a defense for killing her.
And Dixon clearly thinks his views on gays vs. straights are a moral absolute but to me they’re relativistic as hell: Gays aren’t supposed to have the same rights as straights.
So claiming moral relativism is some liberal plot? Bullshit.
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