Why do they call us "bleeding heart" liberals?

[El Supremo]

Isn't that in reference to Roman Catholic's devotion to the symbol of Christ's love for humanity?

This has bugged me for a long time. Why would Right Wingers want to alienate so many Catholics?



More on its meaning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Heart

[willing dwarf]

1. My heart often aches with sorrow.

I don't mind being called a bleeding heart liberal. My heart sometimes aches so that it would bleed when I think of the horrors which humanity has imposed one person on another. The wounds we carry and deny are so deep and painful, and in this country we keep heaping new pain atop the old, slashing the body of our victims anew.

Just quickly, I can pull together a long long list of victims and survivors to pray for and seek atonement with:
Africans and African Americans everywhere; mental hospital survivors; native american indians of North & South America; prisoner workers in China; German holocaust survivors--Jews, Gypsies, Gays,; Russian pogrom survivors; survivors of Hiroshima & Nagaskaki; the siege of Sarajevo; Somalia; Darfur & southern Sudan; the famines of Ethipoia; child survivors of "God's Army" in Uganda; child laborers chained to rug looms in Inida, Pakistand and who knows where else throughout the world; corrections inmates of the US injustice system; the disappeared of El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina & Chile; Catholics in the North of Ireland; Miners trying unionize and strike in South Africa, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Manchester;...such a random list of victims, just off the top of my head, not even including victims of the dreadful disasters of nature like the earth quakes, landslides, floods and sunami of recent memory, not even including the dreadful abuses of animals, but all victims of one thing: human greed.

[HereSince1628]

2. Yes, but it also suggests our hearts bleed too easily

[willing dwarf]

6. We can run in circles or stay steadfast with one concern

I think it's worthwhile to hold steadfast to a concern. Perhaps wound up in the term Bleeding Heart Liberal is the charge that we run from cause to cause, as if they weren't related.

In fact, most of the injustice & horror recently perpetrated by the Bush people has all been interrelated. I suspect that they throw out so much information everyday to make us run in circles round ourselves. Nevertheless, with dogged persistence, if you choose one concern and stick with it you will run into all the injustice and crimes that we run round trying to name all at once.

I suspect different people have different strengths. Fitzgerald is like a spaniel going after his quarry, and I believe he's a dem, if not a linberal.

[pnorman]

9. Better "too easily" than not at all.

(However, your caution is well taken. It's all too easy to get coked to the gills on our own "virtue and compassion").

But my usual rejoinder to such Coulterite ASSHOLES is: "Better to be a Bleeding Heart Liberal, than a Bleeding Hemmorrhoid Ditto-Head!"

pnorman

[DBoon]

11. "the person saving your life may be a bleeding heart liberal"

nt

[DBoon]

10. because some people deserve to suffer and die?

nt

[HereSince1628]

14. Hey, I'm just saying that is what _they_ are suggesting

My personal feeling is that empathy is a requirement for a civilized society.

[Redbear]

3. I had the same reaction to the insult "liberal do-gooders."

My response was, "So, you think people shouldn't do good?"

[Double T]

4. 'bleeding heart liberal' vs. 'cold and callous conservative'........

Which would you rather be????????????

[shenmue]

5. I'm not sure what the source is

It could be the Catholic reference, it might not. It does refer to the idea that we (supposedly) feel sympathy too easily, whereas conservatives claim by comparison to be 'tougher' or 'more realistic.' Which may be 'bullhockey,' but that's what they claim.

I say, it's better to have a bleeding heart than no heart.

[Montauk6]

7. I always understood it as part of the stereotype from the 70s

The nice-nice, goody two-shoes, Alan Alda/Phil Donahue image. Always tearily bemoaning trees being cut down and Bambi being shot, always wringing hands over vicious killers not having their rights read to them by cops.

There's also limousine or minkcoat liberals, pablum-puking liberals, etc.

Then in the 80s, it was tax-and-spend liberals. Although it turns out that it should be tax-to-pay-for-the-tab-run-up-by-conservative liberals.

[El Supremo]

12. It goes further back than that.

I just heard a transcript of a Sen. Joe McCarthy interview where he used the phrase "bleeding heart leftist" in reference to Ed Murrow.

[virgdem]

8. My guess is...

because we DARE to have real compassion and concern for those other than ourselves.

[Mabus]

13. I found a site you might be interested in

DEFINING BLEEDING HEARTS

Don Arthur in Perth

Stephen Holt's contribution on the origins of 'bleeding hearts' in Taking the rap made me curious. Here's what I found. According to William Safire, "the expression was popularised in the thirties by columnist Westbrook Pegler". http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/04/19/1019020709003.html

[El Supremo]

15. Thanks.

That didn't peg the origin of term exactly, but if one believes Safire all the time, then it must.

I just found in dictionary.com that this companion phrase is very old:

"My heart bleeds for you"

I don't feel at all sorry for you, I don't sympathize, as in You only got a five percent raise? My heart bleeds for you. Originating in the late 1300s, this hyperbolic expression of sympathy has been used ironically since the mid-1700s.

[Mabus]

16. I was looking at its political origins

otherwise I believe it harkens back to St. Mary in the middle ages.

[El Supremo]

17. Yes, its political beginnings must go back to the 30's

But I also found that Shakespeare wrote this:

The Tempest
Act 1, Scene 2

MIRANDA O, my heart bleeds
To think o' the teen that I have turn'd you to,
Which is from my remembrance! Please you, farther.