One of the most vile things any American has ever said is the phrase “the personal is political,” the title of a 1969 essay by feminist Carol Hanisch.

That is not merely because of the implication in Hanisch’s essay that everything bad in a woman’s life is men’s fault and/or society’s fault. Sonny Bunch explains the other reason:

Whenever I touch on what I find worrisome about the politicized life—here, here, and here, for example—the most common retort is “So? It’s like, free speech man. I’m allowed to say I disagree with people. Boycotts are just capitalism.” That sort of thing. And it always leaves me shaking my head at how thoroughly they have managed to miss the point.

Look: No one is telling you that you can’t boycott people who vote a way you don’t care for. No one’s telling you it should be illegal for you to say you won’t support someone because they dared disagree with some stance you have decided is really super serial. What I am saying is that engaging in such behavior—politicizing every aspect of your life, allowing politics to determine your every move, and judging everyone you meet online and in person by how stridently they agree with the positions you support—is immensely, horribly destructive to the very fabric of our society. It inspires mistrust, hate, and fear. It tears apart the polity. And a polity torn asunder is a weak one indeed. A house divided, and all that.

Bunch quotes Elizabeth Scalia …

I recently received the following message from a stranger: “So basically, the ‘orthodox Catholic’ game you all play is just that . . . a game?” It was in reference to a Catholic man with whom I am friendly, and like very much. She had apparently read on social media that this man was planning to marry another man.

My friend had never “come out” to me, and—call me old-fashioned, or call me incurious—it had never occurred to me to ask, so the wedding plans were mildly surprising. But reading the email I thought, “Yes, so? What does this woman want me to do? Should I now hate him? Am I supposed to ‘un-friend’ him (that ridiculous term) or even publicly denounce him in order to demonstrate sufficiently ‘orthodox’ Catholic bona fides for her satisfaction? Is that what she wants?”

Well, I couldn’t do that. I like this man. Every exchange I have ever had with him, in person or online has been pleasant, very kind and sweet-natured. The world needs all the pleasant, kind and sweet-natured people it can get, and I wasn’t going to give one up in order to prove myself to some scold I didn’t even know.

… and adds:

In other words, a woman had taken it upon herself to write up a stranger and demand that she denounce a friend in order to prove her purity. Sans an affirmation of righteousness, how could this poor wretch allow Scalia into her life? How could she enjoy Scalia’s writings on PRISM or pet dogs or Bobby Kennedy if she didn’t first publicly shame this awful gay for getting married?

Bunch also quotes Rod Dreher:

What a strange culture we live in, in which people are expected to approve of everything those they love believe in and do, or be guilty of betraying that love. I have friends and family whose core beliefs on politics, sexuality, religion, etc., are not the same as my own, and it would not occur to me in the slightest to love them any less because of it. I hope it would not occur to them to love me any less because they don’t agree with me. People are somehow more than the sum of their beliefs and actions.

Growing up in the Deep South is good training for developing the kind of conscience that can love sinners despite their sin. Every younger person, white and black, knows at least one old white person who holds immoral views on race, but who is also, in other ways, a kind, generous, and upstanding person. Are we to condemn them wholesale for their moral blindness on this one issue? How fair is that? More to the point, how truthful is that, given that all of us are morally blind in one way or another, and depend on the mercy of others, hoping that they will love us and accept us despite our sins, failings, and errors. Once you start pulling at that thread, and deciding who you are and aren’t going to love and live in relationship with because they’ve transgressed an important moral boundary, who knows where it will end?

Exhibit A in this overemphasis on politics is Wisconsin in the past two years of Recallarama. (The disease that infests the People’s Republic of Madison extended to the entire state.) Businesses whose employees dared to contribute money to Gov. Scott Walker or Republicans were boycotted. And then they were “buycotted.” Friendships ended over a vote by politicians. Families, at least extended families, found that state politics, of all things, needed to become a taboo topic. As I’ve written before, Recallarama became so nasty that I am honestly surprised no one was killed by the end of the 2012 elections.

The latest example was the appointment, and then de-appointment, last week of UW–Platteville student Josh Inglett as one of the two students on the UW System Board of Regents. Inglett’s appointment was rescinded after conservatives discovered that Inglett had signed one of the gubernatorial recall petitions, even though, as later reported, he apparently didn’t vote in the gubernatorial recall election.

Independent of whether or not a governor has the right to appoint people who actually represent his points of view (he does), and independent of whether or not the Walker administration thoroughly vets its appointees (apparently not), and independent of whether or not this is definitive proof that government run by either party is far too large (it is), we appear in this state to have reached the nadir, even months after the end of the Recallarama Cycles of Elections, of tolerance of political points of view that don’t match our own. Comrade Soglin of the People’s Republic of Madison is trying to create a blacklist of would-be contractors to the city who fail to hew to the liberal line. Are “Recall Walker” bumper stickers still found on the backs of cars out of owner laziness or spite?

Bunch concludes:

What madness is this? How can we expect to have a fully functioning society if we spend all of our time adjudicating whether or not the people we read and the culture we consume is of the correct political persuasion?

This is a horribly corrosive state of affairs. And, I fear, it’s not going away any time soon.