Leonard Steinhorn: Hating Boomers: America’s Last Acceptable Prejudice

A former speechwriter and strategist for causes, candidates, and members of Congress, Leonard Steinhorn has written on American politics and culture for major newspapers and magazines, and is currently the director of the Public Communications department at American University.

So now we can finally point the finger at those truly responsible for the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. No, it’s not the priests who actually exploited the young children entrusted to them. Nor is it the bishops themselves, many of whom looked the other way and willfully ignored the signs of dysfunction in their church.

Thanks to a new report released by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, we now have a group of people singularly deserving of blame: baby boomers.

Yes, baby boomers, the new piñata for all the problems we have in society today. Or as the New York Times put it, the Church has decided to put forth a “blame Woodstock” defense....

Perhaps Church leaders took their cue from New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, who calls boomers a generation of “hungry locusts” whose penchant for excess and self-indulgence disrespects the sacrifice of their self-effacing parents.

Or perhaps the bishops found inspiration from Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who describes boomers as “self-centered, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and all too often just plain selfish.”...

Boomers have pretty thick skin and take all this hostility in stride. They’ve been through worse. Millions went off to fight a pointless and duplicitous war created by their elders, and millions more took all the slings and arrows from that elder generation as they protested the pointlessness and duplicity of that war. To the horror of their scolding parents, boomers willingly dated across ethnic lines and ushered in a culture in which gay did not mean closeted.

Nor do boomers really need credit for raising the most inclusive and least prejudiced generation in our nation’s history. Or for building a society unprecedented in its equal rights for minorities and women. Or for flattening hierarchies and opening up society for people to express themselves without fear and shame. Or for creating a nonprofit sector far greater in reach, scope, and impact than we have ever seen before. Or for advancing environmental awareness so that we now consider the green consequences of economic progress....