Bigotry is an interesting one, Richard Bridge. I had been trying to get away from the use of that particular word in contexts like this one because in it's strictest sense it doesn't really mean what it seems to have come to mean in popular usage. But when I did that, I found communication to be more cumbersome than if I just went along with popular usage.

I was talking about something along these lines with someone I know recently. He asked me if the person I was talking about was a bigot. I had some difficulty expressing to him what I was talking about because he just wanted to know if the person I was talking about was a bigot. I explained how the dictionary definition seems to not be consistent with popular usage of that word, and was he asking me if the person I was talking about was the equivalent of a racist or an anti-Semite only in the context of people who are not of a different race or Jewish, which is what I took his use of the word to mean. He got a bit impatient and said, yes, just like most people mean when they use the word bigot. And I took that to be Joe Offer's meaning when he used it on the other thread.

We don't really have a word that is the equivalent of the words "racist" and "anti-Semite" when people are not being categorizec by race or Jewishness. We should. But it would appear that "bigot" is becoming that word in popular usage.

Specious means:

1 obsolete : SHOWY
2 : having deceptive attraction or allure
3 : having a false look of truth or genuineness : SOPHISTIC

Websters Online