A reader
sent this along. For a Good Friday meditation. Given the shift away
from the First Amendment we've seen this week, it was apropos. As
Christians we remember that there is the eternal that we look for.
Unfortunately, many are using that to avoid standing up to the problems
of our age. I don't agree with all of the viewpoints in the following,
but there is enough spot on accurate assessments of the decline of liberty in
the US, that I thought it would be worth the read.
Happy
Good Friday.
"We
no longer live in that society." - Kevin Willliamson
For
instance:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/04/01/after-indiana-pizzeria-said-they-wouldnt-cater-gay-weddings-the-backlash-was-so-extreme-it-may-not-be-safe-to-re-open/ "Not
safe to reopen." In Indiana!
No, we
don't live in a society where it is safe to be unpopular. Or in other words, to
be a Christian holding on to the Faith in its fullness, which always included
the ancient Jewish morality that their desert-dwelling God gave to them. And
it's going fast. It won't be long before Christians are back in the catacombs,
or in a more American fashion, put out on a reservation somewhere in the
Badlands. Oh, come on, maybe I'm too extreme, you say. Maybe.
But you
know – about the fiasco in Indiana, where they passed a law designed to keep
mom and pop stores from being sued by gays, and all Hell broke loose – I keep
thinking that the people, the average everyday people, the people I grew up
with, the people my father knew, you know, Americans, will just
rise up and put a stop to it all, all the idiocy, all the special pleading for
deviancy, and now all the authoritarianism that deviancy is forcing on
us.
I'm
still waiting. How am I to raise kids in a world like this? We
live in a sick and decrepit world where Islam emulates its reprehensible
prophet by beheading people like it's the seventh century, where a Russian
bigshot threatens to nuke Yellowstone in order to blow up the North American
continent (have you-all heard of that one?), and where in 20 years gays have
gone from a Libertarian pleading of "leave us alone" to an
Authoritarian diktat "we will sue you out of existence if you don't
conform". It's a world were we old-fashioned Christians and Jews are told
we shouldn't judge. I guess we're just to let a secular state judge us instead?
That means the reservation for us – or the reeducation camps.
If you
don't believe me I'll email a list of comments by gays that pretty much lay out
their program, but here's one, from the gay Advocate, from 1985, in
fact, "The teaching that only male-female sexual activity within the
bounds and constraints of marriage is the only acceptable form - should be
reason enough for any homosexual to denounce the Christian religion". And
then there's this info from Canada, which has federal hate speech laws, and
where currently a priest, Alphonse de Valk, is under indictment for Hate
Speech. His crime? Teaching and preaching the Catholic faith as it pertains to
sexual morality. (For background, from 2008: http://catholicexchange.com/canada-orders-pastor-to-renounce-his-faith And
more recent developments: http://chalcedon.edu/research/articles/canadian-human-rights-commissions-bear-down-on-christian-clergymen/ )
And apparently several cases like this exist in the UK.
And of
course the hypocrisy of it is execrable. http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/04/02/a-guy-walked-into-a-muslim-bakery-and-ordered-a-gay-wedding-cake/ Naturally he
was turned down, but the Mainstream Media chooses not to make a big issue out
of this because, of course, the bakeries in question are Muslim.
It's
getting Old Testament time: "Woe unto them that
call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for
darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" Isaiah 5:20 (Even
then, they had this all too human tendency to call bad good and good, bad.)
A personal
story: I've worked with a number of Lesbians in the publishing biz, and some
gays, but life in the office was one thing. One time ol' Josephine and I were
in a bar on High Street in Columbus, an average sort of place we hadn't visited
before, out speaking Irish with each other after work, checking the various
bars round about. Three young office worker-type women were at the end of the
bar, and after a while it was plain they were getting drunk. I told Josephine I
thought they were maybe having a mini-class reunion. Wasn't long, though,
before they were kissing each other in a serious way. Soon they all three went
back to the bathroom. Ol' Josephine couldn't believe what she was seeing so
before we left the place she went back to check it out, and yep, an toilet orgy
was underway. And of course, Mike Finn here will tell you how it was in the
downtown Lazarus store back 30 years ago, with the gays doing their thing in
the store's bathrooms. I know they had to close a road-side rest down on Route
33 some decades ago because the gays wouldn't stop using it as a hangout. (For
some interesting gay-related statistics, see: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/291357 "Intimate
violence greater for gays, lesbians than heteros")
But
things have progressed beyond such old-fashioned, small-time events. There's
more afoot, more to it. As Paula Ettelbrick, (ex-legal director of Lambda Legal
Defense and Education Fund), says, “Being queer means PUSHING THE PARAMETERS of
sex, sexuality, and family, and in the process transforming the very fabric of
society…”.
Of
course, you can say that you know many gays who aren't like that. I know others
say all the Muslims they know aren't jihadis. Yes, and I myself can say I've
known a number of Germans over the years and none of them were
Nazis. It doesn't mean anything, because with human beings, a
minority organized, ruthless, and prepared to be brutal, always dominates the
peaceful majority. I've seen this in grade school classrooms and read of it
occurring throughout history. That's just the way humanity operates. Unless
such groups are stopped by intentional, coordinated action, they always
win.
Oh
brave new world that hath such creatures in it.... Lent may be over, but then
again, a more permanent form of it may just be beginning.
And here
is a copy of the article that was being referred to:
The War
on the Private Mind
By Kevin
D. Williamson — April 1, 2015
There
are two easy ways to get a Republican to roll over and put his paws up in the
air: The first is to write him a check, which is the political version of
scratching his belly, and the second is to call him a bigot. In both cases, it
helps if you have a great deal of money behind you.
Tim
Cook, who in his role as chief executive of the world’s most valuable company
personifies precisely the sort of oppression to which gay people in America are
subjected, led the hunting party when Indiana’s governor Mike Pence signed into
law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, while Walmart, a company that cannot
present its hindquarters enthusiastically enough to the progressives who hate
it and everything for which it stands, dispatched its CEO, C. Douglas McMillon,
to head off a similar effort in Arkansas, where Governor Asa Hutchison rolled
over immediately.
There
are three problems with rewarding those who use accusations of bigotry as a
political cudgel. First, those who seek to protect religious liberties are not
bigots, and going along with false accusations that they are makes one a party
to a lie. Second, it is an excellent way to lose political contests, since
there is almost nothing — up to and including requiring algebra classes — that
the Left will not denounce as bigotry. Third, and related, it encourages
those who cynically deploy accusations of bigotry for their own political ends.
An
excellent illustration of this dynamic is on display in the recent
pronouncements of columnist and gay-rights activist Dan Savage, who, in what
seems to be an effort to resurrect every lame stereotype about the shrill,
hysterical, theatrical gay man, declaimed that the efforts of those who do not
wish to see butchers and bakers and wedding-bouquet makers forced by their
government at gunpoint to violate their religious scruples is — you probably
have guessed already — nothing less than the consecration of Jim Crow Junior.
“Anti-black bigots, racist bigots, during Jim Crow and segregation made the
exact same arguments that you’re hearing people make now,” Savage said. Given
the dramatic difference in the social and political position of blacks in the
time of Bull Connor and gays in the time of Ellen DeGeneres, this is strictly
Hitler-was-a-vegetarian stuff, the elevation of trivial formal similarities over
dramatic substantial differences. The choices for explaining this are a.) moral
illiteracy; b.) intellectual dishonesty; c.) both a and b.
Adlai
Stevenson famously offered this definition: “A free society is a society where
it is safe to be unpopular.” We do not live in that society.
Barack
Obama can run for office as an anti-gay-marriage candidate — which he did, more
than once — and that is a ho-hum business, because nobody believed him to be
sincere. Brendan Eich was driven out of the company he helped found for holding
a substantially identical view sincerely — and that sincerity
is an unforgivable sin in a society in thrall to the teapot-totalitarian
temptation. When there is no private property — the great legal fiction of
“public accommodation” saw to its effective abolition — then everything is subject
to brute-force politics, and there can be no live-and-let-live ethic, which
is why a nation facing financial ruination and the emergence of a bloodthirsty
Islamic caliphate is suffering paroxysms over the question of whether we can
clap confectioners into prison for declining to bake a cake for a wedding in
which there is no bride.
The
people who have hijacked the name “liberal” — the étatists —
always win when social questions are decided by the state rather than in
private life, because the expansion of the state, and the consequent diminution
of private life, is their principal objective. The self-styled progressive
sets himself in rhetorical opposition to Big Business, but the corporate
manager often suffers from the same fatal conceit as the economic étatist —
an unthinking, inhumane preference for uniformity, consistency, regimentation,
and conformity. It is no surprise to see Apple and Walmart joining forces here
against the private mind. There is a reason that the atmosphere and protocols
of the corporate human-resources office are a great deal like those of the
junior-high vice-principal’s office: All reeducation facilities have a
little something in common.
The
ancient rival to étatism in the Western world is the church
militant, both in its formal institutional expression and in the relatively
newfangled (and thoroughly American) choose-your-own-adventure approach to
Christianity. For the culture warrior, bringing these nonconformists to
heel is a strategic priority. Gay couples contemplating nuptials are not
just happening into cake shops and florists with Christian
proprietors — this is an organized campaign to bring the private mind under
political discipline, to render certain moral dispositions untenable. Like
Antiochus and the Jews, the game here is to “oblige them to partake of the
sacrifices” and “adopt the customs” of the rulers. We are not so far
removed in time as we imagine: Among the acts intended to Hellenize the
Jews was a ban on circumcision, a proposal that is still very much alive in our
own time, with authorities in several European countries currently pressing for
that prohibition.
“I
expect to die in bed,” Francis Eugene Cardinal George famously remarked. “My
successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public
square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly
help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”
Perhaps it will not come to that. But we already are on the precipice of
sending men with guns to the homes and businesses of bakers to enforce compliance with dictates undreamt-of the day
before yesterday.
Yes,
render unto Caesar, and all that. But render only what is Caesar’s — and
not one mite more.
—
Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.
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