The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

News Flash: Liberals Hate Christianity

Posted on | April 7, 2015 | 120 Comments

“And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
— I Corinthians 2:1-2 (KJV)

Jesse Lee Peterson’s WorldNetDaily column:

LGBT groups have been effective in linking their immoral cause to the noble civil rights movement. In reality, gays never wanted equality. They wanted society to accept their sinful lifestyle, or else. LGBT groups — to be blunt — act like fascists. Just like militant Islam demands Shariah law, homosexual pressure groups demand “sodomy law.”
So what’s so bad about discrimination anyway? Discrimination has always been a hallmark of freedom. The ability to discriminate is given to us by God so that we can make right choices.

Brian Tashman of Right Wing Watch expects his liberal readers to be outraged by this. But all Jesse Lee Peterson is saying is that he, as a Christian, views homosexuality as a “sinful lifestyle” and considers the gay-rights movement an “immoral cause.”

What is Brian Tashman trying to say? He doesn’t make an argument, he just gives it the shock headline (“Right-Wing Pundit: America Under ‘Sodomy Law’”) with the evident expectation that Jesse Lee Peterson’s use of the word “sodomy” to describe homosexuality is sufficient to cause liberal outrage: “How dare he?”

Whence this certainty? Why is Brian Tashman so confident in the force of liberal indignation? Christians aren’t allowed to write opinion columns anymore? Nobody is allowed to criticize or oppose the gay-rights movement? Dissent is impermissible? Because if this is what Tashman is trying to say, isn’t he just proving Peterson right?

The recent controversy over Memories Pizza — “Try our new Supreme Homophobia Special!” — and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana has helped bring into focus the inherent problems with mandatory “equality.” If you read Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision, it was apparent at the time that the majority’s “Emerging Awareness” Doctrine would have far-reaching effects in law, society and culture. These effects were not entirely predictable, because Lawrence amounted to a repudiation of many centuries of Anglo-American common law precedent. With this decision, America was setting sail into uncharted waters, voyaging toward that part of the ancient map marked “Here Be Dragons.”

What we are finding here is something like the “Sexual Anarchy” described by Matt Barber, a world without any moral truth beyond a fanatical certainty in the wrongness of “hate.” Yet if mere disapproval is “hate,” and thus subject to legal sanction, haven’t we instituted a regime of Compulsory Approval? Ideas Have Consequences, as we were warned long ago by Richard Weaver and, by making the idea of “equality” the first premise of our syllogism, we find ourselves unable to refute an argument leading us to the conclusion that the owners of Memories Pizza have no right to run their own business as they see fit, and Jesse Lee Peterson’s criticism of sodomy must be silenced.

What is at stake is liberty. Ace of Spades understands this:

I do not exist to appease your OCD need for Hierarchy, Structure, Order, Regularity, and Standard Procedures in all facets of life.
Some people continue to be wigged out at the idea that I can buy alcohol in one county but the next county over — get this! — it’s illegal to sell booze.
They just seem to have this baseline devotion to the ideal that we should all be the same. That each county should follow the same rules. That a traveler, moving from one county to the next, should not be surprised or bothered to discover there are Different Rules in effect, or a Different Culture.
That we should, in short, all have the Same Rules, and the Same Culture, with all Proud Nails pounded flat to the wood, so that there is no danger of snagging anyone’s clothing or giving anyone a cut.
Some find that comforting.
I find it creepy. . . .
It bothers Bill Quick that one bakery could have one set of policies, and yet a bakery down the street could, get this, have an entirely different set of policies.
That’s just wrong, he apparently thinks. . . .

You can read the whole thing, which is both powerful and hilarious (obligatory Strong Language Warning). Understand that Ace and his antagonist Bill Quick are both atheists and libertarian-leaning conservatives. Their argument is therefore instructive of how, once we step off the Solid Rock of biblical truth, we step into the shifting sands of doubt and confusion. The Christian knows what he believes and why he believes it — do I need to cite chapter and verse here? — and need not justify himself or prove his own case, because he does not offer his mere personal opinion. Rather the Christian relies on an eternal and transcendent Truth that exists beyond himself.

‘Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus,
Just to take Him at His Word;
Just to rest upon His promise,
And to know, “Thus saith the Lord!”

Our elite intelligentsia are offended by the Christian’s child-like faith, because a simple Truth that can be known by all — “Jesus Christ, and him crucified” — puts the Ph.D. and the high-school dropout on the same moral plain. The university professor is no better in God’s eyes than the janitor mopping the hallway outside the professor’s classroom. Both of them will be judged by the same standard of righteousness and both are equally condemned by that standard. We are but “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” as Jonathan Edwards long ago warned, and it is only by God’s mercy and by the atonement of Christ that we have hope of anything other than the fiery destruction we deserve.

To which the liberal’s only answer is: “SHUT UP!”

How dare we question their right as Our Moral Superiors™ to tell us what to think? The Christian’s simple faith is tantamount to insulting liberals. To reject their Gospel of Secular Salvation is to call into question the Heaven-on-Earth promises that liberals have been making for at least the past hundred years. The Left is determined to immanentize the eschaton, and when Jesse Lee Peterson speaks disapprovingly of “sodomy,” he must be denounced and ridiculed, lest anyone else get the idea that dissent is permissible or socially acceptable. Why, if people are allowed to disagree with liberals, next thing you know, they might start questioning whether “Haven Monahan” and his frat buddies gang-raped a girl in Charlottesville. They may begin doubting the Gospel of Climate Change, or even lose faith in Keynesian economics!

If these Christians are allowed to call sin by its right name, you see, the entire fabric of liberal belief may begin to unravel, and the system of prestige by which Our Moral Superiors™ claim the right to tell us what to think could crumble into the ash-heap of history as suddenly as the Soviet Union collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And so liberals keep shrieking: “SHUT UP!”

Are we obligated to obey their totalitarian command? I think not.

“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1786



 

Category: Gays, Intellectuals, Liberals, Religion

Comments

120 Responses to “News Flash: Liberals Hate Christianity”

  1. NeoWayland
    April 8th, 2015 @ 5:16 pm

    I’ve long said government should be smaller than absolutely necessary.

    But moving beyond that for a moment, do you really want your morality decided by politicos looking for campaign contributions?

  2. NeoWayland
    April 8th, 2015 @ 5:17 pm

    Your apple didn’t start red and it won’t stay red.

  3. K-Bob
    April 8th, 2015 @ 5:26 pm

    He’s definitely pushing that envelope here.

  4. NeoWayland
    April 8th, 2015 @ 5:26 pm

    Odd that you mentioned the Founders. That’s one of the biggest KYFHOs in history. At least I know you understand the concept.

    You know, the history of liberty is marked by men and women taking a stand for what they believed was right, no matter what the consensus. Seems to me your faith has a history of that too.

    It’s because men are not angels that government needs to be constrained. That’s an idea from that same Madison quote.

  5. NeoWayland
    April 8th, 2015 @ 5:27 pm

    That’s a good point.

  6. Hoo Me
    April 8th, 2015 @ 5:30 pm

    It’s far more than a cult. A cult would be something along the lines of David Koresh or Jim Jones.

    A religion is much more full-fledged and includes, at the very least, a prophet, a prophecy, and a well-developed set of associated literature.

    Viewing today’s liberalism as an extension of marxism, it satisfies all three of the criteria above where Marx = the prophet, Marx’s prophecy = the prophecy and Marx’s core intellectual works form the basis for the follow-on literature.

    If you notice, today’s liberals are becoming much more open about their influence by Marxism:

    http://tinyurl.com/MarxistInfluence

  7. K-Bob
    April 8th, 2015 @ 7:00 pm

    Obviously you don’t care about scale. That’s been the core problem with your attempts at reason.

    No one is depending on an agenda. Most people are idealists. You apparently fall for the lure of idealism over principle every chance you get. You need to understand the difference if you plan on having any impact on anyone’s thinking.

    Principle is how you build solid concepts and policies that stand the test of time. Agendas are ephemera. Idealists are unreliable.

  8. Quartermaster
    April 8th, 2015 @ 7:29 pm

    Politicos don’t determine my morality, or anyone else’s. They determine whose morality becomes law.

    Government should be no larger than absolutely necessary, and no smaller than absolutely necessary.

  9. Quartermaster
    April 8th, 2015 @ 7:31 pm

    It is not odd that I should mention the founders. OTOH, you don’t understand them like you understand little on what you post here. You are so conflicted it’s a wonder you can keep it all straight.

  10. Obama’s Easter Message to Christians
    April 9th, 2015 @ 12:05 am

    […] either case, this should be a lesson to Christians everywhere who have sinned and fallen short of the glory of Barack […]

  11. Wombat_socho
    April 9th, 2015 @ 12:27 pm

    A friend of mine mentioned it to me. Going to have to buy him a beer or six next year when I’m in MN again.

  12. Quartermaster
    April 9th, 2015 @ 12:29 pm

    OK. Blame it on your drinking buddy. I know how that works.

  13. Wombat_socho
    April 9th, 2015 @ 12:31 pm

    He’s actually the antithesis of the basement-dwelling, autistic brony stereotype, which is one of the things that made me listen when he suggested it.

  14. NeoWayland
    April 10th, 2015 @ 10:40 am

    Of course politicos determine your morality. It’s because they’ve been allowed to do so.

    That’s kind of important, and it’s why conservatives share blame for the failings of government.

  15. NeoWayland
    April 10th, 2015 @ 10:46 am

    I don’t care about scale because small tyrannies become habit, and habits become large tyrannies.

    Of course I tiptoed around the elephant in the room, nobody wants to discuss gay marriage. But the same reasons used to ban interracial marriage were used to ban gay marriage. Also poly marriage and group marriage, but those aren’t even allowed in the same room.

    Somehow the “legal” reason is “the Bible tells me so.”

    That can’t be the reason to control another. Not unless you want to open yourself up to the same kind of control from another source.

    Parity. That’s my principle.

  16. NeoWayland
    April 10th, 2015 @ 10:53 am

    NeoWayland said:
    ”There are Christians here who regularly attack anyone who dares dissent.”

    Quartermaster said:
    ”What you think maters not a whit. What you will endure is what is and if you don’t like it, you can join the others and Flossenbuerg. You will be given no other choices.”

    It’s pretty obvious that your definition of liberty only includes those who agree with you.

    That was my point.

  17. NeoWayland
    April 10th, 2015 @ 11:01 am

    I could give you the spiel about by choosing “all or nothing” you left yourself open to uncomfortable truths instead of useful fictions.

    I’ll tell you again. “All or nothing” makes anybody a threat. I don’t agree with you about gay marriage but I agree that sexuality shouldn’t be taught in the schools. I’ll agree that teachers who mess with kids should be severely punished, but I don’t want to see Bible quotes to justify law. I want a very small set of laws that we agree on, not the moral proclamations from someone’s faith condemning all who do not fall to their knees and sing hosannahs.

    You’ll lose the war if you demand “all or nothing.”

    But what the hey. You’ve already said that this world doesn’t matter.

  18. K-Bob
    April 10th, 2015 @ 12:57 pm

    You are so determined to use faulty logic that I certainly wouldn’t trust you to be a judge of parity.

  19. Shibes_Meadow
    April 10th, 2015 @ 6:58 pm

    I oppose interracial marriage, and for the same reasons the Orthodox Jews oppose it.

  20. K-Bob
    April 11th, 2015 @ 12:26 pm

    Congratulations. You are part of a tiny, and shrinking, minority who even care about that issue.