Liberals Are Killing America!! (Christian Persecution Complex is …
The Story: At least, that’s what some people would have you believe. Interestingly enough, this is an article that my mother posted on Facebook. She doesn’t usually post things like this but I really haven’t found a better article that demonstrates the Christian Persecution Complex quite like this. Let’s get into it, shall we?
The Problem: Well, this is difficult, isn’t it? The problem is, umm, the whole article. Although while completely ridiculous, let’s just assume that this author somehow knows something we don’t and go from there. The contention is that liberals are driving the national discussion and debate about the hot-button issues. So I’m going to highlight the passages I think are important and discuss the problem with them afterwards.
The irony is that few worldviews better describe the general liberal orientation to public policy and the culture war. The left often complains about the culture war as if it’s a war they don’t want to fight. They insist they just want to follow “sound science” or “what works” when it comes to public policy, but those crazy knuckle-dragging right-wingers constantly want to talk about gays and abortion and other hot-button issues.
Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum have all signed the National Organization for Marriage’s pledge to amend the Constitution (you know, that document that Republicans treat almost as sacred as the Bible) to ban gay marriage. Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul have al signed the Personhood USA’s Personhood Pledge, which would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade as all people are created “in the image and likeness of God”. And that’s not all. Yeah, that doesn’t sound like the right-wingers are pushing their morals and religious beliefs on anyone!
It’s all a farce. Liberals are the aggressors in the culture war (and not always for the worse, as the civil rights movement demonstrates). What they object to isn’t so much the government imposing its values on people — heck, they love that. They see nothing wrong with imposing their views about diet, exercise, sex, race and the environment on Americans. What outrages them is resistance, or even non-compliance with their agenda. “Why are you making such a scene?” progressives complain. “Just do what we want and there will be no fuss.”
Let’s see, what’s the liberals view on… Diet? Please eat healthy or else you will end up in the hospital. Exercise? Please exercise or else you will end up in the hospital. Sex? The government shouldn’t tell you who you can and can’t have sex with and should treat heteros and homos equally. Race? Please treat whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics equally as our Constitution instructs. Environment? Please keep it clean so that we have something to pass on to the next generation.
Damn those liberals! They can’t just let us eat junk food, be couch potatoes, hate gay people and black people, and wreck our environment with pollution and misuse of resources on our own! Just horrible.
Undermining Catholics
Consider President Obama’s decision to require most religious institutions— including Catholic hospitals, schools, etc. — to pay for contraception, sterilizations and the “morning after” pill. When “ObamaCare” was still being debated, the White House had all but promised Catholic leaders that it would find a compromise to spare the church from the untenable position of paying for services that directly violate their faith. Now that ObamaCare is the law, the administration says the church, like everyone else, must fall in line.
Whenever you see the word “ObamaCare”, it’s already a sign that the author can’t keep their talking points out of the article. And our author clearly missed the fact that the reason Catholic hospitals and schools were required to pay for contraception for their employees is because they hire many non-Catholic people. Even still, Obama did back down and compromise. God, it really sucks when Obama continues to do things to make himself seem rational and understanding.
Or consider the still-raging controversy over the Susan G. Komen For the Cure’s entirely reasonable — albeit very poorly handled — decision to withdraw its funding of Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider. The Komen foundation is singularly dedicated to raising research money for, and awareness about, breast cancer. It’s the folks with those pink ribbons. The organization decided to withdraw its comparatively meager funding in part because Planned Parenthood doesn’t offer mammograms. (Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, was caught misleading people on this very point last spring.)
Other factors included the fact that Planned Parenthood is under investigation by Congress and the obvious but unstated fact that the organization is wildly controversial. It’s this last point that infuriates the left. Pro-choice activists and their allies believe that Planned Parenthood should not be controversial, nor should abortion be up for discussion, either. If you have a problem with either it is because you are an ideologue, an extremist or a zealot opposed to the interests of womankind. And any attempt to suggest that abortion should offend the consciences of mainstream Americans, never mind such a revered organization as Komen, is simply unacceptable.
Already discussed this here.
Resist, and you will pay
It’s clearly not about the money. Komen’s $600,000 in donations amount to less than .01% of Planned Parenthood’s budget (as opposed to the nearly half that comes from taxpayers). It’s about making it very clear: Resistance is not just futile, but dangerous.
That was evident almost immediately. Komen’s website was hacked, its Wikipedia page filled with smears. Various allegedly objective news outlets rallied to Planned Parenthood’s defense as if the behemoth abortion provider was a victim of the tiny little breast cancer foundation.
And yet, somehow this is made to seem like PP coordinated the entire thing. Maybe it was all of the people who support PP and were outraged at the decision to cut funding to an organization that has provided women with decades of health treatments. Maybe the rally cries against Komen were from the people who feel that political intrusion into the private sector, using cancer patients as proxies for the abortion debate, was morally and ethically wrong. Maybe it was the fact that the lead of an ultra right-wing organization and the ring-wing VP of Policy were the ones who pushed this issue into the national limelight and the outcry was a reaction to their initial decision to put ideology over practicality.
Komen apologized and seemed to offer a reversal of its policy. This “just goes to show you, when women speak out, women win,” responded House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
This, of course, is ridiculous propaganda. Women are not a monolithic political bloc and were not unanimously opposed to Komen’s decision. Indeed, roughly half of women are pro-life and, you can be sure, Komen will lose donations from women and men who do not want to see their donations going to abortion providers. But for a certain type of upper-class liberal woman, it simply must be asserted, if not believed, that there is only one acceptable definition of a woman’s perspective when it comes to issues such as abortion.
Ignoring that Komen’s donations do not go to providing abortions, Komen is going to also lose donations for seeming like a corporate pawn in the abortion culture war and were willing to sacrifice the well-being of women to further this point. And when did this article all of a sudden become about class warfare? I thought it was the right-wingers that rail against the idea of classes and class warfare, and now this author assumes that the only type of woman that is pro-choice is an “upper-class liberal” of a certain type (whatever that means). And no, there isn’t just one acceptable definition, but regardless of your viewpoint, the issue is that it should be up to the individual, not the government, to have that definition.
You can understand why Komen wants to get out of the culture war crossfire. It just wants to spend its finite resources on the race for a cure. But that’s not good enough. The real motive behind this backlash is to make it very clear: You must choose a side — ours. And once you choose our side, you can never change your mind without severe consequences. And what is true of liberal politics is also true of liberal public policy. As the Obama administration has made clear to the Catholic Church, there is no neutrality, no safe harbor from liberalism’s moral vision. You’re either with us, or against us — which means we shall be against you.
And indeed, candidates like Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and previous contenders like Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry remind us, there is no neutrality or safe harbor from their conservative Christian vision of this country.
The Solution: It’s kind of funny, but re-read this article once more (I know, if you can handle it, as it drips with so much stupidity you feel like you might need a shower). When you do so, replace the word “liberal” with the word “Christian”. Switch each instance of spectrum bias, such that pro-choice reads pro-life and “progressive” reads “conservative”. Amazingly enough, the article reads just like a horoscope, because the entire article still makes perfect sense! It’s actually a bit eerie. And that’s why it’s complete bullshit, just like horoscopes. Whenever you can write an article that simply blames and complains about the “other side”, it’s an issue that’s a two way street. You can’t in good faith claims that the liberals are driving a culture war where each GOP candidate has signed numerous pledges to use their governmental powers to dictate and control the personal lives of its citizens. You can’t sit back and point fingers at liberals when the evangelical Christian right makes use of every opportunity to inject their beliefs into our public laws and courts. A while back I posted two videos of “The Best of Christopher Hitchens”. In the one, he was talking to a Christian radio host and they had this conversation:
Radio: I readily admit that I’m a slave. I’m a slave of the Lord Jesus Christ.
CH: And glad of your chains.
Radio: Yeah, well…
CH: And that’s fine for you, but you must leave me out of it. I don’t want to be told that I have to obey these laws, or that my children have to be taught this in school, or that laws have to written to gratify the bizarre beliefs of a cult like yours.
Radio: Well, but…
CH: That’s the thing I would need to you understand. You are quite happy to believe this, why can’t you keep it to yourself?
Radio: Why can’t you keep your atheism to yourself?
CH: Because the religious won’t allow me to. Because every time I open the paper, there’s another instance of theocratic encroachment on free society. Which I won’t put up with. Up with which I will not put.
How true that rings in the face of an article like this.
The Solution: And yet, as the author admitted, liberals are have been the driving force for good in previous culture wars like the civil rights movement. And while, the evangelical Christians have vehemently denied it, the gay rights movement is our civil rights movement. It will happen. As Chris Wallace pointed out to Rick Santorum, the comments made about the gay rights movement now is identical to the ones made about racial integration in the 60s. Now that it’s happened, no one thinks anything of it. The same will occur with gay rights. Just give it time.
So what do liberals stand for, to sum it up? Equality. The only difference between this article and the racists ones written decades ago is the group that is targeted. The bigotry is the same, the prejudice is the same, and the unwillingness to accept and understand a group of people that act or look differently is the same. How is it a bad thing that liberals want gays to be treated with kindness and respect? Or looking at it from a different angle, this is what happens with the continuation of anti-gay, Christian rhetoric. Once we can stop oppressing people in the name of God and realize we are all in this together, for better or worse, we’ll be much better off.
And What Did We Learn? Bashing the opposite side just because you would rather pout in the corner than have an adult conversation about where this country is headed doesn’t get you anywhere. Although there are plenty of sheep willing to buy the author’s book, making him rich off of peddling stupid, divisive talking points with little substance and even less thoughtful solutions.