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The Sore Winners of the Left
The Left started the culture war, won it, and now roams the countryside shooting the wounded.
Getting same-sex marriage legalized now appears to have been just a beginning for progressives, not the goal that many libertarians and conservatives had assumed. With SSM accepted in more states every year and the Supreme Court considering if it should be a right in all 50, the Left is angrier than ever.
While most Americans would have celebrated such rapid victories, a large number of so-called liberals are out for vengeance. In Indiana, a local news reporter cold-called businesses to see if they would cater a theoretical same-sex wedding. The first one to say “no” would be made an example of.
When the journalist asked owners of a small, rural pizzeria the equivalent of ”are you now or have you ever been a member of a traditional church?” they answered honestly. So the reporter juiced up the headline by claiming the business refused to serve gays. National outlets ran with the useful lie. The rest is mob violence history.
Progressives threatened to rob Memories Pizza, kill the owners, and burn it to the ground. The terrified couple locked up the store and were too afraid to leave their home due to the threats. This pizza place had never been asked to cater a same-sex wedding — or any wedding ever. It had never refused service to anyone. The owners had never threatened physical harm against a soul.
Tumbrels rolled down Main Street anyway. Jealous at the online buzz, now CNN is calling random businesses to out the traditionally religious. The crowd must be sated. Dissent must be crushed.
All this time, I naively viewed the legalization of same-sex marriage as the goal of its proponents. Well-meaning people who wanted the same legal rights as their heterosexual brothers and sisters. How could my marriage be damaged by simply allowing another couple the same options I enjoy?
But for many activists, same-sex marriage was just a convenient tactic to achieve a much broader goal. Their real desire was to silence dissent. To drive the traditional, the conservative, and the religious underground. To destroy their businesses and threaten their lives. To ensure the minority understood there was no place for them in this nation.
I hope that one day, progressives will learn how to accept people different from themselves. But now that SSM is nearly a fait accompli, I’m wondering which wedge issue will be used next to hammer the stubborn square pegs into the round holes of post-Obama America.
Published in Culture, Law
Indeed, the situation is as Rob Long said, “murky.”
“I’ve never known what exactly the homosexual agenda was, so I’m not interested in stopping it.”
Just check out what’s happening in Indiana to a pizza parlor. That’s the homosexual agenda.
SSM is merely the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent for Progressive secularists since study after study has shown that gays make up 3% of the population. 3%! This issue is merely a tool of the crazed secularists to undermine religion in our society. (I’m not including all secularists – just the crazy ones)
Someone recently did a poll asking folks what percentage of the population they thought was gay. The most common answer? 25%
That’s what you call one heck of a PR campaign – or one heck of an ignorant population…
I never weighed in much on the many SSM debates on Ricochet, because I am not:
Gay
Libertarian
Religious
A Leftist
So I left it to the four of you to fight it out. But the one time I did speak up, I stated that I found it perfectly understandable, and reasonable, that gay couples would want public and legal recognition of their relationships.
I knew however, that it wouldn’t stop there. This has always been an effort to gain a club with which to beat religious people and their institutions.
One of our gay members, (not sure he is still around) dismissed my concerns as something that could be easily remedied afterwards should that prove the case,
Well-meaning people have been pulled into the kulturkampf and are, unsurprisingly, confused to find they are on the side of fascists.
Libertarians please take note: Lie down with progressives; wake up with statists.
Do not defend the Iron Fist of social/political power, otherwise things might get “murky”
I hate just posting something like “well said.” But ‘well said.’
Jon, I don’t see what your concern is about the pizza place. Plenty of folks here on Ricochet will explain it’s just market forces at work.
I had this discussion 12 years ago with my father-in-law, a minister. There was a state constitutional marriage amendment on the ballot. He was opposed to defining marriage as between man and a woman, and he was open to same sex marriage. I actually approve of same sex marriage, but intended to vote for the amendment.
He was incredulous. My point was that this was not about same sex marriage, but about the destruction of Christianity.
I could see the end point, eventually polygamy, marriage to inanimate objects, etc… was just around the corner. Of course, anyone who opposed this would be sued, including all mainline churches.
I told him that within 20 years the Roman Catholic church would be sued for not performing a wedding ceremony, of some sort, and he thought I was crazy. We will know in 8 years (I believe I win).
The sad part is that I still support the idea of same sex marriage. Unfortunately, I oppose its use as a means to destroy Christianity.
As someone else noted, the problem with arguing with the vanguard of the Left is that the issue is never really the issue. SSM was NEVER about equal rights for gays, it was always about creating the wedge to destroy a bedrock of the dominant culture.
Small anecdote: sometime around 2004, I had a habit of listening to CBC Radio 3 (think college radio, but on a national scale). they featured (frequently) a song by some group that decided that their gayness was their primal reason for existence and recorded a song about it. The title was “Ban Marriage”, and it had a catchy tune. Somewhere in the next 2 years, the tack changed from banning marriage outright, to undermining it by redefining marriage, and with it, the SSM movement was founded. The goal didn’t change, the tactic did, which is why it appeared as if from nowhere and overnight.
The next stage in this was pointed out by Arthur Brooks recently: to eliminate the tax exempt status from churches. Again, undermining one of the bedrock institutions of Western civilization.
Paying for contraceptives. Paying for abortions. Bowling for abortions.
Yeah. Sally Kohn:
It won’t be enough that you’re not actively for their causes. You have to pay for them. No doubt they’re already going after the Hyde Amendment.
KC – That’s the ultimate double-speak, isn’t it? Ending Transfer payments stop poor women from supporting themselves. If they were truly supporting themselves why would the rest of the nation have to?
I find the militant SSM supporters’ position perfectly intellectually consistent. If gay coupling is in every way the equivalent of opposite sex coupling, it is morally abhorrent to deny gay couples the same privileges as opposite sex couples. These Christian bigots should be driven from the public square into the catacombs.
Why are you worried about the few affected bakers, florists, and (pizza?) caterers, Jon? After all, you have to break a few eggs… And if you just bake them into a gay wedding cake and keep your yap shut, you have nothing to fear.
/snark off
I see that a gay rights group out of Wyoming is already calling for revolking churches tax exempt status and shutting them down. So it begins.
I know many homosexuals who are fine with the RFRA, with a few openly advocating for it. Most of the abuse cast on the pizza parlor comes from self-righteous straights drunk on punishing the other. I don’t see this as the homosexual agenda, but the progressive agenda using gays to get the statism they desire.
Yes, this is a perfect storm because the most evil part of the gay radical left is combined with the worst of the left. They see their main chance. The 2016 election is going to the Republicans and they want to continue in any way they can with Obama’s anti-American platform. And the religious right is seen as our weak point because this is the the wedge can be driven into the heart of our three legged stool.
Destruction of churches won’t be enough. They will come after religion itself. They are pushing for a secular only society. The ultimate end will be control of even private thought.
Jon, you just don’t get it. There is no gay agenda, there is only the progressive agenda that is using some gay interest to further its goals. In the end the churches and religion will be marginized if not totally shutdown, Christians will be silenced, maybe jailed, possibly killed and sadly you and those of similar mind will be somewhat responsible for that.
They’re not going to take tax exempt status away from churches. That wouldn’t kill churches. Hell, an attack so obvious as that would probably strengthen the church as a whole, moving it into full-blown resistance mode.
No, what the left wants is much worse, much more insidious: they want the churches to stand, but to empty them of meaning. They want a nominally Christian population that doesn’t believe in Christianity. They want the churches to stand as proof that “See? We still have religious freedom here”, but they’ll make life unlivable for people that actually believe and practice Christianity. That’s what they want. They want to do something similar to what China has done: replace real churches with churches loyal to the state’s agenda (the so-called “Patriotic Catholic Churches”). Liberals… and a lot of Libertarians… want a nation of Unitarian Universalists. All the trappings of church, none of the faith or conviction to get in the way of the glorious progressive future.
Think about the totality they’re gathering. It’s not enough that you’ve been made to care …
They can MAKE you DO it …
When the Supreme Court struck down the Texas sodomy laws, I supported it. “What someone does in the privacy of their own bedroom is their business, not the state’s” was my thought. Now I regret that support. Because it’s obvious that ruling was the initial shove down the slippery slope we’re currently rocketing downwards on. It very much has become a case of “give an inch, and lose the whole damned highway”.
I was thinking someone would ask but so far no one has. Fake John Galt, please define LGBTTQQIAAP for me. I was familiar with the Newspeak up to the the first Q, but after that, you lost me.
Part of this problem is that gays, at least many of them, are not content with the “consenting adults in private” formula everyone thought was only fair when we were young an innocent. In particular, they believe they should be able to demonstrate their preference as publicly as possible and be applauded for their “courage”.
A bigger part is that the left would like to narrow the definition of liberty to mean absolute licence to do anything with your genitals. All non-sexual behaviour would be licensed by the state, or not.
I think Irving Kristol expressed it first when he said: (pardon my paraphrasing) Rot and depravity are not by-products of the liberal agenda, they are the agenda.
The object is to create dependence on the state and destroy rival sources of leadership and authority.
It does help the left to have as much of the public’s attention as possible focused on a hypothetical order for pizza for a hypothetical wedding in Indiana while they are driving the real world ever closer to disaster.
Re : comment 28
It’s not quite right to think we were always so nuclear family oriented. Maybe WASP families were pretty spread out by the time the children of Italian immigrants were showing that, like their parents, they preferred to live near relatives. But earlier in the country’s history, nuclear families that were related to each other often, somewhat intentionally, stayed geographically close.
Also, Prager states America was founded on individuality. I’m not sure how he means that. In the north east, there seems to have been a lot of strong–to say the least–church communities. There can’t be that without some sacrifice of individuality, I think. Sometimes, I think that as people seek to protect themselves or their children from the detrimental effects of certain social changes, some church communities may become much stronger than they are now.
Nice try, but I don’t buy it. You could just as easily say that the pizza parlor abuse comes from homosexual rights groups using self-righteous straights to get to the political and social ends they desire. In an alliance of this sort, the dog wags the tail and the tail wags the dog.
Churches won’t be next, schools will be next. And some of your greatest educational institutions will come tumbling to the ground, to the cheers of the tolerant (because, why should a school exist if it is teaching bad things?)
Perhaps somebody will craft a Barmen Declaration for America.
One question: so much of this debate centres around religion, which is bad PR. Why not debate ‘freedom of conscience’, which sounds much better? More seriously, what about matters of conscience as applied to non-religious people, or are they totally in line with the demands of the last?
That final sentence should read “are the consciences of non-religious people totally in line with the demands of the Law?” Sorry about that.
Liberals… and a lot of Libertarians… want a nation of Unitarian Universalists.
Wow! I had no idea my tiny denomination had such broad, if sinister, support!
Well, really, we’re too small, numerically speaking, to be called a denomination…more like a “sect”…but the “d” word makes us feel important.
As does this post— Thank you, Douglas!
(Y’know, if I’m supposed to be taking over/ruining the world, I definitely need to ask for a raise.)
This is exactly right.
Too many people, especially libertarians, confuse political philosophy- which is about creating a good and harmonious society, with politics- which is about power.
Forcing Christianity out of the public square is the goal, not extending rights to homosexuals.
What is called the “homosexual agenda” is not the agenda of gay people. It is the agenda of the left and its aim is to eliminate any rival to the power of the State.
“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
-Anonymous SDS radical
http://genius.com/David-horowitz-a-modern-machiavelli-2-lyrics
Wow that was totally expected
I would agree with that. It’s found throughout the history of the left. Progressives use identity politics to divide and conquer. They don’t really care very much about the goals of any individual group — they only care how useful they are. Whoever is handy, they’ll use ’em.
We are all social conservatives now.