Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The America I Grew Up In, Now Gone
Ever notice that certain people lose their cool whenever a conservative claims that the America he grew up in is disappearing? It doesn’t matter whether the claim is made by Donald Trump, the Tea Party, the Chamber of Commerce, or the RINO squish brigade. Mere mention provokes apoplexy on the Left.
“You preferred the America where blacks were getting hosed in the streets?” they howl. “When gays were discriminated against and couldn’t live openly? You think those were the good old days? You liked it better when the poor, the elderly, the sick, and the uninsured were just abandoned and left to fend for themselves?”
Well, gee, I don’t know. When you put it like that …
For those who may be interested, when I say the America I grew up in is disappearing, I’m talking about the loss of social values and attitudes that even the Left used to revere: the right to speak your mind, a belief that hard work should be rewarded, a commitment to expanding economic opportunity, the right to be left alone.
These things are disappearing. Even the language used to describe them is disappearing. We observe it happening. We feel it happening. But if we say that it’s happening … KABOOM! … we find ourselves in the crosshairs of the social justice sniper unit.
Curt Schilling, come on down.
I won’t rehearse the details. You’ve probably read about them. Suffice it to say that, this week, a man lost his job for making political comments in public that the giant corporation employing him disagreed with. He got fired for his opinions.
There was a time, still within living memory, when the idea that someone could lose their livelihood for expressing a political opinion — or any opinion — was an outrage. And it was an outrage felt not just on the political right but by the political left as well. Indeed, it was felt keenly by every American.
We used to think that our freedom made us unique in the world. We had freedom of speech. We could express ourselves, and our political opinions, without fear of being shamed, suppressed, erased, or visited by the thought police. The Left used to be the fiercest defenders of this ideal.
Didn’t you see Trumbo?
Some will say, “Hey, ESPN is a private company. They can do what they want. They could fire the guy for not keeping his nose hairs in check. His public comments reflected poorly on the company.”
Maybe. But when you see Curt Schilling, you don’t think, “Hey, there goes the ESPN guy.” No, you think, “Hey, there goes that loudmouth right-wing baseball pitcher who had the fake blood on his sock.”
(Sorry about that list bit. I’m a Yankee fan.)
Last I checked, it’s not a crime to be a loudmouth, or to be right wing. Last I checked, dissent was patriotic. I always thought that patriotic dissent included the right to dissent from certain social orthodoxies and certain faddish opinions.
Admittedly, I haven’t checked in a while.
I’ve been fired. The reasons given were not terribly convincing. The boss was the boss, though. It was his company, so I took the hit and moved on.
But the guy that fired me didn’t take to the media basically to denounce me as a bigot. ESPN did that to Curt Schilling. And they did it for the purpose of signaling their total agreement with the belief that some opinions are no longer valid. The implication: The people who hold such opinions should be punished.
Does that sound like America to you?
It’s hard to believe, but there was a time in this country when liberals insisted that what a man did and said in his personal life had no bearing on whether he could adequately do his job. Unfortunately, that time is rapidly receding in the rearview.
Somebody has to say it.
Published in Culture
Who is being left alone by the government mandated glorification and normalization of perversion?
My very first post on Ricochet I talked about how I had this image of America when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, and some time about the late-2000s and early 2010s I looked around and saw that the US didn’t look like that. I cannot say if this is because the world I knew in the 80s and 90s didn’t exist, and was just a child’s understanding, or if the world really had changed.
Regardless, the world I thought I was inheriting was far greater than the one I actually did, and no one seems willing to try to improve it to the standards I remember being promised.
I already know that some on the left are intolerant and unwilling to leave people alone. I’m asking whether there are similar impulses on the part of Socons—for example, wishing to be the ones who get to define what is “perverted” and what is “normal” and, perhaps, impose or restore government mandates according to this preference?
I don’t think it’s necessary to claim that things were better in the 50s and 60s in order to argue that things could be better than they are right now.
I’m not sure they all are; but, many sure are. Here’s one writing positively about Schilling’s ouster http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/brennan/2016/04-20/curt-schilling-espn-facebook-transgender/83302426/
This writer, Christine Brennan, takes liberal positions on all the social/cultural issues and sees nothing but ill-will as the motive for anyone who supports traditional values.
Exactly – it’s beyond obvious who is imposing on whom, but some people prefer conjuring bogeypersons.
“And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
As a society, we have a right to define the norms for our society, as has every society in the history of the world. We are not a society of individuals who get to redefine what is acceptable on their own. A tiny minority has taken it on themselves to redefine the entire culture’s ethos without the input of the vast majority of the country. Who are you to redefine what the word perversion has meant for generations? Perversion is the alteration of something from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended. That still applies here. It is a leftist tactic to hijack language and deliberately use it as a perversion of its true meaning to advance an agenda.
It is not compassionate or loving to indulge mentally ill people in the delusions that they are something they are not. If someone decided they were a chair, we would not take them shopping for doilies to wear. We are not only encouraging this insanity, but the government is now mandating it. It is now controversial to say men should use the men’s room and women should use the women’s room. We can’t even use the bathroom without the Left politicizing it, and you’re more concerned with what social conservatives are doing? Your priorities are way out of line.
You know there are ways of turning you into a public figure, right? And that there are court cases that have upheld such methods, including one that famously benefited a movement conservative, right?
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Is all this worth instigating bloodshed? Or shall we all just get…a little melancholy:
http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s19e02-where-my-country-gone
I didn’t say any of this.
This was a real question, not a rhetorical one. (Or at least, mostly not a rhetorical one!) I agree that “as a society, we have a right to define the norms for our society, as has every society in the history of the world.” It seems to me that this—defining the norms— is exactly what our society is doing.
More to the point, however, is how easy it seems to be for the social justice warriors to get the social conservatives to (over)react in stereotyped ways to what are, as you say, issues that directly affect only a tiny minority of Americans. Why let yourself get played?
They can’t because its not only their employers who can punish them. The Social Justice Warrior squad will assassinate the employer as well as the employee if the former doesn’t can the latter.
Our society has existed for centuries. Our norms have been determined. An outspoken minority is trying to forcibly change that by hijacking our language, enacting their agenda undemocratically through the courts, and by capturing the media channels used for common discourse. I don’t know if you consider yourself a leftist or not, but your tactics are straight out of their playbook: pervert language and demand the other side defend its accepted usage instead of defending your attempt to hijack it, subvert the moral ethos of society and then blame the other side when they object. Your knee jerk attempt to go after social conservatives for something the Left has done is no different than the dishonest commentators who respond to an Islamist shooting up an army base with, “Golly gee, I hope those crazy Christians don’t kill a bunch of peace-loving Muslims in retaliation”. It’s repugnant, and it attempts to stifle any objection from the other side by equating them with the guilty parties.
Many of us, the author of this included weren’t alive in the 50’s and 60’s so wouldn’t argue that things were better then but things certainly were better in the 80’s and 90’s. So we will argue that’ let’s go back to Carl Winslow as America’s dad.
Don’t give Roger Ailes any ideas. Get ready for Fox News Sports. Fair, Balanced, and more hot blonde anchors.
I was only barely alive in the 60s…but I take your point. I was an adult in the 80s and 90s, and for what it’s worth, I think things are a lot better now. Food is better. Television is better. Cell phones are better. Haircuts are better (mostly). We still have punks, and we’ve added hipsters and(sadly) haven’t solved the problem of inner city gangs, but there’s a lot less domestic violence, rape and murder than there used to be.
Okay, but they aren’t doing all this at gunpoint, are they?
The city councils of Charlotte and Chapel Hill are democratically elected bodies, and a citizen has no constitutional right to use a public bathroom at all, let alone the right to decide who else gets to use it, so I don’t see why it is a “leftist” notion to allow the citizens of Chapel Hill to make their own bathroom laws. If anything, it seems more conservative; let local governments, who are closest to the people, make the rules the people must live by.
I would add that, by over-reacting to things like this, conservatives and conservative-dominated legislatures a.) allow leftists to set the agenda, and b.) confirm the liberal stereotype about Christians who might claim to “just” want to be left alone to practice their faith but in fact, deep down, want to establish a theocracy.
I also take your point since I was an oblivious kid in the 80’s with a crimped side pony tail, neon leggings, with an oversized sweatshirt with a stretched out collar to show one shoulder.
but I think because there was no social media back then you could be oblivious to the crazy stuff going on around in the culture
so cute. i miss the 80s.
This—IMHO—is the really important thing, the right that must be defended: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression.
Oh, and I agree with you about pushing change through the court—but I think it’s important that our disgust with SCOTUS activism isn’t dependent upon the outcome of any given case, but rather demands adherence to the legitimate processes for establishing or changing laws in our constitutional republic.
I remember the stretched-out-collar thing! Flashdance!
Being a kid helped. As an adult, what I remember (other than babies) is the crappy economy, furlough days for state workers and talk of layoffs in the state police, and my husband trying to figure out what we would do if he lost his job… it wasn’t much fun. There were good parts too, of course (babies) and eventually the economy improved… but all things being equal, I think we’re better off now.
And again, you go after Christians instead of the activists who are forcing this change on the country. There is nothing conservative at all in embracing the insanity of transgenderism. The Left is politicizing going to the bathroom, and your knee jerk response is to blame everyone else for overreacting. It’s well past time for someone to react to the garbage going on, and your cheap attempt to stifle disagreement by mischaracterizing it is misguided at best, classic concern trolling at worst.
This whole issue is built on the fallacy of the false choice. We don’t have to do anything for transgenders because a person is not supposed to be a transgender.
Whiskey, I agree, but there was a far more straightforward objection:
Yes, they are doing at gunpoint. Bakers, florists, and now the owners of stores with bathrooms. If the libertarians around here actually have a point it’s that these laws are enforced by violence, whether that takes the form of a cop with a gun coming to your door, or the emptying of your bank account, enforced by cops with guns if you try to get your money back.
That they cloak the violence in paper and high rhetoric doesn’t change the fact that it is what they are doing.
Not really. It reflects the fact that the “Trump Organization” is pretty much considered a joke as a business. It is a branding and sales organization that hasn’t created much excess value at all over the past 40 years accounting for the capital his father provided him with initially. In the early years there were a lot of hard real estate assets but that hasn’t been the case for 25 years
he isn’t harming the brand because it wasn’t held in high esteem to begin with except for a relatively small slice of consumers that bought into his nonsense. Those people are his political “base” and will continue to revere him.
I’m not “going after” anyone, Whiskey Sam. I’m discussing issues with you.
And no one is forcing change—these changes are coming about because the left is doing a better job of persuading people either to agree with them, or not to disagree all that strongly. There are probably lots of reasons why they aren’t resisting the change, but one might very well be that the other message sent by the left tends to find confirmation in things like HR2; namely that conservative Christians are mean.
I know, from abundant personal experience, that conservative Christians aren’t mean.
I also believe that freedom of conscience is being threatened and religious points of view– specifically Christian points of view—are being “shamed and suppressed” by all the forces you’ve named; this is bad news not just for Christians but for all Americans, because the debates about whether and how society’s norms should change must have the Christian and conservative perspectives if these debates are to be full and fruitful.
I’m not suggesting that conservative and/or Christian North Carolinians (or anyone else) should approve of the Chapel Hill bathroom rules. I do think they could have been safely ignored ( with perhaps an indulgent chuckle…”oh, yes, well Chapel Hill just has to be Chapel Hill, doesn’t it?”) in favor of keeping a tight, relentless focus on protecting the constitutional rights of Christians (and therefore everyone else, too—something liberals appear to have forgotten) to live according to the dictates of faith and conscience unmolested by the government. The bathroom thing is a distraction. If it was a deliberate distraction, designed to provoke, then boy! those liberals really are sharp. Conservatives need game.
Yes—if they were to succeed in passing a law that says “you can’t refuse to perform/cater/enflower a same sex marriage or else” then force is certainly strongly implied.
If the bakers and photographers are being Tweeted and shamed and boycotted to death…that’s a little different.
What strikes me about this—and we’re drifting far from the OP, but anyway—is that the principles involved are completely defensible without reference to the content of the belief or speech involved. Defending the baker who doesn’t want to bake a cake for the same sex marriage because he’s a Christian also defends the atheist who doesn’t want to make a cake that says “Jesus Saves” or the feminist officiant who doesn’t want to perform a wedding in which the bride agrees to obey the groom. Why let yourself get bogged down in icky content when the obvious issue—and all the common ground—is found in defending the principle and process?
Did you sleep through Oregon? Did you sleep through Massachusetts a decade ago? Arizona, Colorado? Twice in Georgia in the last year. California, New York, and the Virgin Islands right now. The mobs are more and worse but beside the point, and if they’d passed the laws through state legislatures I could almost accept it -but these are administrative and judicial decisions.
There are AGs in the United States, trying to put people in jail or fine them out of existence. There are state boards stripping credentials and firing civil servants. They are doing this right now, as we speak. And all you have to say is Christians need to get game.
My further sentiments on this point cannot be expressed within the code of conduct.