I don't know why I'm surprised, but still...
The other day she posted the meme to the left. I don't see it as horribly sacrilegious or disrespectful of God. Unfortunately- though predictably- it attracted a bunch of responses from the juvenile neo-atheists and generally intolerant morons who seem to abound in our society these days.
I registered my disapproval of these responses in rather mild terms and added a respectful suggestion that given their inevitability posting the meme might have been a mistake. I honestly didn't expect the response to that post. But I should have.
A gay man called me a hypocrite for posting this. I have to admit that I don't see his logic.
Another man agreed with him in rather odd terms, admitting that he had an obligation to respect my right to have an opinion which differs from his but not to respect that opinion. Fair enough. Except that he then said that in fact, he respected neither- which on any terms rather clearly makes him a hypocrite by his own admission.
Memes of crucified Godzillas and all sort of juvenile nonsense followed. The responses which actually had any content were essentially a repetition of the notion so common on the cultural Left these days that while "liberal" opinions must in all cases be respected, dissent from those positions need not be. Given the polls which recently have shown a majority on college and university campuses believing that they have a right to use intimidation or even violence to silence opinions contrary to their own, I can't say I'm surprised. As I mentioned in the post linked to above, ethical disapproval of homosexual behavior is somehow equated on the cultural Left with discrimination and bigotry, as if it were even possible to be bigoted against a behavior. People lose their jobs not because they discriminate against or mock gay and lesbian people, but because their religious beliefs disapprove of homosexual behavior or their understanding of the purposes of marriage fails to encompass "marriage" between people of the same gender.
President Trump and his hard-core followers have often and quite rightly been called out for their authoritarianism. But the authoritarianism of some of the very people who are the most critical of it coexists with the absolute absence of any sense of irony. Part of the reason, I think, is the result of a phenomenon the late William F. Buckley observed: that by and large if one disagrees with a conservative, he will attribute it to one being misinformed, or illogical, or at most stupid. But if one disagrees with a "liberal," his or her default position tends to be that one is evil. Misinformation can be fought with more accurate information and bad logic can be fought with better logic. Stupidity, alas, is impervious to correction, but even stupid people can at least be decent.
But evil exists to be defeated, to be suppressed, to be destroyed. And so, in the illiberal minds of "liberals" (or "progressives," as they prefer (perhaps with a subconscious embarrassment) to call themselves these days, do people who disagree with them. Very few people lost their jobs because they were in favor of gay "marriage," or lose their jobs now because they see no ethical distinction between homosexual activity and what takes place between the average man and his wife. But for people who hold any other viewpoint to express it is to run the risk of boycotts, public slander and libel, loss of jobs, destruction of careers, and all manner of personal catastrophe.
It seems that the Left believes that there should be two sets of rules, one for them, and another for those they disagree with. It's a sad phenomenon, and it becomes ominous when it is embraced, as it seems to have been, by an entire generation of young Americans. How, one wonders, can the very pluralism and diversity which the Left supposedly so values survive when conformity is so ruthlessly and widely insisted upon?
Many years ago, Lutheran theologian Charles Porterfield Krauth wrote of three stages which religious liberalism and heterodoxy always go through in taking over a denomination. To some extent, at least, it's what happened when the churches which formed the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America or the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) turned liberal after long having been conservative, confessional denominations. And it reflects much the same mentality:
When error is admitted into the Church, it will be found that the stages in its progress are always three. It begins by asking toleration. Its friends say to the majority: 'You need not be afraid of us; we are few and weak; let us alone, we shall not disturb the faith of others. The Church has her standards of doctrine; of course we shall never interfere with them; we only ask for ourselves to be spared interference with our private opinions.'
Indulged in for this time, error goes on to assert equal rights. Truth and error are balancing forces. The Church shall do nothing which looks like deciding between them; that would be partiality. It is bigotry to assert any superior right for the truth. We are to agree to differ, and any favoring of the truth, because it is truth, is partisanship. What the friends of truth and error hold in common is fundamental. Anything on which they differ is ipso facto non-essential. Anybody who makes account of such a thing is a disturber of the peace of the Church. Truth and error are two coordinate powers, and the great secret of church-statesmanship is to preserve the balance between them.
From this point error soon goes on to its natural end, which is to assert supremacy. Truth started with tolerating; it comes to be merely tolerated, and that only for a time. Error claims a preference for its judgments on all disputed points. It puts men into positions, not as at first in spite of their departure from the Church’s faith, but in consequence of it. Their repudiation is that they repudiate that faith, and position is given them to teach others to repudiate it, and to make them skillful in combating it.
There is, of course, a major difference between ecclesiastical and republican political polity. The former assumes a standard of orthodoxy around which a church body at least initially gathers and constitutes itself; the latter assumes that truth, when all is said and done, is arrived at, and the wisest and most just policy formulated, by all viewpoints having equal opportunity to be heard and to be heard even after a decision has been reached. While the Left seems not to have actually read Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision which imposed same-sex "marriage" in all fifty states, in it Justice Anthony Kennedy specifically and even pointedly insists on the right of those who for religious or any other reason believe that marriage should remain a matter between one man and one woman to hold and even to argue for that position despite the Court's decision.
As well he should have: freedom of religion is clearly established by the First Amendment, and so is freedom of speech. Even after a law has been made, in a free society people are free to argue that it ought not to have been made, and ought to be repealed. In essence, in the political realm- in what we Lutherans would call "the Kingdom of the Left--" we begin with Krauth's second stage. That, and not some prior orthodoxy, is the norm- unless, of course, tolerance and freedom of belief and expression themselves are seen as the orthodoxy.
And I would argue that they should be. Or to look at the matter another way, I would argue that there cannot be any other prior orthodoxy on which a society can exist and remain a free society. This is the point which the Left has always seemed to miss in democratic societies: unless all viewpoints are given the opportunity to advance themselves on equal terms, including especially those viewpoints we find most repugnant and obnoxious, the society simply cannot remain free.
Let me repeat that point: no society in which the most repugnant, the vilest, the ugliest, and the most detestable viewpoint cannot be freely expressed can claim to be a free society, If anyone can be intimidated into silence by legal sanctions or even by mockery, to the extent that this can happen a society is not free.
That isn't true of general disapproval or even of contempt. As I argued in the blog post linked to above, nobody in a free society is obligated to respect any viewpoint or the people who hold it. Even ridicule, if it has as an objective the illustration of a position's absurdity, is perfectly kosher; satire can be one of the most effective and useful forms of free speech. But where an attempt is made to silence a particular viewpoint or those who hold it, that is an assault on freedom itself and an undermining of the central assumption of a free society: that the free expression of all ideas is the best and in the last analysis the only way to ensure that the best ones prevail and that the worst ones do not.
If one group or one viewpoint can legitimately be suppressed, in principle there is no reason why any viewpoint or any opinion can't be. Many of the world's democracies- even some of the oldest ones, like France, which has a tradition of criminalizing the act of insulting a public official- have forgotten that point, if they have ever truly realized it. In Germany, Nazism and its symbols are not merely treated with disgust and repugnance but criminalized. Even in England and Canada and Australia and other nations whose traditions of freedom are most closely allied with our own and grow from the same roots, people can be fined or even imprisoned for saying something disparaging, or even perceived as disparaging, to a minority.
I do not for a moment doubt that this is done with the best of intentions, and even with the explicit intent of promoting tolerance and diversity. But it is troubling in the extreme that so many these days- especially on the Left- can fail to see that in fact, these things subvert the very values they are meant to uphold.
The failure of virtually the entire generation which currently attends our colleges and universities to internalize the most basic values of democracy and the most fundamental givens of a free society makes me seriously doubt that our freedom will survive another generation unless something happens to cause them to change their minds.
And the most frightening thing of all is that there are so few prepared these days to stand up for those principles. Never before in our history has been simple logic so foreign to us as a people, or the ability to think critically so rare. I shouldn't have been surprised at the reception my advocacy of tolerance, respect, and reason got on Claudia's page. But the truly frightening thing is that all that intolerance and incivility are coming from the quarter which we generally think of as the home of diversity and tolerance and equal treatment. Liberalism is no longer liberal.
Or perhaps it never was. Perhaps it has simply reached a stage it has never reached before, akin to the third stage of Krauth's paradigm for the subversion of churchly orthodoxy. Perhaps we've simply come to a point where its inherent intolerance and authoritarian and even totalitarian proclivities are openly shared by enough of us that they can freely be expressed, and there are no longer sufficient voices, or loud enough ones, to point out the contradiction of the values we all give lip service to, "liberals" perhaps most of all.
And here's the really scary part: there doesn't seem to be any effective opposition to the trend. Those we might normally expect to oppose Leftist authoritarianism have as their current leader a man who wants to change the law to make it possible for him to sue newspapers for disagreeing with him, and itself seeks to silence its opponents with ridicule, albeit by calling them things like "snowflake" and "libtard" and other inarticulate grunts.
We once opposed arguments with which we disagreed with other arguments and sought to overcome them with facts and logic. But now, both sides are committed instead to ridicule and name-calling.
Freedom cannot survive such a state of affairs.
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