It could be said that if you don’t let God make your agenda, you just may make your agenda God. And it has been said that everyone has a religion, even if it’s just an ideology deified by zealots. There’s a good recent example of this phenomenon, too: a Democrat Oklahoma state representative who literally referred to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as “God.”
What’s more, said Representative Regina Goodwin at a March 2 meeting, those opposing DEI should be silenced.
Per the Blaze:
Goodwin’s comments were in response to HB 2077, an education transparency bill introduced by Republican Rep. Chad Caldwell.
Caldwell’s legislation would require the Oklahoma Department of Education to allow parents to review their schools’ curriculum on an “online transparency portal.” He referred to the proposed bills as a “simple middle-of-the-road common-sense solution” that would address parents’ education concerns.
The bill would “support parental rights to access, review, and comment upon curriculum, instructional materials, textbooks, and library materials being used by the school district where their child attends school, and which their child might be exposed to without prior parental knowledge or consent.”
Such parental oversight didn’t sit well with Goodwin. “Long story short, this is a very controversial issue, it’s a very controversial bill, there’s nothing that’s simple about it,” the Blaze also relates her as stating. “And when we start having government overreach, which I often hear folks talk about here, this is a prime example of government overreach, and I would hope that we would allow our teachers and our folks that are really trying to do the work of educating — leave them be.”
Interesting logic: Allowing parents to review what the government employees called teachers do — not giving those government employees free rein — is “government overreach.”
Goodwin then stated that saying teachers are “going to have to share every waking moment of what they do, and how they do it, is not productive,” Fox News writes. It was sometime after that when the legislator expressed her faith in something that, metaphorically speaking, was invented last Thursday.
“That’s very disturbing, to say the least, when we have, again, a state superintendent who does not want to have anything to do with diversity, equity and inclusion,” Fox also quotes Goodwin as saying.
“DEI, is a deity, diversity, equity and inclusion is God,” she summed up (video below; relevant portion begins at 27:38).
Watching Goodwin, it’s clear that inspiring her pseudo-epiphany was “DEI” and “deity” having the same first three letters; she fancied it clever. Yet her comment nonetheless revealed her spiritual errancy. The was noted on Twitter, too. As Fox further relates:
“She sounds like someone whose worldview has been thoroughly framed through womanist (black feminist) liberation theology,” one user wrote.
“Well there it is. ‘It’s not like a religion, it is a religion,’” another user said.
“I told y’all ‘DIE’ wasn’t what they really meant like three years ago,” a third Twitter user responded.
(“DIE” — diversity, inclusion, and equity — is the proper way to frame this, do note, for rhetorical effectiveness purposes.)
But here’s what’s unsaid: If DIE is “God,” as Goodwin avers, then it can be stricken from schools and all other government entities based on the Left’s own conception of separation of church and state, right? After all, we’ve long been lectured about how we can’t impose a religion on others through government. Bye-bye, DIE.
Furthermore, if DIE is the deity, a question is raised: Who’s the Devil? Would it be meritocracy, which DIE’s application kills? Would it be those opposing Goodwin’s agenda, or would they just be the demons serving a malevolent will?
Whatever the case, Goodwin revealed her contempt for the latter — and exposed herself. When Caldwell asked what voices she’d like to silence, she didn’t identify it as perhaps a leading question. Rather, she replied:
“Voices that should be silenced, quite frankly — I would hope any thinking human being would know anybody that thinks diversity, equity, and inclusion is a bad idea — perhaps those voices that don’t want to include all of humanity in this world and in our curriculum and in our education, perhaps those are the voices that should be silenced.”
The kicker is that Goodwin fancied this position so self-evidently true that she asked Caldwell “Would you agree?” as if she’d made a gotcha’ point.
The silence really speaking volumes, however, was that of the other officials present. While Caldwell did say that freedom of speech should be respected, the rest of the attendees appeared to register flat-line, business-as-usual responses. Where were the audible gasps that should accompany someone explicitly deifying left-wing social engineering and calling for dissenters’ muzzling? Was this an American legislature or a politburo?
In reality, Goodwin is free to express her anti-American views, but there’s no right to freedom from stigma for doing so. Yet while she’s enthusiastic about silencing others, conservatives aren’t even willing to scorn and ostracize her to combat her cultural revolutionary agitation. And that’s why conservatives never saw a culture war they couldn’t lose.
Philosopher G.K. Chesterton once noted, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” Goodwin and her fellow ne’er-do-wells certainly hate what is in front of them, Western culture, and they fight for its death. The question is: Do conservatives love what is behind them enough to preserve it?
