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“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.” So said the late Cardinal Francis George approximately a decade ago, warning that this recurring historical pattern could be completed in our nation if we maintain our current cultural trajectory. And as society secularizes, say critics, leading the way is a major political party: the Democrats.
It’s not just that mention of God was removed from the party’s platform in 2012; it is not just that restoring it was so controversial that the creative vote counting required to do so evoked boos. It’s that this election cycle the mask has dropped further, laments American Thinker’s Lathan Watts, with Democrat Party hopefuls seeking primary votes by opposing orthodox Christianity and rejecting our long-held understanding of religious freedom.
“At their most recent summer meeting,” Watts writes, “the Democrat National Committee unanimously passed a resolution criticizing America’s First Freedom, religious liberty, claiming it is used to ‘justify public policy that has threatened the civil rights and liberties of many Americans, including but not limited to the LGBT community, women, and ethnic and religious/nonreligious minorities.’”
Ex-congressman Irish Bob (“Beto”) O’Rourke took it a step further, saying at CNN’s “Equality Townhall” October 10 that religious institutions such as churches, colleges, and charities should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose what most people in the world are against: so-called same-sex “marriage.” Moreover, he vowed to effect this punitive measure via executive order as president (video below).
In reality, formerly bright fading star O’Rourke will say anything to buttress his flagging campaign (live-streaming his dental cleaning didn’t do it). But that he felt comfortable voicing such radicalism, and that his proposal evoked applause and affirmation, speaks volumes — about prevailing left-wing, anti-Christian prejudices.
Listening to the sexual devolutionaries complain about Christians’ alleged anti-“LGBTQ” “bigotry,” you’d think Christianity had only one doctrine, one teaching, one prohibition: that against homosexual behavior. After all, where are the proposals to remove churches’ tax exemptions for opposing polygamy, interspecies “marriage” (yes, some people claim to have been thus “wed”), and human-robot “marriage” (yes, again). “Rights,” right?
In reality, prohibitions against homosexual behavior are just one part of Christianity’s complete paradigm for man’s sexuality, with adultery, fornication, auto-eroticism, the viewing of pornography, and other acts also forbidden. It’s not Christianity that singles homosexuality out for stigmatization — it’s the Left that singles it out for exaltation.
It singles out Christianity, too. It’s interesting that CNN moderator Don Lemon, who posed the question about same-sex “marriage”/tax status to O’Rourke, didn’t mention mosques by name when citing institutions that would be subject to such a punitive measure. That would have caused some uncomfortable squirming.
Oh, it’s not that O’Rourke’s proposal wouldn’t cover mosques (at least on paper); it’s that the sexual devolutionaries’ aren’t, in word or deed, equal-opportunity anti-religion oppressors.
Just consider recent years’ government persecution of religious businesses, such as bakeries, florists, wedding planners, and photographers, for being unwilling to service same-sex “weddings.” And never mind that such coercion is unprecedented, as the government never before had punished businessmen for refusing to service certain classes of events, only for refusing to serve certain classes of people. For if you looked at the sexual devolutionaries’ business target list, you could think there’s only one religion in the nation: Christianity.
What of, for instance, all the Muslim establishments that decline same-sex “wedding” business? They exist, too, as commentator Steven Crowder proved in the video below.
Lathan Watts laments that the Democrat presidential candidates aren’t asked in their debates questions such as, “Do they agree that religious liberty is no longer a freedom worth protecting, and is, in fact, a threat to civil rights as the DNC resolution states?” Of course, they won’t be asked about this for the same reason they’re no longer queried about benefits for illegal aliens: Posing real questions exposes their radicalism to the world and hurts the leftist agenda. So the moderators try to make them look moderate.
But the reality is that leftists, morally relativistic/nihilistic at heart, don’t believe in the principle of religious liberty because they don’t have principles, only preferences. And a prevailing preference is to stigmatize Christianity.
In fact, leftists are increasingly labeling the Bible itself “hate speech,” as an Australian rugby chief did this summer. Why is there special focus on Christianity?
Of course, politically correct instincts, fear of being called bigoted, and the fact that Muslims and other religious minorities tend to vote for liberals is a factor. Then, a Christian would assert that his faith is especially assailed because it’s the Truth, and the Truth hurts (in the “No pain, no gain” sense). Yet there’s another reason.
The oyster is irritated only by the one grain of sand in its shell, not by the billions of grains beyond it. Likewise, people feel more antipathy for the annoying neighbor who continually disturbs their sleep than for a brutal tyrant across the sea, even though the latter is infinitely more malevolent. For the neighbor is “in their shell.”
Since they’re raised in a “Christian” culture, the faith for leftists is “in their shell,” being close psychologically and emotionally. To them, it’s the grain of sand, the noisy neighbor; Islam is across the sea from their minds.
Yet leftists have historically been anti-Christian (and anti-religion in general), and here are a few reasons why:
• As far as power-seeking leftists go (mainly politicians), Christianity is a competitor. After all, people won’t put the state’s laws first if they hold God’s laws as preeminent. To worship God means opposing ungodly governments.
• Related to the above, church attendance is one of the best predictors of voting patterns, with regular service-goers breaking widely for the GOP and atheists being largely Democrat.
• No one likes having his bubble burst. People attached to sin, sexual or otherwise, will hate that which condemns it. Christianity does this, and the sexual devolutionaries know that insofar as Christianity can successfully spread virtue, their vice will be stigmatized. Thus is it no surprise that left-wing comedian-cum-commentator Bill Maher once said on his old show Politically Incorrect, “The concept of Absolute Truth is scary” (note: Truth implies God). What he fears is judgment.
• Then there’s man’s ego, well reflected in “philosopher” Friedrich Nietzsche’s argument for atheism, “I will now disprove the existence of all gods. If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently, there are no gods.” God’s inestimable “bigness” reveals our smallness, and we can’t be the boss as long as He’s around. This is intolerable to those with far bigger heads than minds.
Speaking of which, today’s Democrats may not know God or basic philosophy, but they do know their constituencies. This summer’s DNC resolution, writes Watts, “also enthusiastically embraced the religiously unaffiliated as emblematic of the party’s values and [as] ‘the largest religious group within the Democratic Party.’”
Their hope, in fact, is that with atheism waxing and faith waning in today’s America, the Democrats will be tomorrow’s party. This doesn’t bode well for theists, Christians in particular, and can make one understand why Cardinal George uttered that ominous line about a successor dying “a martyr in the public square.”
Yet usually omitted from his quotation, George lamented, is his all-important, hope-infusing follow-up line: “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”
Photo: Peshkova / iStock / Getty Images Plus
