|
This is worse than a witch-hunt -- it's an anti-religious Inquisition
It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemiesby Mary Eberstadt Harper, 158 pages, $25.99 Members of traditional religions became moral outlaws in the United States once equal rights for sexual preference and gender choice were enshrined in regulation and law. To believe that homosexual relations are sinful, as does biblical religion, defines the believer as a bigot in the view of liberal opinion, which is backed by the federal regulatory apparatus and the regulators of most American states, as well as by most of the judicial system. As Mary Eberstadt reports, expressions of religious belief that society considered innocuous and normal until quite recently are now grounds for dismissal from jobs, denial of employment, and boycotts by the media. Devout Christians believe they must choose between their faith and job security, and they commonly conceal their faith in the workplace to avert discrimination. (Muslims are exempt because liberals consider them a threatened minority and make allowances for their misogyny and gay-bashing.) Plus the fact that Muslims are violent and leftards are, first and foremost, cowards Actions or speech (quoting a Bible verse or leaving a religious symbol in plain view) elicit persecution. In some cases, evidence of past incorrect opinion is sufficient: The CEO of the software firm Mozilla, Brendan Eich, was hounded from his post in 2014 for a $1,000 contribution to a 2008 California referendum campaign against gay marriage, evidence of a position he shared at the time with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. ...Eberstadt calls the persecution of traditional religion a "witch-hunt"--a critical error. A witch-hunt is a search for malefactors who pretend to be good people but really are intent on doing evil. There is a witch-hunt going on today, namely the search for secret racists at American universities. The witch-hunters pillory teachers and administrators who claim to hold politically correct views but allegedly betray their secret racism through wicked actions, for instance by correcting bad grammar in minority students’ term papers. Loyal liberals who commit no aggressions are said to be guilty of micro-aggressions. By contrast, the purge of traditional Christians and Jews is a heretic hunt, an Inquisition, whose objective is to isolate and punish individuals who actually profess opinions contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy. There can be some overlap between an Inquisition and a witch-hunt, to be sure. But today’s liberal Inquisitors are not searching for individuals secretly in communion with God--yet. ...This is a critical distinction. Witch-hunters eventually discover that burning a few old hags does not prevent cows’ milk from souring. Inquisitions, by contrast, usually succeed: The Catholic Church succeeded in stamping out broadly held heresies, as in the Albigensian Crusade of 1220-1229, which destroyed between 200,000 and 1,000,000 inhabitants of Cathar-controlled towns in Southern France. In many cases a town’s entire population was killed, just to make sure. For its part, the Spanish Inquisition eliminated all the Jews, Muslims, and Protestants, although it sometimes drove heretical opinions underground, with baleful consequences for the Catholic faith. ...Because Eberstadt confuses the present persecution with mere witch-hunting, she hopes that the witch-hunters will realize their error and do the decent thing. She compares the persecution of Christians to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s. ...The comparison is misguided. McCarthy was not attacking individuals who professed Marxist sympathies, but individuals who concealed their Marxist sympathies while serving as high-ranking military officers and officials of the Eisenhower administration. He was a witch-hunter drunk on his own power (as well as drunk in the usual sense of the term). He had to be humiliated, and he was. McCarthy claimed to know of secret Communist agents in high Establishment positions. And unlike in the Salem of the witch trials, in Eisenhower’s America there were in fact "witches" to be hunted--that is, hundreds of secret Russian agents or agents-of-influence. American intelligence decoded more than 3,000 covert messages to and from the Soviet embassy in Washington after 1943, in whichhundreds of Americans were mentioned, some of whom later were proven to be spies. The U.S. government couldn’t reveal its covert sources, so it encouraged "witch-hunts" to flush out suspected traitors. McCarthy got out of control. But by the time the U.S. Senate passed a motion of censure against the rogue Wisconsin Senator, in December 1954, the problem largely had been eliminated. In a similar way, the liberal establishment will eventually conclude that its witch-hunt--its persecution of academic liberals--has gone too far. It will decide that correcting grammar in a doctoral dissertation submitted by a minority student is not a firing offense. Witch-hunts respond to an observed problem (spoiled cows’ milk, a plague, failed crops, and so forth). I have suggested previously that the academic witch-hunters are responding to a catastrophic outcome among minority students: "Little more than a third of black male college students obtain a bachelor’s degree (ideally a four-year program) after six years of university attendance. The college entrance rate is identical for white and black high school graduates at about 70%, but graduate rates diverge. Sixty percent of white male students graduate within six years, almost double the proportion of black males." That is not the fault of liberal academics who correct the grammar in black students’ term papers, and eventually the liberal establishment will call off the witch-hunt. ...The liberals fear that Christian America will rise up and avenge itself against their tyranny. They will keep coming after you. Your alternative is to counterattack. Ridicule your enemies. Expose their intellectual and moral bankruptcy. Assert the superiority of your own intellectual tradition. Single out some of the "New Atheists" and attack their intellectual pretensions. Target individuals; liberals are brave in a mob but cowards in a corner. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2016-07-01 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=460628 |