A Hangover From Christendom

The Secular State Will Betray Free Speech

More than a few think that all free speech, by virtue of being free, is righteous speech.  Confused protagonists assume that as long as speech is a freedom right, everything uttered must be regarded as good, and never criticised.  Thus, when voices have been raised criticising the Charlie Hebdo portfolio as being extremist, blasphemous, illiberal, immoderate and crude, others have slam dunked the critics by accusing them of being anti-free speech.

Of course there are ethical limits to free speech.  Speech can be good or evil.  Moral or immoral.  The Scriptures unequivocally state that speech can very definitely be evil, and, more often than not, it is so.  Consider one of the Bible’s declarations on the subject:

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body. If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things.

How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.  From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.  [James 3:1-10]

Or consider the Larger Catechism‘s exposition of the Ninth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbour”

Question 144: What are the duties required in the ninth commandment?

Answer: The duties required in the ninth commandment are, the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbour, as well as our own; appearing and standing for the truth; and from the heart, sincerely, freely, clearly, and fully, speaking the truth, and only the truth, in matters of judgment and justice, and in all other things: Whatsoever; a charitable esteem of our neighbours; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for, and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocence; a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them; discouraging talebearers, flatterers, and slanderers; love and care of our own good name, and defending it when need requires; keeping of lawful promises; studying and practising of: Whatsoever things are true, honest, lovely, and of good report.

Question 145: What are the sins forbidden in the ninth commandment?

Answer: The sins forbidden in the ninth commandment are, all prejudicing the truth, and the good name of our neighbours, as well as our own, especially in public judicature; giving false evidence, suborning false witnesses, wittingly appearing and pleading for an evil cause, outfacing and overbearing the truth; passing unjust sentence, calling evil good, and good evil; rewarding the wicked according to the work of the righteous, and the righteous according to the work of the wicked; forgery, concealing the truth, undue silence in a just cause, and holding our peace when iniquity calls for either a reproof from ourselves, or complaint to others; speaking the truth unseasonably, or maliciously to a wrong end, or perverting it to a wrong meaning, or in doubtful and equivocal expressions, to the prejudice of truth or justice;speaking untruth, lying, slandering, backbiting, detracting, tale bearing, whispering, scoffing, reviling, rash, harsh, and partial censuring; misconstruing intentions, words, and actions; flattering, vainglorious boasting, thinking or speaking too highly or too meanly of ourselves or others; denying the gifts and graces of God; aggravating smaller faults;hiding, excusing, or extenuating of sins, when called to a free confession;unnecessary discovering of infirmities; raising false rumours, receiving and countenancing evil reports, and stopping our ears against just defence; evil suspicion; envying or grieving at the deserved credit of any, endeavouring or desiring to impair it, rejoicing in their disgrace and infamy; scornful contempt, fond admiration; breach of lawful promises; neglecting such things as are of good report, and practising, or not avoiding ourselves, or not hindering: What we can in others, such things as procure an ill name.

Given that speech can be so evil, why ought anyone for a moment consider that speaking freely should be a human right?  The answer is straightforward.  Not all sins are crimes.  In fact very few of them are.  Essentially the right of free speech asserts that the state has no (or very limited) jurisdiction over the thoughts and words of human beings.   But God, the Judge of all the earth, does.  As always, the Judge of the heavens and the earth has total jurisdiction over mankind, including what men say. 

Consequently, one can both defend Charlie Hebdo’s crude blasphemies against the murderous rage of Islamic warriors, as well as against the rule and power of the French imperium–and, at the same time, consign the content of Charlie Hebdo’s speech and the speakers to divine wrath and judgment to come.  These positions are not contradictory.  They turn upon the greater principle that Christ alone is the judge of the heavens and the earth; all human judgment is a delegation from Him; it is necessarily limited, finite, and incomplete because no creature carries the infinite authority of the Creator. Therefore the Christian is able to tolerate all kinds of evil amongst human beings, without condoning any of it.  Rather, we keep entrusting ourselves to Him who will judge righteously and exhaustively on that great final day. 

The only alternative is propounded by the secular atheist state.  Since there is no acknowledgement of God, there is no higher power than the state to whom justice and judgment can be appealed.  The state alone is the judge of the heavens and the earth.  Judgment upon all kinds of  manifestations of evil can be appealed no further or higher than the state itself.

Consequently, free speech cannot survive in the modern secular atheistic state.  It is a “hangover” from a Christian past.  For secular society and the atheist state, all sins are implicitly crimes.  Speaking hatefully about a person is a sin.  The modern secular state is rapidly turning it into a crime.  This is why all atheistic states trend towards authoritarianism and, eventually, totalitarianism.  It is also why free speech rights are eroding so rapidly throughout the West.  (See the postscript below)

Meanwhile, our defence of free speech rights must remain Christianly based.  Unbelief waxes between two poles.  The one makes all speech sacrosanct and holy–beyond any judgment, moral or otherwise.  The second constantly agitates to employ state power to make all our speech “righteous”.  In a secular atheistic world, the latter will always win, because, not to put the matter too finely, the state carries a big gun.

Christians believe, and insist upon, free speech rights because Christ is the Judge of the heavens and the earth, and man is not.  The present secular state, albeit a divinely appointed servant, is in rebellion against the Lord.  In the longer term, however, these things will not always be so.  In the Christian world–the only real and substantial and abiding world–the secular state cannot and will not survive.  From the Christian perspective, the secular atheistic world is merely a temporary, passing chimera. 

________________

Postscript:
Peter Hitchens writes about the late Mr Harry Hammond, an elderly eccentric living in Bournemouth.

Mr Hammond, a passionate evangelical Christian in his late sixties, liked to preach the Gospel in the open air of Bournemouth, whether anyone was listening to him or not.  In April 2002 he was prosecuted under the Public Order Act of 1986, which makes it an offence to display any writing, sign or other visible representation that is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm and distress thereby.  Mr Hammond’s crime was to display a placard–now destroyed by order of the bench–on which was written: “Stop immorality.  Stop homosexuality.  Stop lesbianism.”

As Mr Hammond hoisted his six-word manifesto in the centre of town on a busy Saturday in October 2001, a small crowd gathered round him, partly hecklers but mostly curious onlookers.  The hecklers were rough with him.  A young woman tried to tug the placard from his hands.  During this tussle, Mr Hammond fell flat on his back and had to be helped to his feet by security guards from a nearby shop.  Soon afterwards, Mr Hammond’s enlightened liberal critics flung clods of earth at him, one striking him on the chest and one on the head.  Another of these campaigners for tolerance crept up behind Mr Hammond and emptied a bottle of water over his bald cranium.

When the police were called, it was Mr Hammond who was arrested.  Mr Hammond’s case may well be the most bizarre arrest in the history of English policing, since the two officers involved disagreed over what to do and did not resolve their disagreement.  A more experienced male constable, Wayne Elliott, thought that Mr Hammond should be protected.  His younger female colleague, Nicola Gandy, thought that he should be taken in.  They argued for 20 minutes before her view prevailed.  At the trial the two officers gave evidence on opposite sides, PC Elliott appearing of the defence, while PC Gandy spoke for the prosecution.  The Crown Prosecutor laid into Mr Hammond as if he were a serious malefactor  He said the offending placard was “insulting to people and people’s intelligence.  It was insulting to gay people and gay people’s friends and he knew that.”  A magistrate ruled that the sign “clearly insulted members of the crowd who had gathered round him.”  She pronounced him guilty and fined him 300 [pounds], plus 300 [pounds] in costs.  She also ordered that his placard be destroyed. . . .

PC Gandy stood by her decision to arrest Mr Hammond. . . . Asked about her motives for taking a strong stance, she explained: “My agenda was to try to maintain the peace.  I was not very impressed with Mr Hammond’s conduct, I don’t think he is a very good representative of the Christian faith.”  It is interesting that police officers now feel able to comment in public on the religious opinions of citizens.

Mr Hammond planned to appeal, but died in the summer of 2002, before his case could be heard.  He would have been disappointed, but not surprised by the failure of his posthumous appeal in early 2004.  [Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Liberty: the Decline of Order and Justice in England (London: Atlantic Books, 2003),   pp. 245-247.]

Mr Hammond, formerly of Bournemouth: RIP in the presence of your Saviour and Great King.

Embarrassing Advocate Proves a Point

Charlie Hebdo, Hate-Speech and the Marianas Trench

When it comes to the rights of free speech the Western world is in a bit of a pickle.  Over the past twenty-five years, free speech rights have been steadily undermined.  “Hate speech” has become a crime, which is to say that any speech a particular statute d’jour just happens to say is “hate speech” is, by definition, a crime. 

Wikipedia provides the following definition:

Hate speech is, outside the law, speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation. 

The article then goes on to review the present state of “hate speech laws” as they apply in various countries around the world.   Regardless of the specifics of the French legal code, in a general (Western) sense the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo has been repeatedly guilty of the crime of hate speech.  We might as well face up to it. Charlie Hebdo scathingly satirised people and cultures for their respective religions.

So, the bottom line is this: Charlie Hebdo was undeniably guilty of the generic crime of “hate speech” (at least as it is currently defined in the general Western legal corpus); those responsible got taken out in an act of vigilante justice;  therefore, the crime of the vigilantes was their “vigilanteism”–taking the law into their own hands–not the injustice of their cause per se. 

Some voices are recognising this uncomfortable reality.  They are applying a justification for the ex-judicial murders using a variant of the the “she got what she deserved” justification for rape.  Here is one example of just such a voice in New Zealand.

The Maori Party distanced itself from former candidate Derek Fox after he controversially blamed the victims of the Paris terror attacks for their deaths.  Mr Fox said on Facebook that the editor of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo had “paid the price” for his “bigotry” and “arrogance”.

He stood by his comments, and said if the magazine had not published gratuitous insults, the victims “would still be alive now”.  “But they didn’t, in fact they ramped it up to sell more mags. Well, they got bitten severely on the bum.”  . . .

Mr Fox ran for the Maori Party in Ikaroa-Rawhiti six years ago but is also a leading Maori journalist, former Maori Television chairman and former mayor of Wairoa.  He wrote on Facebook that Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier was a “bully” who had abused free speech and was now responsible for the deaths of his colleagues.

“The editor of the French magazine has paid the price for his assumption of cultural superiority and arrogance, he was the bully believing he could insult other people’s culture and with impunity and he believed he would be protected in his racism and bigotry by the French state.  Well he was wrong, unfortunately in paying the price for his arrogance he took another 11 people with him.”

Mr Fox continued: “Power cultures all like to use the old chestnut of freedom of speech when they choose to ridicule people who aren’t exactly like them, and mostly they get away with it.  “These guys liked the privilege but didn’t think they’d be caught up in the ramifications – they were wrong.”

Apart from the implicit endorsement of vigilante actions, Mr Fox stands four square upon the modern Western notions of the crime of “hate speech”.   Pillorize Mr Fox all you like, but whilst you dance around the stocks throwing rotten cabbages at him, at least be cognizant that Mr Fox is more in tune with modern Western law a this point than you are.

We cannot have it both ways.  You cannot extend that old forked tongue ridiculing Mr Fox’s comments out of one side of your mouth, and yet support the notions underlying Western “hate-speech” law, out of the other. 

Our position is clear and, we trust, consistent:

• Free speech is virtually an absolute freedom right as far as the State is concerned.  The only limitations historically recognised are those which put people in clear and present danger as a result of speech (crying “fire” in a crowded theatre) and civil actions such as defamation (which generally have a very high burden of proof). 
• Speech can be evil or good.  The tongue can be used for sublime good, or gross evil.  (James 3: 5-18) But few sins are crimes in this life, and rightly so.
• There are many sins of speech, all of which shall be adjudicated by the Judge of the heavens and the earth, on the Last Day.  But criminalising speech in this life always represents an unjust arrogation of power by the State.  It cedes to the State sovereignty over the thoughts and intentions of human beings.
• The sinfulness of some speech does not justify the State criminalising such speech. 
• The state which criminalises human speech has become a tyrannical state which persecutes those who disagree with the accepted state orthodoxy of the day.  For example a state-orthodoxy of our day is that homosexuality is amoral–neither good nor bad–in the same way as ethnicity or trees are amoral. In some Western jurisdictions, if a Christian church or Christians were to proclaim openly that homosexuality is not amoral at all, but a grievous sin against God and man, they would risk indictment and punishment under hate-speech laws.  

Is Mr Fox right?  Not at all, although many who would raise their hands in ridicule and horror at his views are actually stirring their objections in a bowl of thick hypocritical gruel.  These same people also champion “hate-speech” laws when it suits them.

If Charlie Hebdo deserves free speech rights then Western notions of “hate-speech” need to be tossed into the Marianas Trench, once and for all. And that, we believe, would be an exemplary thing to do.

The Glories of Post-Christian Britain

Multi-culturalism, Orwellianism, Censorship and Neo-Criminalism

James Bloodworth

The Independent

Thursday 1 January 2015

At some point saying “offensive” things online stopped being a social faux pas and became a potentially criminal act.

Dare to be rude about the wrong person or group and, in a bad parody of Erich Honecker’s East Germany, you could hear the knock on the door in the middle of the night and be dragged off to some dreary police cell for questioning.

I exaggerate of course, but not much: around 20,000 people in Britain have been investigated in the past three years for comments made online, with around 20 people a day being looked into by the forces of the law, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The overused Orwellian cliché has finally become the reality: Big Brother in the form of an overzealous and under regulated police force really is watching you. As Police Scotland terrifyingly informed us this week, “Please be aware that we will continue to monitor comments on social media and any offensive comments will be investigated.”

And so, in a further erosion of free expression, the police in Scotland have this week decided to investigate former Apprentice star and professional controversialist Katie Hopkins for off-colour comments made online about the Scottish nurse who contracted Ebola.

Doing what she is paid handsomely to do (and presumably what got her 291,000 Twitter followers), Hopkins came up with the most grotesque thing she could say about the issue and condensed it into 140 characters, tweeting that the nurse in question was a “sweaty Glaswegian” and referring to Scots as “Jocks”.
In response, the perennially thin-skinned of Twitter cobbled together a 12,000-strong petition demanding that Hopkins be charged over the tweets and handed it to a police force desperately looking to justify its place in the world at a time of falling crime.

Predictably the police pounced on it. As Detective Inspector Glyn Roberts of Police Scotland put it: “Inquiries are ongoing into the nature of these tweets and to establish any potential criminality.”

Since the birth of social media a fruitful relationship has developed between those who seek to offend and those who spend every waking hour looking desperately for something to be offended by. Indeed, notoriety of Katie Hopkins is largely due to the legions of people who froth with outrage at (and publicise) her every utterance.

But now things are getting really serious, for at some point we accepted the dreadful premise that unpleasant – and yes “offensive” – opinions ought to be silenced by force. Idiotic views are now considered matters for law enforcement and it is utterly terrifying.

This isn’t only about professional controversialists like Hopkins: what of the woman found guilty of a public order offence for saying that David Cameron had “blood on his hands”? Or Azhar Ahmed, who was prosecuted for an online post mocking the deaths of six British soldiers killed in Afghanistan?

All vile and grossly insensitive certainly; but on balance I think I’m more afraid of the Twitter Stasi and their increasingly zealous police enforcers.

Rather than obsessing over their tweets, we ought to leave the Katie Hopkins’s of the world to the obscurity they so richly deserve. And more importantly, we should keep the police out of it.

Hypocrisy on Steroids

What Obama and Stalin Have in Common 

At ContraCelsum we have a pathological, reflexive scepticism when it comes to politicians talking their own books.  We confess it to be a weakness.  A missing dragon scale on the flank of Smaug, as it were.  We just find it hard to believe the self-righteous rubbish pouring forth from the lower orifices of the Body Politic. 

Here is the latest contribution to the proverbial sewer.  First a bit of backstory:  Sony has decided to allow a token screening of its idiotic spoof about North Korea–The Interview.  President Obama made the following pronouncement from the Olympian heights:

On Tuesday, a White House spokesman said “the president applauds Sony’s decision to authorize screenings of the film.” “As the president made clear, we’re a country that believes in free speech and the right of artistic expression,” the spokesman added.

Well, thank goodness for that.  The United States, according to Pressie Obama, stands for “free speech and the right of artistic expression”.
  Unless you happen to be a no-name video maker who just happened to be convenient cover and a superb tool of misdirection when Obama’s White House and  Hillary Clinton’s State Department were being asked to explain why the US Ambassador had been killed in Bengazi on September 11, 2012. 

At that time, the US Government, from the President down attempted to dissemble and attribute blame for the attack to the release of a no-name video produced by a no-name artist, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula which just happened to be critical of Islam.  Nakoula was subsequently thrown in prison.  Apparently, the Obamian doctrine of freedom of speech and the right of artistic expression applies only to the speech and artistic expression  approved by the Party.  Speech sending up the Korean dictator: APPROVED.  Speech sending up Islam: VERBOTEN. 

Stalin also believed in free speech and the right of artistic expression.  He and Obama would have got along just fine, it would seem.   

US Tort Law Facilitating Pyongyang Victory

Great Leader Strikes Again

It’s official.  The FBI has confirmed that the hack of Sony computers came from a foreign “power”, North Korea.  The psy-ops war has so far been a total victory for one of the nodes in Bush’s Axis of Evil.  Allegedly, a specialist hacking unit operating out of North Korea hacked into Sony’s computers and databases to “punish” the company for daring to make and planning to screen The Interview, a satirical comedy sending the North Korean dictator up the creek.  Sony could not have chosen a more fitting and worthy subject for a satirical roast. 

North Korea finally disclosed its hand when it threatening to bomb any movie theatre showing the film.  The language employed in the threat was eerily reminiscent of your average, every day fulminating eructation out of Pyongyang.  Ironically, in the long term, this would likely make the movie one of the great cult classics of all time.  Kim Jong Un would forever be remembered as a pompous idiot with no sense of humour (as well as a moral monster).  Watching the movie would become a delicious act of sedition against a petty tyrant; laughing at Dear Leader would become a political act, a blow for freedom.  Sony could never buy that much notoriety and publicity in their wildest dreams.  (We have no doubt that conspiracists will eventually claim that the Sony hacking was all an inside job to immortalise the movie.)

That is, unless Sony completely caves in.  There are signs that it will do so.
  The intended screening of the movie has been cancelled in movie theatres across the country.  Now, at first blush, this seems like an act of national cowardice.  It would appear that the cocky, self-aggrandizing  American bolshieness has ended not with a bang, but a whimper.  After all, it is the coward who talks the biggest game and runs at the first sign of danger. 

But there are deeper issues and worse villains at work, it seems.  Blogger Patterico, a district attorney, discusses the likely real reason movie theatres have refused to screen The Interview. 

Why is “The Interview” being pulled? Why was Steve Carell’s “Pyongyang” cancelled? In the first instance, you can blame the lawyers.  Once all the major movie chains decided not to show the film, that was the end. Why did they make this decision? I’m sure part of the reason is that they worried moviegoers would stay away from the theaters showing the movie, whether the patrons were there to see this film or not.

But I’d say one major reason the chains decided not to show the movie is that they worry about lawsuits if something happens. Ridiculous hyperbole? Nah. For example, the victims of the Aurora shooting are suing Cinemark over an act perpetrated by a lone gunman. The suit has survived summary judgment, meaning it will cost the chain millions whether there is a settlement or a jury trial. You think chains weren’t thinking about that case and similar litigation when they refused to show “The Interview”?

The apparent decision to forego streaming and DVD sales is also the work of lawyers, from what I have read. Apparently, to collect on insurance, Sony needs a total loss. I would think an insurance company would want them to mitigate their losses, but I don’t write the contracts.

Plus, once the company decides to pull the movie from theaters — a decision that will cost them as much as $200 million, some executive’s head is going to be on a platter. Probably the heads of a bunch of executives. They will be told they should have seen this coming. Now imagine being the guy who decides whether to do a DVD release. You can face the fate of those other executives, or play it safe and kill everything, pointing the finger at the people who are getting sacrificed anyway.

A similar thought process is going on with respect to any movie in development or being considered now: is there some madman or group of madmen who might make violent threats over this? If so, then the project is dead. Simple incentives at work.

Yes, there is a healthy dose of plain cowardice involved here too. (I understand many of you see this as a business decision, but I think you — and the chains — are taking the short-term view over the long-term.) But don’t discount the power of tort law to scare companies into doing ridiculous things. That, in large part, is what started the ball rolling.

Who would have thought that American tort law would have become such an effective weapon in the hands of the Great Leader?  

 

Letter From Australia (About Trotskyite Sydney University)

Orwell Would Weep at the Demonisation of Professor Barry Spurr 

Miranda Devine

The Sunday Telegraph
November 16, 2014

I MUST assume Eden Caceda is an inspired satirical creation by Sydney University students outraged at the brutalisation of poetry professor Barry Spurr. 
 
After all, the anagram of the name is “A Decadence”. That’s one way of looking at the descent into Orwellian thought-control at the nation’s finest university, which has suspended Spurr indefinitely and banned him from campus for using “offensive” language in private emails, which he said had been hacked and sent to a left-wing website.

“Eden Caceda”, an office-bearer with the university’s “Autonomous Collective Against Racism”, ho, ho, led the campaign last week against Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence’s “racist” Mexican-themed staff Christmas party.  The dress code was “Mexican Fiesta — bring your own sombreros and ponchos”.  But “Caceda” was deeply ­offended by the “culturally ­insensitive” invitation.  “My family has a poncho and it is really important to us, and these people are treating it like a costume,” he said.

Spence, who made the decision to render Professor Spurr a non-person, now finds himself hoist with his own petard.  He has been forced to send an email to staff, cancelling the Mexican dress code: “I have today asked the event organisers to amend our plans so the party has no particular theme.”

You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

Cowardly capitulation to political correctness only ends when the barbarians are pouring molten silver down your throat. But Spence deserves everything to come, because his treatment of Spurr is a shameful disgrace.  It dishonours everything that a great university is supposed to be. Rather than exalting reason and truth, it is prosecuting Crimethink — banishing people for having private thoughts.

Spurr wrote some of his private thoughts in jocular emails to a friend in which he refers to “Mussies”, “chinky-poos” and “whores” and describes the university’s chancellor, Belinda Hutchinson, as an “appalling minx”.  New Matilda has published some of the stolen emails, while the university conducts a top-secret and extremely slow “investigation” into whether they constitute evidence of closet racism, sexism, misogyny, Islamophobia etc.

Spurr said the comments were not serious, but part of a “whimsical linguistic game” in which he and a friend tried to outdo each other with extreme language. Any literate person would understand this boundary transgression. Yet one of the few people to speak up for Spurr lives in London.  “How could anyone take such deliberate touretting seriously?” wrote comedian Barry Humphries, asking if Australia has “gone slightly mad”.

You might have thought that students would rise up in fury and condemn the disgusting treatment of a good man.

Professor Barry Spurr.

But, alas, the only student protests have been by the campus Trotskyists, Socialist Alternative, who shrieked through megaphones outside Fisher ­Library that Spurr was “racist filth” and a “vile bigot” and gathered signatures to have him sacked.

In the days after Spurr was driven out, his fellow ­professors read aloud the ­administration’s ritual denunciation of him before every class, urging students who may have experienced discrimination to come forward.

Spurr is Australia’s only poetry professor. He is the world’s pre-eminent T.S. Eliot scholar. His CV, which has not yet been erased from the university’s website, shows a man of extraordinary literary and academic accomplishment. Students come from across the world just to be in his classes.  Most are dismayed by his banishment, but are so ­oppressed by the McCarthyist atmosphere on campus that they daren’t speak out.

Michael Davis is one brave exception. In a brilliant article in next month’s Quadrant, the 20-year-old blasts the university for “caving to the efforts of 100 caustic teenagers who insult and abuse a 60-something year-old who’s given the better part of his life to that same institution. There would be no University of Sydney without men like Barry Spurr, and there would be no Australia without the Western Civilization he defends.”

Of course, the reason Spurr was marked for destruction was because he helped in the Abbott government’s review of the national curriculum, recommending greater emphasis on the Western literary canon.  Along with review co-author Kevin Donnelly and four other subject experts deemed “conservative”, he has been monstered by the authoritarian Left who control education.

He agreed to help fix the curriculum because he believes English studies are in crisis. He believes democracy is under threat when its people are “inarticulate in their use of language and sub-literate in their linguistic discernment”.

Spurr has devoted his life to eradicating the sort of slovenly, deceitful, politically correct language that “makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”, as Orwell put it.

Now he is its victim.

Rights Inflation

Corpulent Human Rights

Freedom (civil, political, words, speech, thought, etc.) is a fragile flower.  It does not take much to squash it flat.  These days the most fragile “freedom flower” in New Zealand is freedom of speech or expression.  The reason is that taking offence or being offended has been elevated into an enduring crime against humanity.  If someone causes another to be offended, the latter has suffered a quasi-criminal act, of similar ilk as theft, assault, or battery.  The offender has transgressed upon the rights of another.  We have discovered yet another human right, hitherto not known–a right not to be offended.   

It seems that a retail clothing company, Hallenstein Glasson has offended people.  It had deployed mannequins in stores dressed in skimpy bikinis.  The plastic “models” represented skinny teenagers.  The mannequins were displaying ribs in a very realistic manner–just as you would expect to see on such a young lady if she had an arm extended upwards, as was the bodily attitude of the mannequins in question.  But people (mainly women) took offence because it was promoting an ideal body shape for women that is allegedly unhealthy.  The public outcry, combined with sensational, breathless beat-up articles in the media, resulted in the company sacking the mannequins without even the courtesy of redundancy pay.  Just like that.  Behold the power of our new human right.  Another fragile freedom flower is crushed beneath the relentless weight of a few offended human beings who have suffered near-criminal damage.

But obesity (we are told) is also unhealthy.
  Therefore each and every representation of obese women should also be banned–whether on the teee-veee or in the newspapers.  Such pictures implicitly promote an ideal body shape that can be a harbinger of more plagues than we care to enumerate.  Therefore, we are offended, we tell you.  Offended.  Such images must be banned because they assault our human right not to suffer offence. 

There are companies specializing in garments for the more portly female.  All their advertising and promotional material must be revised, lest offence be taken.  By using portly models they, too, are implicitly promoting obesity as ideal and we are mighty offended at that.  Better still, send such companies bankrupt  Force them out of business.  Make portly women go unclothed.  Only then will our raging offence be assuaged.

We live in a neighbourhood where the average bloke and blokesse  has overindulged in carbs and sugar.  We are assailed by offensive sights on every hand.  These people have no right to cause such offence.  They need to be removed from public view lest people get the idea that such corpulence represents an ideal body shape.  That monstrous consequence would ramp up our offence meter by a factor of ten.  Away with them from public sight.  Otherwise we are going to play the offence card.  We may even lay a complaint to the Human Rights Commission. 

Come to think of it–and yes, now the truth is coming out–we are offended at the silly offensive people taking offence at those poor mannequins in the windows of Hallenstein-Glasson shops.  Mightily offended.  So we are going to complain to Hallenstein-Glasson about how they (and the complainants) have offended us by taking their mannequins off the job and making them redundant.  We are going to insist that they be reinstated.  Only then will our offended feelings dissipate. 

Conflict of interest disclosure: we hold no shares in Hallenstein-Glassons and are mighty relieved we don’t. 

Letter From America (About the Gaystapo)

Newspaper Editor Fired Over Blog Post Decrying ‘Gaystapo’ and Rewording of the Bible — and Now He’s Fighting Back

Jul. 24, 2014 12:23pm 

Billy Hallowell  

TheBlaze

Journalist Bob Eschliman was fired from his position over a controversial blog post he wrote (Liberty Institute)

A newspaper editor has filed a discrimination complaint with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against his former employer, claiming that he was wrongfully terminated for penning a personal blog post about homosexuality and the Bible.

Bob Eschliman, 41, the former editor-in-chief of the Newton Daily News in Newton, Iowa, is arguing that he was illegally fired May 5 from his position at the newspaper, which is owned by Shaw Media, for publicly sharing his religious beliefs.

Problems started when Eschliman, who is being represented by the Liberty Institute, a conservative law firm, lambasted the “Queen James Bible,” a version of the holy book that is favorable toward homosexuality, and cited his support for traditional marriage, according to a press release.

The Liberty Institute’s Jeremy Dys told TheBlaze that the firing came after someone in the community complained about his controversial blog post.
“[Eschliman] was just writing this as his own personal impressions,” Dys said, explaining his client’s motivations. “And he saw this story about the ‘Queen James Bible’ and it really got under his skin about how they’re twisting scripture — and he felt compelled to defend his vision of scripture.”

Dys said that Eschliman didn’t have any second guesses about publishing the post, as his employers reportedly knew that he had a personal blog outside of work.  “They decided to completely squelch his speech because he expressed a religious belief,” Dys charged. “Nobody should be fired for their faith or for the exercise of his faith.”

Eschliman was initially suspended over the blog post in May, which he removed in an effort to appease his employer and stem controversy.

“They decided to completely squelch his speech because he expressed a religious belief,”

That act did little to save his job, though.  A recap of the scrubbed post was published at the time by journalist and media blogger Jim Romenesko. According to that account, Eschliman accused “the LGBTQXYZ crowd and the Gaystapo” of attempting to amend the Bible “to make their sinful nature ‘right with God.’”

“[Jesus] said there would be deceivers. He said those deceivers would cause Christians who remain true to His teachings to become reviled,” Eschliman reportedly wrote. “He said false prophets would follow to deceive even more, and that lawlessness will abound.”  He continued, “If you ask me, it sounds like the Gaystapo is well on its way. We must fight back against the enemy.”

What followed the initial controversy was an op-ed from Shaw Media president John Rung that was published in the Newton Daily News, condemning Eschliman’s comments and announcing his departure; the editor-in-chief had been at the paper for just under two years.

“Last week, [Eschliman] expressed an opinion in his personal blog that in no way reflects the opinion of the Newton Daily News or Shaw Media,” Rung wrote, according to the Des Moines Register. “While he is entitled to his opinion, his public airing of it compromised the reputation of this newspaper and his ability to lead it.”

AP

Eschliman believes the paper discriminated against him and he’s taking his complaint to the EEOC, a government body that upholds employment discrimination laws.

After the case is investigated — which can take a few days to more than a year — the commission will determine whether Eschliman he has made solid claims against Shaw Media and is entitled to back pay.
“Bob is less interested about cash or returning to his position,” Dys said. “What he’s most interested in is clearing his name. He’s been dragged through the mud for expressing his faith.”

The attorney said that his client is on unemployment and that he has been “blacklisted” and has not been able to find a job since his termination.  Matthew Whitaker, a former United States attorney, has volunteered to work with the Liberty Institute on this case.

Shaw Media told TheBlaze Wednesday that the company currently has no comment on the matter.

Louisa Wall Is Appalled

We Are the Borg, And We Have Your Interests at Heart

NZ Member of Parliament, Louisa Wall (Labour) has taken a complaint to the Human Rights Commission.  The case concerns a cartoon by a newspaper which, according to Stuff,

depicted people taking advantage of the Government’s breakfast-in-schools programme to spend money on their vices.

But, it’s not that Wall lacks a sense of humour.  It’s that some of the figures in the cartoon expending money on their vices were Maori and Pacific Island folk.  To Wall, the cartoon amounted to speaking about these racial groups with contempt, which the law forbids.  The Human Rights Commission disagreed.

In response, Wall has animadverted that there is something systemically wrong with either the law or the Human Rights Commission or both.

MP Louisa Wall says it is “appalling” that the Human Rights Commission has not upheld a single complaint under its race relations section despite receiving more than 2000 complaints since 1993.

Two thousand complaints, and not one upheld.  Why?
  Well the Commission (and the lawyers for the newspaper) argued that the law requires not just that speech be offensive to some but that the Commission be engaged only at the serious end of the spectrum.  Wall wants it involved right across the spectrum.

Lawyer Robert Stewart said if Wall’s approach was taken to its logical conclusion, any material that was “disrespectful, belittling, or that mocks a group on the ground of their colour, race or ethnicity” could be restricted by section 61.

Stewart said 61 should be interpreted “restrictively” to the serious end of the spectrum with​ “insulting” to mean “scornfully abusive”, and “bring into contempt” to mean “regarding with deep despise, detestation or vilification”.  Stewart said it was clear the editors “were aware of the possibility for the cartoons to cause offence”.  However, “the right to freedom of expression is also a right to shock, offend, and disturb any sector of the population”.

“Of course, freedom of expression also allows those who are shocked, offended or disturbed to say so and why. Through this exchange or marketplace of ideas society is better informed.”

Wall represents a view gaining more and more credence.  It is the idea that speech ought to be free until someone claims to be offended, either for themselves or (as in Wall’s complaint) on behalf of someone else.  Take a straightforward case:  Christians, believing the authority of the Word of God, have asserted that unrepentant sinners will not enter the Kingdom of God.  A sinner is defined as someone who breaks the law of God, and includes thieves, murderers, the covetous, the slanderer and the sexually immoral.  All such are excluded whilst they continue to live in their sins, without repentance.  People are bound to get offended at that message.  They have for thousands of years.  Demands that Christians be proscribed from speaking the truth of the Gospel will inevitably be made on the grounds that people are offended at their speech. 

Here is another example: gender identity propaganda asserts that all gender identities are equal, and none must be condemned or rejected (or criticised or vilified).  Homosexuality is one such gender identity.  To declare that homosexuals are sinners by virtue of their attachment to homosexuality is seen by Wall and her cohort as offensive, insulting to, and contemptuous of, homosexuals.  Therefore, such speech–and the religious beliefs it represents–must be banned. 

Wall and her cohort represent a large and growing number of folk.  What they make more and more evident by the day is an authoritarian demand that the world must be made in their image, to their tastes, by compulsion if needed.  Freedom is a privilege granted by the cohort, not a human right. Freedom is bestowed only upon those the emerging authoritarians sanction and approve.   

The benign state is always at risk of becoming increasingly despotic and authoritarian.  Wall and her colleagues want to push it more and more in that direction.  If Wall loses her case, we have no doubt that she and her colleagues will campaign vigorously for a change in the law more perfectly to reflect Wallian doctrines of authoritarian compulsion. 

Letter From the UK (About Bert and Ernie)

Bert and Ernie gay marriage cake leaves Christian bakery facing court threat

Christian bakery facing legal action from equality quango for refusing to make cake with Sesame Street characters saying ‘support gay marriage’ 

The Daily Telegraph

By John Bingham, Religious Affairs Editor 

July 07, 2014

A Christian-run bakery is facing legal action from a Government agency for refusing to produce a cake carrying a picture of the Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie and the slogan “support gay marriage”.

Ashers Baking Co, based in Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland, cancelled an order for a novelty cake with a picture of the puppets arm in arm printed onto the icing saying that it went against the directors’ religious beliefs.

They believe that producing the cake with the slogan and the logo of QueerSpace, a gay rights group the would-be customer supports, would amount to endorsing the campaign for the introduction of gay marriage in the province, and go against their religious convictions.

But the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland has now written to the firm claiming that it is breaking the law. A letter signed by the legal office orders the firm to “remedy your illegal discrimination” within seven days or be taken to court by the commission.  It claimed that refusing to print the cake amounted to discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation against the man who placed the order.

It establishes a dangerous precedent about the power of the state over an individual, or business to force them to go against their deeply held beliefs.

The Christian institute, which is supporting the bakery, says it is not discriminatory for managers to refuse to endorse a political campaign.  Gay marriage is not legal in Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK in which it is not on the statute book.

Colin Hart, chief executive of the Christian Institute, said: “This is a sign of things to come exactly as we predicted.  “The Government repeatedly failed to listen to members of the public, lawyers, constitutional experts even its own MPs when they called for safeguards to protect those who back traditional marriage, especially those who work in the public sector.

“Now this nonsense, more usually associated with the public sector, is being applied to the private sector. This means millions of ordinary people who do not agree with gay marriage, face intimidation and the real threat of legal action from the forces of political correctness if they, out of conscience, decline to provide good or services to campaign groups they do not agree with or support.

“It establishes a dangerous precedent about the power of the state over an individual, or business to force them to go against their deeply held beliefs.”  The customer was unable to comment.

 

The Rise of the Secular Clerisy, Part II

Will the Secular Clerisy Triumph?

In Part I of “The Rise of the Secular Clerisy”, published here, Joel Kotkin argued that an elite has arisen to  coalesce around a series of propositions and ideas which are now being enforced with regularity.  To espouse a contrary opinion is to enunciate heresy.  The enforcement sanctions used by this new elite have gone beyond mere public opprobrium to sending the guilty to Coventry, and to sacking offenders from their jobs.  Not that their employment had anything to do with the hateful opinions being expressed.  It’s just that what they believe is increasingly seen as an anathema. Witness the case of the CEO of Mozilla forced to resign because he happened to give a small donation several years ago to a political campaign opposing homosexual “marriage”.   It is getting very close to the ancient punishment of exile. 

In the second part, Klotkin analyses the seat of the power of this new clerisy.  Whilst he is analysing the battlefield as it exists in the United States, we are confident the same patterns and nodes of power are to be found in almost all countries in the West.  The first bulwark of influence and power is found in the nation’s bureaucracies, both federal and state. 

America’s Nomenklatura

The Clerisy has thrived during these hard times. Since 1990, the number of government workers has expanded by some five million to some twenty million. That’s four times the number who were employed by the government at the end of the Second World War, a growth rate roughly twice that of the population as a whole.

The upper bureaucracy have been among the greatest beneficiaries—along with Wall Street and the green crony capitalists —of the Obama Administration’s economic policy. The number of workers, particularly at the federal level, continued to rise even at the height of the great recession. Between late 2007 and mid-2009, the number of U.S. federal workers earning at least $150,000 more than doubled. The ranks of federal nomenklatura—combined with a host of related private contractors —- have swelled so much that Washington DC by 2012 replaced New York as the wealthiest region in the country .

The upper bureaucracy has evolved into a privileged and cosseted caste. In California, state workers are allowed such special privileges as having their Department of Motor Vehicle records kept confidential; a sensible precaution for those, like police, who deal with criminals but now expanded to cover a vast array of public servants, including social workers. Naturally, as beneficiaries of an expanded government, public sector unions have been among the strongest backers of regulatory growth and ever increased social services. Their political power has also been on the rise; since 1989, public sector unions accounted for two of the top three top ten donors to political candidates.

More important still is the bureaucracy’s ability to control society through unelected agencies, something that grew even during Republican administrations, but has achieved unprecedented scale under President Obama. Increasingly, agencies such as the EPA and HUD, seek to shape community development patterns—for example on land use policies —- that traditionally fell under local control. With their power, the agencies have harassed unfriendly conservative organizations, as seen by the IRS, and monitored the populace’s private conversations, seen in the case of the NSA. But to some prominent members of the Clerisy, these power grabs haven’t gone far enough.

Leading figures of the Clerisy, like former Obama budget advisor Peter Orszag and Thomas Friedman, argue that power should shift from naturally contentious elected bodies—subject to pressure from the lower orders—to credentialed “experts” operating in Washington, Brussels or the United Nations. The popular will, according to the Clerisy and its allies, lacks the scientific judgment and societal wisdom to be trusted with power.

Here the naked ugliness of elitism is displayed.  Ordinary people are deemed stupid (unless they think like the clerisy).  They cannot be trusted with government.  The opinions they hold are not just ignorant, they are flat out dangerous to the survival of the planet, at the broadest level, and to civilised society, such as our own country.  The clerisy alone is sufficiently educated, clever and able to protect the interests of all other people–or at least, the interests other people ought to have.   If you think the clerisy treats you with condescension herein lies the reason.  They know you better than you know yourself.  They believe themselves to perceive your interests far better than you do–which is to say that at root you are profoundly ignorant of yourself and what is best for you.

The Real College of Cardinals.

Like the upper bureaucracy, academia has also expanded rapidly in recent decades. In 1958 universities and colleges employed under 370,000 people; by 2014 that number had expanded to roughly 1.7 million. With universities now serving roughly twenty million full and part time students, academics have never exercise more influence over young Americans.

Ironically, despite its patina of egalitarian beliefs, the academic world now epitomizes the new hierarchical class order as much as any major institution. The roughly 1.4 million instructors in the University system, have experienced what one writer calls “the great stratification” between roughly 500,000 largely older tenured “alpha” Professors and a vast “beta” of low-paid teaching assistants, contingent faculty and those working in extension programs.

At the same time, the bureaucracy of the University, like that of the government, has exploded, even more at elite (and tax-favored) private schools than among public ones. Whereas there were about 250,000 administrators and professional staff members in 1975, about half the number of professors, by 2005 there were over 750,000, easily outnumbering tenure-tracked professors. As the University has gained in power, those in control have taken on ever more the trappings of an aristocracy whose primary mission is self-preservation—not unlike the Medieval European clergy.

The Academy sees itself not just as the protector, preserver, and transmitter of our historical culture along with its values, to present and future generations.  It has gone way beyond that.  It now sees its role as redeemer and saviour–ushering in the new world of redeemed men and women.  

The Creative Elite

The final element of the Clerisy’s triumvirate is the culture-based industries and their upper middle classes participants. Arnold Toynbee identified the “creative genius” as the historic leader and savior of society—an apt description of the self image held by many of the new tech and media elites.

Today, this “creative” element has grown ever more pervasive. Artists, writers, fashion designers and actors have achieved enormous status in our society; and a handful has become very wealthy. More important still has been the rise of media oligarchs, some tied to the tech establishment, who now rank among the wealthiest Americans. Indeed of the world’s 25 richest people, a majority come from either the information sector, the fashion industry or media. These new media elites, combined with the tech oligarchy, could well emerge as the dominant economic force of the 21st Century, surpassing fortunes made in energy, manufacturing, or housing.

The media itself is increasingly populated by the children of prominent politicians and by those who come from the ranks of the plutocracy. These include the offspring of the Reagans, GOP stand-bearer John McCain, various Kennedys, and Nancy Pelosi. In Hollywood, meanwhile, some of the new powerful producers come from the ranks of the ultra-rich, including heirs to the Pritzker fortune and the daughter of Oracle Founder Larry Ellison, one of the world’s ten richest men.

The celebrity culture is the creative elite on public display.  The outpouring of adulation, the self-congratulation, the narcissistic preoccupation with oneself, daaarhling, is not just obnoxious, it is contemptible.  By-and-large these folk are tinpot wannabes.  The genuine artists among the media  are far too weighty and serious about their craft to want to have anything to do with celebritism.  

The Clerical Consensus

Today’s Clerisy attempts to distill today’s distinctly secular “truths”—on issues ranging from the nature of justice, race and gender to the environment—and decide what is acceptable and that which is not. Those who dissent from the accepted point of view can expect their work to be simply ignored, or in some cases vilified. In the Clerical bastion of San Francisco, an actress with heretical views, in this case supporting a Tea Party candidate, who was pilloried, and lost work for her offense.

The pattern of intolerance has been particularly notable in the area of climate change, where serious debate would seem prudent not only on the root causes and effects, but also what may present the best solutions. Climate scientists who diverge from the warming party line, even in a matter of degree, are routinely excoriated by the Clerisy as “deniers” of “settled” science even in the face of 15 years of relatively stable temperatures. The media also participates in this defense of orthodoxy. The Los Angeles Timesas well as the website Reddit have chosen to exclude contributions from skeptics.

The stifling orthodoxy from the technocrats and media elite is benign compared to the inquisitional behavior can be seen in institutions of higher education. It is nothing short of tragic, notes civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, that a 2010 survey of 24,000 college students found that barely a third thought it “safe to hold unpopular views on campus.”

Such attitudes seem natural in an environment where, according to various studies, liberals outnumber conservatives by between eight and fourteen to one. Whether this reflects natural preferences among the well-educated or is partially due to institutional discrimination remains arguable. But consider that 96 percent of all Presidential donations from the nation’s Ivy League schools went to Barack Obama, something more reminiscent of Soviet Russia than a properly functioning pluralistic academy. Nor is there any sign that this trend is slowing. Between 2007 and 2010, a University of California study revealed that “far left” and liberal views grew from 55 percent to almost 63 percent of full-time faculty while the conservative segment dropped from roughly 16 % to less than 12%. If the academic left simply waits long enough, it could look forward to a conservative-free faculty on many campuses.

A similar, if less uniform, clerical consensus suffuses the media culture, led by the television networks and the leading newspapers. In fact nearly half of all Americans consider the media too liberal, more than three times as many who see it as too conservative. Overall, reports Pew, the percentage who feel news is tilted to one side has grown dramatically from 53 percent in 1985 to 77 percent in 2011.

To be sure, there remain important exceptions to this rule, notably Fox News and talk radio, and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Yet the right’s hold on the major media is demonstrably weak, and likely to decline further once Murdoch himself is no longer on the scene. A detailed ++UCLA study found that of the twenty leading news outlets in the country, eighteen were left of center.

Despite the journalistic embrace of the idea of diversity, a recent Indiana University Study notes that journalists themselves have become increasingly homogeneous.  Journalists are far more likely to be college educated than they were in 1970, and less likely to be a racial minority than just a decade ago. But the biggest change has been an ideological one; barely seven percent in 2013 were Republican, compared to nearly a quarter in 1971.

Even Arnold Brisbane, the former ombundsman of the The New York Times, has noted the group-think that now overshadows objectivity, long cherished by that most important of America media outlets.  Brisbane observed that, “so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism—for lack of a better term—that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.”

These positions are all reflected in almost lock-step media support for President Obama. Over sixteen prominent journalists joined the Obama administration, which was something of a record; in 2012 employees at the major networks sent President Obama almost eight times as much in contributions as they did his Republican opponent.

This consensus of views prevails as well in the electronic media. As the liberal author Jonathan Chait suggests, the media increasingly reflects not just commercial values, but “a vast left-wing conspirary.” He adds: “You don’t have to be an especially devoted consumer of film or television (I’m not) to detect a pervasive, if not total, liberalism.”

What of the future?  What are the prospects for this new clerisy?

Will the Clerisy rule after Obama?

The fact that Republicans continue to maintain considerable power in both Washington and the states suggests that the Clerisy’s power is not yet determinative. And indeed after President Obama leaves office, the Clerisy’s reach may be temporarily diminished, but its ability to set the social and political agenda will likely persist and even grow given their influence to shape perceptions, particularly among the young.

The current atmosphere of ideological unanimity—in academia, the arts and much of the government bureaucracy—set the stage for the outrages of this commencement season, making painfully palpable the growing authoritarian spirit in so many of our leading institutions. They often see themselves as a liberating force in our society, but in their dislike of conflicting ideas and open debate, today’s  Clerisy increasingly resembles the closed-minded dogmatists of the Medieval church.

This article first appeared at The Daily Beast.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

The Rise of the Secular Clerisy

Misanthropic Distrust of Humanity

We have posted several pieces in recent months on the rise of ideological authoritarianism in the West, particularly in the Europe, Canada, the UK, and the United States.  Further in this vein we are going to reproduce an article written by Joel Kotkin, entitled “Watch What You Say, The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent” that not only calls attention to this phenomenon in the United States, but identifies the nodes of its influence and power.  

We believe Christians, along with all citizens should be not just aware of these developments, but conscious of the implications for civil freedom, liberty, and the threats to the right of dissent.  One of the reasons Christians need to be aware is that common to all the nodes of influence of the new ideological authoritarianism is a disdain, if not outright hatred of the Christian faith, and a despising of Christians and the Church. 

Watch What You Say, The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent

by Joel Kotkin 

06/07/2014 

New Geography

 

In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.

An alliance of upper level bureaucrats and cultural elites, the Clerisy, for for all their concerns about inequality, have thrived, unlike most Americans, in recent years. They also enjoy strong relations with the power structure in Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street.

As the modern clerisy has seen its own power grow, even while the middle class shrinks, it has used its influence to enforce a prescribed set of acceptable ideas. On everything from gender and sexual preference to climate change, those who dissent from the official pieties risk punishment.

 The “official” pieties are not defined in a creed or other formal statement.  They reflect a world-view which coheres around doctrines such as economic egalitarianism, distributive economic rights, a strong emphasis upon identity politics–both racial, class, and gender–a misanthropic distrust of the human race, along with a deeply held inchoate (as opposed to, reasoned) commitment to the omni-competent regulatory despotic state to create a society consistent with the shared world-view.  

Increasingly, those who dissent publicly and even privately are subjected to discrimination with teeth–so much so that people are now being hounded out of positions and occupations because they do not hold the received view. 

This power has been seen recently in a host of cancellations of commencement speakers. Just in the past few months Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde, and former UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, have been prevented from speaking by campus virtue squads whose sensibilities they had offended.

The spate of recent cancellation reflect an increasingly overbearing academic culture that promotes speech codes on what is permissible to say and even seeks to provide “trigger warnings” to warn students about the presence of nominally troubling subject matter in readings and discussions so they can avoid the elements of reality they find offensive. 

The emerging mien of the “politically correct” brigade is that it would stand upon the bridge, shouting “You shall not pass”, thereby preventing any heretics or naysayers to enter any academic hall, place of work, or government position, or society in general, lest the heretics do great harm to others by offending them.

The very term Clerisy first appeared in 1830 in the work of Samuel Coleridge to described the bearers society’s highest ideals: the intellectuals, pastors, scientists charged with transmitting their privileged knowledge them to the less enlightened orders.

The rise of today’s Clerisy stems from the growing power and influence of its three main constituent parts: the creative elite of media and entertainment, the academic community, and the high-level government bureaucracy.

The Clerisy operates on very different principles than its rival power brokers, the oligarchs of finance, technology or energy. The power of the knowledge elite does not stem primarily from money, but in persuading, instructing and regulating the rest of society. Like the British Clerisy or the old church-centered French First Estate, the contemporary Clerisy increasingly promotes a single increasingly parochial ideology and, when necessary, has the power to marginalize, or excommunicate, miscreants from the public sphere.

Of course, every society needs a clerical class, to instruct the young and maintain cultural standards. But in the past, at least in modern America, they tended to be a tolerance for fairly disparate views. Today’s Clerisy, by contrast, is increasingly homogeneous in its beliefs- despite pockets of conservative power such as the Heritage Foundation and most notably the media empire controlled by the Murdoch family.

Like all destructive ideologies, it relies not upon reason nor persuasion of the will, but upon the exercise of  social, political, and legal powers, such as ostracism, sending to Coventry, exile, ridicule, mockery, and ad hominem attacks–very much like classical racism. 

The modern Clerisy’s homogeneity springs from their social conditioning. Educated along similar ideological lines at major universities, they tend to be geographically concentrated in wealthy, “progressive” places, where few dissent from the prevailing worldview. As such they breathe, as analyst Walter Russell Mead suggests, “within a cocoon.” Inside their urban cocoons they operate from a thoroughly internalized set of progressive tropes on such issues as the environment, urbanism, gender and race. In practical terms, such as in their support of President Obama and the Democratic Party, they are both broadly allied with centers of power and influence, much as the clergy was in Medieval and early modern times.

When a people come to hold verities which they view as impeccable, but are unable to argue for them in any winning way apart from blackmail, threat, and force, we are confronted with invincible ignorance.  
 

Letter From the UK (About the Gulag)

First Clarkson; now the FA’s Richard Scudamore

The Left’s Language Stasi are on the March

by James Delingpole  

17 May 2014

Breitbart London

Here is a viewpoint I think you ought to read. It’s by someone to whose politically correct idiocies you ought never, ever to have been exposed in your entire life. But unfortunately – a bit like the cockroaches that inherit the earth when the Apocalypse comes – he is the kind of person who is very much part of your new future. So get used to it, Edward Lord and his ilk are here to stay.

Edward Lord has a job you probably never imagined could possibly exist. He is on the Football Association’s Inclusion Advisory Board. And, as you can see from this blogpost, he is currently agitating for the sacking of the FA’s chief executive Richard Scudamore.

If Scudamore doesn’t accept the heinous nature of his sexist remarks and the impact they have had, not only on women in the game, but on the perception they create of football’s commitment to equality and inclusion in general, then regrettably I must reach the conclusion that he may be in the wrong job.

Heinous, eh? Let’s have a look at these “sexist remarks” more closely, shall we, so that we can judge their awfulness for ourselves.

It’s surprisingly hard to find them online. Both Twitter and the various MSM news sites abound with self-righteous harpies and progressive milquetoasts expressing outrage at what Scudamore said. But they seem oddly reluctant to tell us what it was.

So far as I can gather, the scandal concerns some private emails Scudamore exchanged with a lawyer friend called Nicholas West. In one of them, Scudamore ventured to mock “female irrationality.” In another, the men discussed a woman involved in the Premier League’s planning and projects department, whom they nicknamed Edna. Scudamore blokeishly advised West that where Edna was concerned he should: “Keep off your shaft.” West referred to women in another email using the not necessarily flattering term “gash.”

Were the two men’s exchanges demeaning and offensive to women? Well quite possibly but that’s why the men chose to use these phrases in private emails rather than, say, in the Souvenir Issue of the FA Cup Final. Like Clarkson’s “n-word” nursery rhyme, the words were never meant for public consumption. The only reason they got out was because some mole decided that it would be in the public interest for them to be exposed in the media, so that we could all be properly appalled by the dog bites man story that two blokes involved in arguably the most laddish industry on earth – football – talk to one another privately in laddish language.

Well, I think it’s a dog-bites-man story, anyway. I’m trying to think what job Richard Scudamore would have to hold for it not be. Maybe if he were Minister For Women, that would be mildly ironic. Or if he were PA to Polly Toynbee – that would be amusing. Or if he were head of the Campaign for the Abolition of Sexist Language in Emails (Private or Otherwise) – that would definitely make it a goer, I’d say, if I were a news editor.

But “Bloke In Charge of Football Association Uses Sexist Language In Private”? Does anyone claiming to be shocked by this actually know anything about football? I don’t personally. Not a lot. But I do know enough to be aware that footballers are often shockingly overpaid yobs who get up to any number of unconscionable overpaid-young-men antics such as glassing people in night clubs and “kebabbing” groupies in foreign hotels. And that the people who generally follow football can sometimes be a bit laddish and lairy too. So what kind of person, exactly, would you expect to be in charge of the body responsible for regulating this yob’s game? Jeremy Paxman? Stephen Fry?

What we have here, I fear, is yet another scary example of the media being whipped up into confected outrage by the pressure groups of the cultural Marxist left. In the Clarkson case it was the “r” word that was invoked. In this one it happens to be the “s” word, but really whether the charge is “racism” or “sexism” (or “disablism” or “Islamophobia” or “homophobia” or “transphobia”) it all amounts to the same thing. This is part of an ongoing linguistic and socio-political terror campaign designed to create a world in which, not even in private, can anyone engage in unseemly banter.

Why, though, would anyone wish to do such a thing? Well, philosophically it’s part of that Year Zero thing that has long exercised leftists from Pol Pot to Tony (“Britain is a young country”) Blair. But more specifically in this case – see the views of this chap from the FA’s Inclusion Advisory Board, above – it’s about the bizarre ongoing campaign to persuade us all of something we know in our hearts just isn’t true and never will be: that women’s football is as exciting, important, interesting and generally worthy of support as men’s football and that the only reason it’s not is because of society’s ingrained sexism which must be eradicated by whatever means necessary.

This is what’s so ugly and dishonest about the current witchhunt against Scudamore: various vested interests with a political axe to grind – the goalkeeper of the women’s England football team; a woman on the FA board called Heather Rabbatts; etc – are being granted the luxury of taking the moral high ground in support of what is a blatant lie.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

The Gaylag Archipelago

Blog and Mablog 
Douglas Wilson

So a marginal football player got drafted into the NFL, kissed his boyfriend smack on the lips, and then another football player tweeted something that expressed the sentiment ick gross, and so the second player was hustled into sensitivity training. Got that?

As the revolution is established, there will be no heckling. Kirsten Powers got it right. I have as much of an expectation of broad-minded tolerance from the left these days as I do of somebody hoisting up a John 3:16 sign at a North Korean missile parade. These people are coercion junkies.

How will they stop the heckling? Vee haff vays. Notice that I did that obliquely because I didn’t want to violate Godwin’s Law — the first person in a debate to invoke Nazi parallels loses. This is because it is a well known principle of political science that political coercion and tyranny was only possible in the 1940s. All claims about oppressive coercion in our day are therefore bogus by definition, and one begins to suspect that the person who won’t stop expressing his views when the establishment wishes for him to express theirs is cruising for a sensitivity seminar. I also brought up Godwin’s Law because Nazi analogies are not the only negative examples that we should take into account.

Look. If you use language in ways they disapprove of, they will show the world what thorough-going malice looks like. That is why I make a point of doing it. They will send you off to the Gaylag Archipelago — there’s an example of what I do — where they will upbraid you for your intolerance until you come to realize that love is the answer. Love is all you need. Love is the best. Love is what Big Br . . . love is a good thing. Who could be against love except for the haters?

Anybody who says they believe in free speech, but who insists that Christians start groveling lest we “hurt” the perpetually hurt is someone who is himself a central part of the problem. The church is full of effeminate cowards who want us to truckle before the machinery of our passive aggressive police state. Beneath the visor of the leader of the SWAT team hauling me off, I saw a slow tear trickling down. I guess my language was hurtful. I see that now.

Second, they like to marginalize anybody who observes the obvious and comments on it, and they do this by claiming that some Christians can’t get over their loss of privilege, and are just a bunch of whiners. Now I have many faults, deep and grievous, but I think that whining is not one of them. Try another one.

As to the charge that I am fighting for Christian privilege, the reply is “you bet I am.” When the Christian faith is privileged, then freedom for everyone becomes a possibility. When Christian privilege is made illegal, and its denunciation mandatory, as it has been in our time, the first thing that happens is that we see the essentially coercive nature of unbelief revealed. Unbelievers have never built a free society and they never will. They have been running this one for just a few minutes now, and they are already driving up and down the streets with their Coercion Trucks, loudspeakers blaring that it is past curfew and we are all supposed to go inside now, place our noses on the specially designated freedom wall, and think grateful thoughts about how much Uplift Congress will be able to generate next session. When we wake up in the morning, we can all have a breakfast of liberty gruel, designed by the first lady’s personal nutritionist and national sadist.
You know what we need around here? We need a liberty czar.

How many commencement speakers have been uninvited this graduation season? Tolerant liberals are going the way of the dodo, and they really might well be the one genuine victim of climate change. But speaking of commencement speeches, let me share with you the paragraph that got my speaking gig at Oberlin nixed. They had the prudence to ask for a manuscript beforehand, and I was foolish enough to send it to them.

“. . . and now, moving on to your women’s study department, an exercise in what I call petticoat feminism. They have instructed a generation of young women on the art of demanding to be treated like the men are, and then to burst into tears if somebody does, and to contact an attorney shortly afterward so that they can have the security of some fatherly legal protection. This is a mass of . . .”

Third, never forget that discrimination is inescapable. Why are people going along with this ludicrous claim that same sex mirage is marriage? Well, it is because Americans have been taught to hate “discrimination,” as though discrimination is a thing out there all by itself. Discrimination is not a stand alone characteristic. I would discriminate against people who take away liberty; they discriminate against people who exercise it. But everybody discriminates.

But Americans dislike unnecessary coercion, and they have been persuaded that traditional Christians like myself are “coercing” homosexuals by denying them the delights of nuptial bliss. Well, yes, but only in the same sense that I am coercing them by denying them the delights of the hawk’s ability to soar above the clouds, the marlin’s ability to swim the coral reef without scuba gear, and the gazelle’s ability to dash across the savannah. I am coercing them by observing (mildly enough, I thought) that they don’t have a body equipped for such delights, and they don’t have it because God didn’t give it to them. You can’t be born retroactively something else, and as it all came down, you weren’t born a hawk, marlin, gazelle or girl. But you know, things are tough all over.

The one bright spot in this whole rolling debacle is that this kind of big E on the eye chart punditry just encourages them further in their torquemadian tolerance crusade, and this means they start manifesting what actual coercion looks like.

Keep it up, boys, keep it up. I want as many people as possible to see your political theory in action.

Letter From America (About The Dark Ages, Part II)

Kirsten Powers: Liberals’ Dark Ages

Kirsten Powers 6:33 p.m. EDT May 15, 2014

USA Today

Each week seems to bring another incident. Who will the thought police come for next?

Welcome to the Dark Ages, Part II. We have slipped into an age of un-enlightenment where you fall in line behind the mob or face the consequences.   How ironic that the persecutors this time around are the so-called intellectuals. They claim to be liberal while behaving as anything but. The touchstone of liberalism is tolerance of differing ideas. Yet this mob exists to enforce conformity of thought and to delegitimize any dissent from its sanctioned worldview. Intolerance is its calling card.

 

Each week seems to bring another incident. Last week it was David and Jason Benham, whose pending HGTV show was canceled after the mob unearthed old remarks the brothers made about their Christian beliefs on homosexuality. People can’t have a house-flipping show unless they believe and say the “right” things in their life off the set? In this world, the conservative Tom Selleck never would have been Magnum, P.I.

This week, a trail-blazing woman was felled in the new tradition of commencement shaming. International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde withdrew from delivering the commencement speech at Smith College following protests from students and faculty who hate the IMF. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, this trend is growing. In the 21 years leading up to 2009, there were 21 incidents of an invited guest not speaking because of protests. Yet, in the past five-and-a-half years, there have been 39 cancellations.

Don’t bother trying to make sense of what beliefs are permitted and which ones will get you strung up in the town square. Our ideological overlords have created a minefield of inconsistency. While criticizing Islam is intolerant, insulting Christianity is sport. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is persona non grata at Brandeis University for attacking the prophet Mohammed. But Richard Dawkins describes the Old Testament God as “a misogynistic … sadomasochistic … malevolent bully” and the mob yawns. Bill Maher calls the same God a “psychotic mass murderer” and there are no boycott demands of the high-profile liberals who traffic his HBO show.

The self-serving capriciousness is crazy. In March, University of California-Santa Barbara women’s studies professor Mireille Miller-Young attacked a 16-year-old holding an anti-abortion sign in the campus’ “free speech zone” (formerly known as America). Though she was charged with theft, battery and vandalism, Miller-Young remains unrepentant and still has her job. But Mozilla’s Brendan Eich gave a private donation to an anti-gay marriage initiative six years ago and was ordered to recant his beliefs. When he wouldn’t, he was forced to resign from the company he helped found.

Got that? A college educator with the right opinions can attack a high school student and keep her job. A corporate executive with the wrong opinions loses his for making a campaign donation. Something is very wrong here.

As the mob gleefully destroys people’s lives, its members haven’t stopped to ask themselves a basic question: What happens when they come for me? If history is any guide, that’s how these things usually end.

Kirsten Powers writes weekly for USA TODAY.
H/T Whaleoil

A Really Thorough Hanging

Sinister and Stasi-like

Free speech is being attacked everywhere in the West.  The saddest specatcle of all is the crowds packed around the tumbrills cheering and applauding as fresh decapitations roll in.  Unbelief is becoming more and more authoritarian, more and more militant.  It is now blasphemous to speak certain words, or utter certain sentiments. 

Let’s recap why free speech is a Christian construct–required by the faith.  Firstly, God alone is judge of the human mind and its ruminations.  He alone is judge of the tongue.  He has not given that authority over to man.  He alone “takes every thought captive” to His Son, the designated and appointed Messiah.  (II Corinthians 10:5-6)  He alone understands, and can weigh the thoughts and intentions of the human heart.  (Psalm 139:1-6)

Secondly, when man arrogates the power and authority to control what people think or say he is necessarily claiming authority over all knowledge, truth, and thought.  This inevitably means the approval of some beliefs and thoughts, and proscription of others.  The forcible imposition of an ideology or religion is the inevitable outcome.  “Official Man”, whoever that might be, becomes self-elevated to the status of a deity.

Thirdly, if human beings are to believe something in truth, they must believe according to the liberty of their conscience.  Their intellect, emotions, and will must all give assent.  To force someone to believe is not just an oxymoron, it destroys the essence of what it means to be in God’s image.  It makes that man a slave.  It reduces that man to a chattle or a mere animal.  Consequently, it reverses the created order, “animalises” man, and attempts to dethrone God, Who alone is Lord of the conscience.

God alone is Lord of the conscience and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men . . . and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also. (Westminster Confession of Faith, 20:60

Fourthly, in a sinful world, where the Spirit of God has not yet taken every thought captive to Christ, to recognise liberty of conscience necessarily means that many thoughts and words and opinions that are not merely wrong, but evil, will be conceived, considered, and expressed–for the heart of man is deceiful above all things, and desperately wicked.  In a fallen world, awaiting full redemption, evil thoughts and evil words are a necessary trial and tribulation; they are a necessary and inevitable adjunct of freedom of conscience. 

Remove Christian faith from the culture, and there is no absolute foundation for human freedom, let alone the rights of free speech.  At best there is the tyranny of the fifty-one percent.  Therefore, secular humanism, being true to itself, cannot help but extend its putrid hand to punish thought and speech which it deems odious or evil.  In such a dystopian world, the only tolerable freedom is to be utterly conformed to the authoritarian state.  In true Orwellian Newspeak, “freedom” means complete conformity.

The latest example of free speech disappearing, to be replaced with authoritarian controls over what one thinks and does is the case of BBC Top Gear host, Jeremy Clarkson.

Jeremy Clarkson, The ‘N-word’ and the Creeping Tyranny of Political Correctness

by James Delingpole

Breitbart London

5 May 2014 

On the day the Jeremy Clarkson “N” word story broke, I was sitting with friends of the same age in their kitchen, trying to remember when it was that the children’s choosing rhyme “Eeny meeny minie mo” (or however you spell it: there are myriad variants) transmuted into its politically correct, N-word free modern version.

First, I seem to recall, the offending word was changed to “tigger”. Then – so that even the memory of the unfortunate rhyme was expunged – it became “tiger.” Today, most children who recite the poem probably aren’t even aware of its sinister, “racist” past. But for my generation – which is pretty much Clarkson’s generation: anyone born before, say, 1970 – it was so unexceptionable as to pass without comment, even were you to be overheard using it in front of your left-wing teacher in your kindergarten classroom.

This is something our politically correct culture has contrived to forget about the past: deliberately, I think, because the totalitarian left is the enemy of history and tradition and would like to declare every year Year Zero.

I can tell you now because I remember it well that when we used that rhyme as children and we came to the “N” word, there wasn’t a racist thought in our heads. It was just another word in a ritual incantation, not unlike, say “trespasses” in the Lord’s Prayer.

Sure it might have had a meaning once but you never thought about it or analysed it. Did we know the “N” word had offensive connotations? Well of course we did but the way we used it in the rhyme wasn’t one of those occasions.

There’s a world of difference between chanting such a word in a children’s rhyme and directing it, with deliberate venom, in the street at a black person. Everyone knows this. Most people with any sense, anyway. It ought to be so obvious as scarcely to need restating. . . .

Now suppose . . .  there had been someone with a tape recorder present. And suppose they had tried to present this in a left-wing newspaper like the Guardian or the Mirror as shocking evidence of a hated, right-leaning commentator’s evident racist tendencies: the irreverence in his voice; the fact that there were children present during the discussion; the evident nostalgia for a past where the language police weren’t out to get you for every vaguely distasteful phrase you may have used…

Even as a recently as decade ago, I would suggest, such a thing would have been unthinkable. As unthinkable as the possibility that a team from the Sunday Mirror would have been able to get hold of some outtakes from an old recording of Top Gear, in which maybe or maybe not the presenter recites the Eeny Meeny Miny Mo rhyme cheekily using the now verboten word from his childhood, and turn it into a story so scandalous that it threatened the ruination of the presenter’s career.

Why would it have been unthinkable? Because even after a decade of Tony Blair people still had a sense of perspective. It would have been perfectly well understood that Jeremy Clarkson is an outspoken, cheeky, politically incorrect presenter who likes to push things to the edge; that the harmfulness of the “N-word” is dependent on context; that using it does not automatically make you a ‘racist’ (whatever that word means); that anyway, the offending incident wasn’t even broadcast, so what business is it of the Sunday Mirror to be intruding on a private moment; that all these bien-pensants now calling for Clarkson’s head – among them the noisome Piers Morgan – are doing so less out of affronted righteousness than simple resentment and jealousy at Clarkson’s salary and popularity. . . .

There is nothing healthy or fair about this attack on Clarkson. In fact it is downright sinister and Stasi-like. The fact that hardly anyone is coming forward to say this – with such notable, brave exceptions as Michael Gove –  is more worrying still. If freedom of speech is now impermissible even in private, then we are well on the way towards tyranny.

Sinister.  Stasi-like.  The final full-flowering of secular humanism has commenced.  It will be the last gasp before it, too, integrates into the void, along with every other “ism” which has infected our benighted, fallen race.  The Lord not infrequently gives a culture or civilisation just enough rope to facilitate a really thorough hanging.  All of us are going to have to choose sides.  All of us are going to have to respond to Joshua’s insistent demand: “Choose you this day whom you will serve . . . ”

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Just Getting a Drink

Posted on Monday, April 28, 2014  
By Douglas Wilson
Blog and Mablog

 
A recent jag in the feminist jihad has to do with what they are pleased to call microaggressions — what Jonah Goldberg recently worried might become nanoaggressions. So let’s talk about all that for a microbit.

Conservatives will frequently make merry about this kind of fevered brow behavior, assuming that these women’s-study-center-people have utterly lost it. Those who talk about microaggressions all the time must be doing so because of their microminds. But this goes wide of the mark by a good distance. What these people are doing to us is intelligent, rule-guided behavior. They are doing it because they are getting something important they want from it. Let me tell you a parable:

Once there was a game of pick-up basketball, and there were two teams — red shirts and blue shirts. The red shirts were from red states and the blue shirts were from blue states. With me so far?

Beyond the basic rules of the game, the blue shirts had only two requirements. The first was that they needed to be allowed to ref the game as well as play it, and the second requirement was that if anybody on the red team questioned any call, it was an automatic technical, and they had to go sit on the racist bench, or on the misogynist bench, depending on which eyebrow they had raised in protest.

At first the game looked kind of normal. But as time went on, the calls started getting more and more outlandish. First the blue players would flop when there was just slight contact, then when there was no contact at all, and finally they commenced to flopping whenever a red player came within three feet of them. Bam. Right on the back, and one of the others would always call it. Charging! Of course, there were some protests, and thus it was that the red state bench started accumulating a bad reputation for racism and misogyny. I mean, look at all of them sitting there. Such a poor testimony.

As I said earlier, some of the guys on the red player bench started joking amongst themselves about how stupid it all was. But then they started getting charged for micro-charging from the bench, and were made to sit on another bench behind the first one.

Pretty soon everybody was used to this system, and when a hot-headed player started to argue, or even looked like he was thinking about arguing a call, all the evangelicals in the bleachers behind him would start hissing at him. “Tesssstimony! Tessssssstimony! Sssssit down!” Most of the time he would.

In the off-season, lots of evangelicals from the bleachers would attend conferences dedicated to the question of why we were losing so many basketball games. They could actually fill arenas for such conferences, with about ten times more attendees than would show up for the basketball games themselves, and the registrations cost about five times more than the basketball tickets did.

Nevertheless, the consensus among the players remained that this whole set up was really stupid — they would talk about it in the locker room afterwards. This was the only place they were still allowed to talk about anything, and that was probably coming to an end by the next season as well. But in their remaining time, in order to make themselves feel better, they would complain bitterly about what morons the blue players were being.

But one day a new guy on the team decided to ask a question, one that seemed obvious to him anyway. “Why are they the morons?”

“What do you mean?” somebody else asked.

“I mean they are getting everything they want, they win every game, they make us conform to stupid and inane requirements, our own fans police those requirements for them, and we all go along with it. So I would ask again, why are they the morons?”

I interrupt this instructive parable to note that the word moron is no doubt considered offensive by some, and that three blue players are flat on their backs, and that one of them is clutching his ankle and making a lot of noise. On top of that, I am refusing to go to the bench, and I refuse to apologize. In addition, ascending to my personal zenith of irreverence, I refuse to apologize for any earlier expressions like lesbyterians, gaystapo, or that heretofore unremarked illage vidiots in the sidebar to the right.

This is not, incidentally, because I am a verbal sociopath. I was taught by my mother and father back in the Eisenhower years not to call people certain names, and to this day I honor the law of my mother (Prov. 1:8). Invective, scurrility and abuse are not my bag. But my mother also knew that actual charging was when you lowered your head and ran into a guy. I believe that our speech should be gracious, seasoned with salt (Col. 4:6), and that Christian discipleship that does not extend to the tongue, pen, and keyboard is a worthless discipleship (Jas. 1:26).

So I do believe in rules for polemical discourse. I believe that a biblical approach to it allows us to hit hard, and above the belt. But God defines for us where the belt is. What I do not believe in is the insane practice of putting the definitions of appropriate discourse in the hands of people who believe that every woman has an ongoing constitutional right to a childectomy, whenever she decides undertake the procedure. In his fine book, Rules for Patriots, Steve Deace rightly says that we should never accept the premise of our adversary’s argument. In this case, the premise I am rejecting is that those people have any grasp whatever of what appropriate discourse is. They don’t know what the womb is for, they don’t know what the anus is for, and they don’t know what liberty is for. But they do know what a red-shirted basketball player is for — somebody to call fouls on.

So we answer to God for our words, and He has set the standard of what constitutes appropriate discourse for us in Scripture. He has not put the bedwetters in charge of whether we are being gracious or not.

Okay then. I interrupt this line of reasoning to acknowledge that children who struggle with bedwetting have enough troubles without me making fun of them, so I am taking care not to do that. I am actually making fun of those adults who sneak down the hall at 2 in the morning for a glass of water to pour on their beds so that they can pretend to be actual bedwetters, in order to be able to shriek at me for being so insensitive. So I am not talking about real people with real problems who need real compassion. Telling a story about a boy who cried wolf did not make Aesop a hater of genuine wolf-warnings.

I am talking about those posers and hypocrites who have assumed a complete and preening authority over the public lexicon as an essential step in their drive to control all thought by controlling all language. These people are Orwellian in their up-is-down newspeak, and so I always want to have on hand a suitable Orwellian response. George Orwell once said that `whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie.” But if you are the kind of evangelical who objects to the custard pie, and not to the overweening and arrogant tyranny-speak that was so rudely interrupted by that custard pie, then congratulations, you are the problem. Just go sit in the bleachers on the other side now and get it over with.

Jesus was not polite. One time He offended the lawyers (Luke 11:45), and when they protested it He took the occasion to multiply the offense in their eyes. Nice is not one of the fruits of the Spirit. Making baskets is not a bad testimony, and docilely accepting insane foul calls is not a good one. In Acts 13:45, when Paul and Barnabas were opposed by men full of envious snark, their response was not to walk on eggs. They met envious opposition with boldness (Acts 13:46).

So what many Christians are failing to realize is that all the hubbub surrounding pc-language, giving offense, microaggressions, and so on, is a transparent trick that is being run on clueless conservatives. The bad team is the bad team, but they are not the stupid team. That honor goes elsewhere.

I refuse to let those blue guys ref the game, but I do not call them unintelligent for trying it. It has worked for them so far. The stupidity lies elsewhere, which is also why I refuse to allow the fans on our side of the court to hiss me back onto the bench.

Friend, don’t you see? You are being worked. You are being played. You are being manipulated. You are being engineered. You are being finagled. You are being cozened. You are being duped. You are being gulled. You are being snowed. You are being chiseled. You are being hustled. You are being gamed.

I trust I have made my meaning clear enough. And I am not going to the bench. Just getting a drink.

Hypocritical Plutocracy

The Buying and Selling of Free Speech

Free speech is usually more of an idea than a civic reality.  H. L. Mencken, writing in the 1920’s observed that the Bolsheviks showed the way for the West–which has clung on to the ideal of free speech far longer than most.

The Russian Bolsheviki . . . . once they were in the saddle, they decreed the abolition of the old imperial censorship and announced that speech would be free henceforth–but only so long as it kept within the bounds of the Bolshevist revelation!  In other words, any citizen was free to think and speak whatever he pleased–but only so long as it did not violate certain fundamental ideas.  [H. L. Mencken, “The Genealogy of Etiquette”, Prejudices: Volume I, edited by Marion Rogers (New York: The Literary Classics of America, Inc. 2010), p. 99.]

Nowadays we are moving much more into a Bolshevik world where some speech is not deemed equal at all, insofar as it violates some cherished ideas.  Mencken goes on in his essay to argue that the Bolsheviki notion has been precisely the “sort of freedom that has prevailed in the United States since the first days.”

We have recently been treated to the debacle over the Los Angeles Clippers owner, Donald Sterling who has privately expressed sentiments which fall outside of “Bolshevist” revelation.  Sterling provides an excellent touchstone for Mencken’s thesis that free speech is a chimera in the West.
  He represents a classic case study because he said things which were abhorrent to most.  His free speech rights evaporated more quickly than ether on a hot stove–yet the abstract civic ideal of free speech argues that it can exist only if abhorrent sentiments and thought remain free and protected from suppression.  His case demonstrates that the US (and the West, by extension) has become progressively more and more Bolshevistic.

Sterling has been attacked and done real, substantial, and actual damage because of what he said–and not even in public, mind.  What he said was actually a private conversation, recorded without his knowledge  (therefore, illegal), and made public by someone else.

There is something rotten here.  Ben Shapiro gives us his take:

In November 2009, Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling settled a lawsuit in which the Department of Justice alleged that Sterling had discriminated against Hispanics, blacks and families without children in his rental properties. The lawsuit contained testimony that Sterling had suggested Hispanics were poor tenants because they “smoke, drink, and just hang around the building,” and that “black tenants smell and attract vermin.” The settlement cost him and his insurers $2.73 million.

The NBA and the national media said virtually nothing. That same year, the NAACP gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.  

What!  How on earth could the NAACP have done that?   Something other than principles had to have been involved.

In 2005, Sterling signed a check for more than $5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that he had attempted to prevent non-Koreans from renting in his facilities in Koreatown.  The NBA and the national media said virtually nothing.

This week, Sterling’s 31-year-old girlfriend, V. Stiviano, released a tape of the 80-year-old racist being an 80-year-old racist. Sterling apparently told Stiviano he didn’t want her posting pictures of black men on her Instagram account and didn’t want her bringing black men to Clippers games.

The entire media establishment suddenly went insane.

Colin Cowherd of ESPN idiotically called for the league to void all of Sterling’s contracts with his players and agents — a violation of basic contract law.

Magic Johnson declared that the NBA should force Sterling to sell his team — a violation of basic contract law.

President Barack Obama, determined never to let an opportunity pass to label America racist, took to the microphones to declare Sterling’s racism a symptom of America’s “legacy of race and slavery and segregation.”

This is, at the very least, hypocrisy.

• Last year, Sterling signed coach Doc Rivers, who is black, to a contract worth $7 million per year.
• Chris Paul, who is black, is slated to make nearly $19 million this season. 
• Blake Griffin, who is black, is slated to make $16 million. 
• DeAndre Jordan will make $11 million. 

 The coach, these players and their agents surely knew about Sterling’s legacy. So did Cowherd, Johnson and Obama. They all said nothing. 

Ah, money.  How sweet the sound.   These guys knew all along that Sterling was racist and practised (not just talked) discrimination in his business activities.  Yet they did nada.  They said nada.  Such commitment to free speech.  Such dedication to the Bill of Rights.  We wish. 

But the big problem here isn’t hypocrisy. The big problem is that the market is turning on Sterling not over action, but over words. Sterling’s a pig, and that’s been no secret for decades. But what triggered America’s response? Sterling’s thoughts. American society now considers expression of thought to be significantly more important than action. Sterling got away with actual discrimination for years. But now he is caught on tape telling his gold-digging girlfriend he doesn’t like blacks, and that’s when the firestorm erupts?

Mencken argued that the Bolsheviks were committed to free speech, as long as it did remained conformed to “basic ideas” as defined and developed by the State Apparatchik.  This appears to be precisely the kind of freedom of speech operating in the United States today.  Mencken argued that from the beginning the US notion of free speech and Bolsheviki real-politick were kissing cousins.  The Sterling case proves him right again, after all these one hundred years.

But there is development. A peculiarly American twist has emerged.  The evolution of the Mencken thesis lies here: now discrimination is acceptable as long as  there’s money in it for all, which means that free speech can be bought and paid for.  But, when there’s more money to be made by crushing and excising the “free-speaker”, the guillotine will fall quicker than a Jedi light-sabre. 

Human rights and freedoms are commodities to be traded.  Good profits can be made.  Sterling proved it for years, and the NAACP cheered.  But now, the piranhas scent blood.  Anyone care to bid for the LA Clippers?  Oh, Magic Johnson has called for the forced sale of the Clippers, and has reportedly made an offer.  How noble.  How principled.  Hypocrisy, thou art a rare jewel.  Freedoms and principles can be ignored for thirty pieces of silver in the United States.  Bribery and simony, thou art glorious.

What remains of free speech?  It has become a harlot to be bickered over and bartered for by the mercantile apparatchik. 

Tyrannical Tumours in the Western Body Politic

The Slow Death of Free Speech

How the Left, here and abroad, is trying to shut down debate —  from Islam and Israel to global warming and gay marriage

The Spectator Australia

Mark Steyn

These days, pretty much every story is really the same story:

• In Galway, at the National University of Ireland, a speaker who attempts to argue against the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) programme against Israel is shouted down with cries of ‘Fucking Zionist, fucking pricks… Get the fuck off our campus.’
• In California, Mozilla’s chief executive is forced to resign because he once made a political donation in support of the pre-revisionist definition of marriage.
• At Westminster, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declares that the BBC should seek ‘special clearance’ before it interviews climate sceptics, such as fringe wacko extremists like former Chancellor Nigel Lawson.
• In Massachusetts, Brandeis University withdraws its offer of an honorary degree to a black feminist atheist human rights campaigner from Somalia.
• In London, a multitude of liberal journalists and artists responsible for everything from Monty Python to Downton Abbey sign an open letter in favour of the first state restraints on the British press in three and a quarter centuries.
• And in Canberra the government is planning to repeal Section 18C — whoa, don’t worry, not all of it, just three or four adjectives; or maybe only two, or whatever it’s down to by now, after what Gay Alcorn in the Age described as the ongoing debate about ‘where to strike the balance between free speech in a democracy and protection against racial abuse in a multicultural society’.

I heard a lot of that kind of talk during my battles with the Canadian ‘human rights’ commissions a few years ago: of course, we all believe in free speech, but it’s a question of how you ‘strike the balance’, where you ‘draw the line’… which all sounds terribly reasonable and Canadian, and apparently Australian, too. But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.

But I don’t really think that many people these days are genuinely interested in ‘striking the balance’; they’ve drawn the line and they’re increasingly unashamed about which side of it they stand. What all the above stories have in common, whether nominally about Israel, gay marriage, climate change, Islam, or even freedom of the press, is that one side has cheerfully swapped that apocryphal Voltaire quote about disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it for the pithier Ring Lardner line: ‘“Shut up,” he explained.’

A generation ago, progressive opinion at least felt obliged to pay lip service to the Voltaire shtick. These days, nobody’s asking you to defend yourself to the death: a mildly supportive retweet would do. But even that’s further than most of those in the academy, the arts, the media are prepared to go. As Erin Ching, a student at 60-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper the other day: ‘What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.’ Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity. . . .

The examples above are ever-shrinking Dantean circles of Tolerance: At Galway, the dissenting opinion was silenced by grunting thugs screaming four-letter words. At Mozilla, the chairwoman is far more housetrained: she issued a nice press release all about (per Miss Alcorn) striking a balance between freedom of speech and ‘equality’, and how the best way to ‘support’ a ‘culture’ of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusiveness’ is by firing anyone who dissents from the mandatory groupthink.

At the House of Commons they’re moving to the next stage: in an ‘inclusive culture’ ever more comfortable with narrower bounds of public discourse, it seems entirely natural that the next step should be for dissenting voices to require state permission to speak.

At Brandeis University, we are learning the hierarchy of the new multiculti caste system. In theory, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. If conservative white males were to silence a secular women’s rights campaigner from Somalia, it would be proof of the Republican party’s ‘war on women’, or the encroaching Christian fundamentalist theocracy, or just plain old Andrew Boltian racism breaking free of its redoubt at the Herald Sun to rampage as far as the eye can see.

But when the snivelling white male who purports to be president of Brandeis (one Frederick Lawrence) does it out of deference to Islam, Miss Hirsi Ali’s blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly news anchor. . . .

I’m opposed to the notion of official ideology — not just fascism, Communism and Baathism, but the fluffier ones, too, like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘climate change’ and ‘marriage equality’. Because the more topics you rule out of discussion — immigration, Islam, ‘gender fluidity’ — the more you delegitimise the political system. . . .  Young Erin Ching at Swarthmore College has grasped the essential idea: it is not merely that, as the Big Climate enforcers say, ‘the science is settled’, but so is everything else, from abortion to gay marriage. So what’s to talk about? Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry but ‘safe spaces’ where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex, orientation, ‘gender fluidity’ and everything else except diversity of thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.

As it happens, the biggest ‘safe space’ on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there’s nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme’s famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.

As American universities, British playwrights and Australian judges once understood, the ‘safe space’ is where cultures go to die.

Mark Steyn is a Canadian commentator and author of several books, including America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, a New York Times bestseller.  This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 19 April 2014 Aus

Letter From America (About Mozilla’s War)

Mozilla’s Culture War Is a Bad Model for Business

Russell Moore
Penny Nance
April 8, 2014

Time Magazine 

The decision to remove Mozilla CEO Brandon Eich is not good for anyone on any side of the culture war

Last week’s forced resignation of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich should have sent a shudder through gatherings all over the country. This shudder was felt, it’s true, in gatherings of evangelical churches, Roman Catholic parishes, Orthodox Jewish synagogues. But this shudder should also have gone through corporate boardrooms, because it signals a dangerous trend of forced political uniformity, rather than tolerance, in corporate America. That’s not good for anyone, on any side of the culture war.

At issue, of course, is Brendan Eich’s 2008 donation of $1,000 to a campaign in support of Proposition 8, a California ballot measure to retain the definition of marriage in that state to the union of one man and one woman. Eich was hounded out of his job by activists who didn’t simply disagree with Eich’s view but who wouldn’t tolerate any dissenting view in the company at all. The goal, it seems, wasn’t dignity or justice, but enforced equality of thought.

As social conservatives, we, of course, were shocked by this development. Columnist Rod Dreher spoke of it as Portlandia’s form of Sharia Law. But those on the traditional marriage side of the cultural divide weren’t alone.
Some pro-same-sex marriage thinkers, such as Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan, also dissented from this sort of Inquisition. “The whole episode disgusts me,” Sullivan wrote. “If this is the gay rights movement today—hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else, then count me out.”

Make no mistake, we support the rights of corporations to live up to their corporate values, even when we disagree with those values. We don’t want the government interfering with Mozilla’s right to make this decision. But we think the decision was a poor one, one that seeks to wield a nuclear option of silencing all dissent through endless campaigns of forced silence. We believe it’s important for all of us to ask, how did Mozilla get to this point? And is this really where we want to go?

Mozilla executive chair Mitchell Baker wrote, in explaining the board’s decision, “We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right.” Baker uses “people” here in an abstract and almost universalizing way. Who are these “people”? It’s obviously not LGBT people in general because many of them, like Sullivan and Rauch, don’t agree with these tactics.

And “people” here cannot refer to the overwhelming consensus of the American population because every poll indicates that, whatever cultural changes have happened, the population is still divided on the question of whether the definition of marriage should be revised to include same-sex couples.

The “people,” it appears, who sparked this controversy, are critics on Twitter and a dating site, OKCupid, which recommended its users find another browser than Mozilla’s Firefox. And Mozilla has received more backlash for removing Eich than for hiring him. The company tracks positive and negative comments, and the negative reaction to this is unprecedented.

We’ve seen this before in recent days, in the kerfuffle over A&E’s suspension of Duck Dynasty reality show star Phil Robertson for quoting a Bible passage about sexual morality. The backlash to the suspension was so overwhelming that A&E rescinded it within days.

So how does this happen? How does a company get to the point where its first reaction to an unpopular opinion is to punish diversity of thought? We think it happens because the company becomes so culturally isolated that they no longer know that there, in fact, is diversity of thought on a given issue. The Twitter and Facebook outrage against Eich can seem to be the uniform “voice of the people,” rather than one more debate in an ongoing controversy.

As evangelical Christians, we’ve heard, all our lives, our churches and ministries warn against a “Christian bubble,” where we can be around fellow believers all the time to the point that we lose touch with what our unbelieving neighbors think, to the point that we lose any point of connection with them. That’s easy to do, and not just in church circles.

There can be a “boardroom bubble,” where belonging to a particular cultural group can give the blindness of thinking that “everyone” believes the way that you do. This can happen in Hollywood studios or in New York media empires or in Washington DC think tanks—and it can also happen in Silicon Valley tech companies.

Have American boardrooms become so insulated in their secularity, that they cannot even imagine why, for instance, Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants and Orthodox Jews and Muslims and Latter-day Saints might hold sincere differences from the accepted wisdom of the corporate cocktail parties about what marriage is? If so, these companies will be out of touch with a significant segment of the population. But, more importantly, these companies can find themselves, as Mozilla did, turning their corporate mission into a scorched-earth culture war battlefield that will be good neither for business nor for civil society.

The answer, we believe, is to break out of the bubble. Don’t silence disagreement, but see more conversation, not less, as a means of engagement. The Bible tells us that “in the multitude of counselors,” there is wisdom (Prov. 11:14). We would think that successful business leaders—even those who wouldn’t know how to find that passage in the Bible—would know that intuitively. But that multitude of counselors means engagement, not silencing. And it means real diversity, not just whatever makes sense to the diversity officer. If companies were to seek this sort of engagement, we might see fewer embarrassing episodes like Mozilla’s in the years to come.

Dr. Russell Moore is President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Penny Nance is CEO and President of Concerned Women for America.