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.

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. 

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

Antidotes to Bigotry and Hate Speech

More Free Speaking, Please

There is a controversy broiling in Australia over free speech.  That country has moved radically away from free speech rights in recent years.  The present government, under Tony Abbott is seeking to redress the balance.

The issues are now familiar to us all.  Advocates of spurious human rights have promulgated the radical curtailing of free speech by proscribing “hate speech”, otherwise known as bigoted speech, offensive speech, racist speech, anti-Islamic speech, and so forth.  In reality all these proscriptions seek (and achieve) curtailing certain kinds of speech.  The Commentariat is agog and aghast in Oz over the government’s intentions to reform the current anti-free speech regime in Australia.  Consider the umbrage taken by a Sydney scribe, printed in the NZ Herald:

It’s all part of Tony Abbott’s vision of a new Liberal dawn. The Australian Prime Minister’s conservative Government intends to dilute racial vilification laws to enshrine the right of Australians to be bigots.  Amid fury and concern even within his own party, Abbott has invoked the greater goal of free speech to amend the Racial Discrimination Act to allow offensive, insulting and humiliating abuse so long as it does not incite hatred or violence.

Do people have a (freedom) right to be bigots?  Of course.  To be ignorant?  Of course.  To be a venter of spleen?  Of course.  Everyone has a right to go down to the pit in their own way.  It’s called freedom.
  But, says the caviller, there are always limits upon freedom.  Too right–for the purpose of protecting the freedom rights of others.  Curtailing so-called “hate speech”  does not fit into that category.

The fundamental flaw in anti-free speech laws springing up like mushrooms all over the place is that free speech is deemed (or imagined) to be in the ear of the hearer.  Hate-speech, bigoted speech, offensive speech is “proven” to be such if the hearer finds it to be hateful, bigoted, or offensive.  If the hearer takes offence, the speaker is thereby proved guilty. 

Imagine a parallel.  It is a crime to act with murderous intent.  A thug loses it, and hits his wife.  The state prosecutes and the courts convict with the crime of acting with murderous intent.  What was the evidence and proof of the intent to murder?  The wife believed it to be the case.  Or worse, the court rules it was likely the wife believed it to be so.  Therefore, the thug is guilty beyond doubt. 

The situation in which Australians now find themselves with respect to speech, (as do citizens in the UK, and much of Europe, and Canada), as bad as  the parallel cited above.  Andrew Bolt, a columnist in Australia, was found guilty in 2011 of “race hate speech” because of

his ”offensive” 2009 article accused ”fair-skinned” Aborigines of choosing their racial identity to get certain benefits. [Sydney Morning Herald]

A judge decided that some folk would likely take offence, and hey presto, Bolt was convicted of hate speech.  

The right to freedom of speech took something of a battering today after Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt was found guilty of breaching the racial discrimination act.  Bolt’s crime was to suggest that some people of mixed racial heritage, whom he described as ‘fair skinned aborigines’, only declared themselves as such in order to claim govt benefits.

Justice Mordecai Bromberg, who presided over the case, found that such a statement was likely to cause offence to those at whom it was aimed, and were not made in ‘good faith’.  This judgement was probably inevitable because of the manner in which Victoria’s Racial Vilification Laws were drafted. Because they proscribe statements that might cause offence, it’s now very difficult for anyone to debate the issue of race without getting themselves into trouble. [Tom Elliott, 3A Radio commentary.  Emphasis, ours.]

One struggles to imagine how folk can endorse and champion free speech rights, on the one hand, and yet applaud such censorious law and decisions, on the other.  Free speech rights in the West have rapidly devolved into free speech for moi, and curtailment of everyone else who offends moi.  It is this travesty which the Abbott government is seeking to redress and reform.

A victim of this infamous curtailment of free speech, Andrew Bolt has written the last word on the matter:

But is a law against free speech really our only and safest recourse [against racial hate speech]? Six years ago The Sydney Morning Herald allowed Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, then Mufti of Australia, to peddle a bit of denialism himself: “I, like many researchers in the world, shy off the number of innocent victims that had been estimated at six million.”

Hilali already had a disgraceful record of hate speech. He’d called women who wore no hijab “uncovered meat’’ for rapists.  He’d accused Jews of using “sex and abominable acts of buggery, espionage, treason and economic hoarding to control the world’’. He’d praised suicide bombers as “heroes’’ and the September 11 terror attacks as “God’s work against oppressors”.

How did Hilali get away with that when we’ve had the RDA for two decades? Answer: because we had failed to use our free speech.  SBS journalists actually filmed Hilali praising the September 11 terrorism but destroyed their tape to avoid giving the “wrong idea”. Other journalists, likewise cowed by social and threatened legal sanctions against criticising Muslims, looked the other way until the radical threat became too obvious. Even today, news reports often delete ethnic descriptors such as “Middle Eastern appearance” from police appeals to help identify wanted men.

Even so, what muzzled Hilali since has been not the law but public opinion.  Media and talkback criticism finally became so much that the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils dropped him as Mufti.  Yet again, the best antidote to bad speech was free speech and the worst has been the law.

The proof is in. Australians can be trusted to maintain the moral code. Say no to racism, yes to free speech.

The best antidote to bigotry and hate speech is more free speaking.  The alternative is too ruinous to contemplate.

Politicians–Why We Hold Them In Such Low Regard

Over-egging the Pudding

The Labour Party has announced some new initiatives about the internet.  If it is elected to government, Nanny will provide internet access to all human souls in the country.  It will become part of a government guarantee.  How do we know this?  Because Labour is promising to do the very same. 

Citizens will have their access to the internet guaranteed . . .

What will that mean?  Don’t know really.  Hints are contained later in the grand policy announcement:

Accessing the internet is now an essential part of modern life. Labour will explore means of increasing public internet access –such as through libraries and Wi-Fi hotspots – to ensure all Kiwis can go online when they need to.

Wait a minute.  Exploring means of  increasing access to the internet is not a guarantee of access.
  How about the intrepid hunter or tramper up the heights of the Tararua ranges?  When one of them wants to go on the internet, will Labour guarantee that?  What about way up the Whanganui River in the isolated reaches of the Ruatiti Domain or the Bridge to Nowhere?  A government guarantee for accessing the Internet from there?  And while we are at it, how about a government guarantee for access to books?  For cell phone coverage? 

Why on earth do politicians or their PR minders constantly feel driven to over egg the pudding?  We are sick and tired of being spoken to as if we were little children about to be captivated by a fairy story. 

David Cunliffe, Labour leader goes on:

It would also guarantee freedom of expression, thought, conscience and religion, while still outlawing hate speech.

Mmmm . . . freedom of expression whilst outlawing hate speech.  Spot a contradiction there?  Who defines hate speech?  Well, we would hazard a guess that the following will constitute the operational definition: hate speech will be deemed to have occurred when some random declares that he is offended by what has been said.   That is the consistent pattern of its application overseas.  Ironically, hate speech is effectively defined as speech which other people hate.  In that context, freedom of expression has shrunk faster than open water on the Great Lakes.  It begs the question: is the Labour Party really committed to free speech, or is it ignorant of how “hate speech laws” have been applied in the United Kingdom and Australia and Europe?  It would be a gratuitous insult to suggest that David Cunliffe was ignorant, so . . .

But to these brickbats, let us add one bouquet.  Labour has declared it will act to prevent our spy agencies using internet to snoop on private conversations, without a warrant. 

Such legislation would protect people from the digital equivalent of warrantless phone tapping. While it wouldn’t override current GCSB powers, it would set a principle which would be used to replace the Government’s controversial new legislation.

Now there is something to get excited about.  It’s a pity that one gem was obscured, if not smothered by hyped up bloviations of little merit or substance. 

Orwellian Dystopia Emerging in Post-Fascist Italy

The Rise of Homo-fascism

Posted on December 20, 2013 

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

 

If you thought Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty is being treated unfairly by A&E, then you have to get a load of what is happening in Italy with regards to media treatment of dissenting views on homosexuality.

The government has just issued a new set of guidelines for journalists on how to treat “LGBT” people. The guidelines, funded by the Council of Europe, dictate what terms and images must be used by the media and which cannot be used when treating LGBT subjects. Journalists who do not comply are threatened with legal and professional penalties.    Journalists are instructed not use negative sexual images from gay pride events and to refrain from employing terms like “natural family”, “traditional family” and “gay marriage”. The guidelines explain that those terms are discriminatory and that marriage and family alone will do.

Italian media covered the guidelines but was not as incensed as might have been expected. Perhaps this is the chilling effect on freedom of speech that was expected all along. One of the ministers who was in charge of promulgating the guidelines said she was pleased overall with how major newspapers and other media reacted to them.

The tone of the guidelines is educational. They start with the basic notion that “sex” is not the same thing as “gender”, the latter being a mental state and the former being merely anatomical, and then proceed to explain the in and outs of homosexual jargon with colorful and detailed explanations. “Coming out”, is explained as a long process of self-awareness and awakening — not to be confused with “being outed” against one’s will. The term “gay woman” journalists are told is disparaging, and should be substituted with “lesbian” which is more respectful. But things get tricky pretty quickly after that.

The guidelines delve into the subtle differences and nuances of the differences between transsexual male to female (Mtf) and transsexual female to male (Ftm), transgender as an umbrella term for everyone who is in-between to genders either anatomically or psychologically and transvestitism, drag king and drag queen and the list goes on. It then says the biggest problem is that all these “trans” should be preceded by the feminine article (la trans) and not by the masculine (il trans) — a mistake journalists commonly make.

The document also contain perplexing moments, like when it laments the indifference of Italians to gay women. The author reports that no disparaging terms have been coined specifically for lesbians while there are a dozen disparaging terms for male homosexuals in the language in which Dante once wrote.

But the objective of it all is clear. Restricting freedom of speech is not enough. The ultimate goal is thought control.

The Way the Kingdom Rolls

Remarkably Honest Speech

The Duck Dynasty is a very popular cable reality show in the US, starring an intergenerational family of “good ol’ boys”.  Recently the patriarch of the clan, Phil Robertson had the temerity to express his opinions on homosexuality.  It just so happens his opinions are grounded in the teaching of Scripture. 

GQ Magazine did a profile piece on Phil and his family.  Here is a snippet, to give flavour:

It’s easy to see the appeal. The Robertsons are immensely likable. They’re funny. They look cool. They’re “smarter than they look,” says sportswriter Mark Schlabach, who co-writes the family’s books. And they are remarkably honest both with one another and with the viewing audience: Phil’s old hell-raising, Si’s traumatic stint in Vietnam, the intervention that the family staged for Jep when he was boozing and doing drugs in college (Phil placed him under house arrest for three months)—all of it is out in the open. The more they reveal, the more people feel connected to them.

And then, of course, there is their faith, which plays no small role here. During the family’s initial negotiations about the show with A&E, Jase told me, “the three no-compromises were faith, betrayal of family members, and duck season.” That refusal to betray their faith or one another has been a staple of every media article about the Robertson family. It’s their elevator pitch, and it has made them into ideal Christian icons: beloved for staking out a bit of holy ground within the mostly secular, often downright sinful, pop culture of America.

During that interview, Phil happened to express in passing his views on homosexuality and sin.  Read on:

What does repentance entail? Well, in Robertson’s worldview, America was a country founded upon Christian values (Thou shalt not kill, etc.), and he believes that the gradual removal of Christian symbolism from public spaces has diluted those founding principles. (He and Si take turns going on about why the Ten Commandments ought to be displayed outside courthouses.) He sees the popularity of Duck Dynasty as a small corrective to all that we have lost. “Everything is blurred on what’s right and what’s wrong,” he says. “Sin becomes fine.”

What, in your mind, is sinful?

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

Then the storm broke.  Phil was paraphrasing (pretty accurately) the Bible and was foolish enough to say it in the public square (that is, where other human beings could hear him).  The company which produces his show suspended him indefinitely.  Why?  On behalf of speaking ill of drunkards and being found guilty of drunkophobia?  Of slanderophobia?  Of course not.  But he was suspended because of homophobia!  We kid you not. 

“We are extremely disappointed to have read Phil Robertson’s comments in GQ, which are based on his own personal beliefs and are not reflected in the series Duck Dynasty,” A&E said in a statement. “His personal views in no way reflect those of A+E Networks, who have always been strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community. The network has placed Phil under hiatus from filming indefinitely.”

Now it looks likely that either A+E will back down, or the family will walk.  Already there are other corporates salivating at the prospect of signing them.  This from the rest of the family:

“We want to thank all of you for your prayers and support. The family has spent much time in prayer since learning of A&E’s decision.  We want you to know that first and foremost we are a family rooted in our faith in God and our belief that the Bible is His word.  While some of Phil’s unfiltered comments to the reporter were coarse, his beliefs are grounded in the teachings of the Bible,” reads a statement posted on the family’s Duck Commander website. “Phil is a Godly man who follows what the Bible says are the greatest commandments: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Phil would never incite or encourage hate. We are disappointed that Phil has been placed on hiatus for expressing his faith, which is his constitutionally protected right. We have had a successful working relationship with A&E but, as a family, we cannot imagine the show going forward without our patriarch at the helm.  We are in discussions with A&E to see what that means for the future of Duck Dynasty.  Again, thank you for your continued support of our family.”

The fascist wing of the homosexual lobby rapidly joined in to express its outrage.  The more principled and conscientious wing of the lobby, however, have not joined in the faux-outrage, but have spoken out strongly against the anti-homophobic brigade (we suppose these need to be given the sobriquet the anti-anti-homophobic wing).  Here is Camille Paglia’s far more principled perspective:

Paglia: Duck Dynasty uproar ‘utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist’

Posted By Caroline May On 5:42 PM 12/19/2013

The suspension of Phil Robertson from A&E’s Duck Dynasty is outrageous in a nation that values freedom, according to social critic and openly gay, dissident feminist Camille Paglia.  “I speak with authority here, because I was openly gay before the ‘Stonewall rebellion,’ when it cost you something to be so. And I personally feel as a libertarian that people have the right to free thought and free speech,” Paglia, a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, said on Laura Ingraham’s radio show Thursday.

“In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as well as they have the right to support homosexuality — as I one hundred percent do. If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again they have a right of religious freedom there,” she added.

Robertson has been suspended from Duck Dynasty due to comments he made to GQ that have been deemed “anti-gay.” According to Paglia, the culture has become too politically correct.

“To express yourself in a magazine in an interview — this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades,” Paglia said. “This is the whole legacy of free speech 1960’s that have been lost by my own party.”

Paglia went on to point out that while she is an atheist she respects religion and has been frustrated by the intolerance of gay activists.

“I think that this intolerance by gay activists toward the full spectrum of human beliefs is a sign of immaturity, juvenility,” Paglia said. “This is not the mark of a true intellectual life. This is why there is no cultural life now in the U.S. Why nothing is of interest coming from the major media in terms of cultural criticism. Why the graduates of the Ivy League with their A, A, A+ grades are complete cultural illiterates, etc. is because they are not being educated in any way to give respect to opposing view points.”

“There is a dialogue going on human civilization, for heaven sakes. It’s not just this monologue coming from fanatics who have displaced the religious beliefs of their parents into a political movement,” she added. “And that is what happened to feminism, and that is what happened to gay activism, a fanaticism.”

We respect Paglia for her conscientious, principled stand.   But there is a deeper reality here.  Once again we see that the Kingdom of God and its coming is an exceedingly messy affair.  Gloriously so.  The sovereign Lord pours out His grace and mercy upon the most unlikely of recipients–a degenerate hillbilly clan from the Bayou–and washes them clean in the blood of the Lamb, giving them new life. 

In that new life, with all its tumult and ups and downs, they testify to the Lord in their own genuine, honest, unique manner–and in the process garner an audience of 14 million people–more than watch the final series episodes of Breaking Bad.  We suspect that many of those watching have heard more of the Gospel and the saving mission of the Lord Jesus Christ than they have ever heard from anyone else before. 

God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.  There is laughter and joy and gaiety and humour in the coming of the Kingdom.  That’s the way God loves to make it  roll.  And we love Him for it.

Haters of Humanity

Baalism or the Christ

Neutrality is not an option.  It is a chimera.  The Scriptures declare that one is either for the Lord Jesus Christ, or against Him.  No middle ground.  And our Lord added, he who does not gather with Me, scatters.  These statements are not startling; they are entirely predictable and expected.  After all, our Lord is the light of the world.  Darkness cannot continue or abide in the light.  They are opposites.  When men are confronted with the light, they will either come to Christ, into His light, or they will flee Him.  No neutrality.

The secular humanist state, now regnant throughout the West, professes neutrality towards the Christ.  It is officially neither for Him, nor against Him.  The secular humanist state considers Him irrelevant.  If He exists at all, He belongs to a realm that has no bearing upon earthly reality.

But what of His followers?
  How does the modern secular state regard them?  With like neutrality.  The state and its engines are neither for Christians nor against them–so long as their faith and loyalty to Christ stays in the closet.  But as soon as Christians seek to live out their faith in public, look out.  The vaunted neutrality of the secular humanist state disappears in a puff of smoke.  Suddenly, the state is not neutral at all. 

The professed neutrality of the secular humanist state towards Christ and His disciples is a charade.  The words of Christ are true–one cannot be neutral toward Him; the words of the secular state are misleading and deceptive; they are lies.

Unbelief is never static.  It is always moving.  It is either moving towards the Light, or away from it.  So with the secular humanist state.  And consistently governments in the West have moved away from Christ for the last fifty years.  One of the consequences is that the canard of state neutrality towards the King of all governments is wearing more and more thin.  Christians, therefore, need expect that public opposition will grow and eventually persecution will break out once more against the Church in the West.

Western governments are moving now to enforce secular beliefs.  Some utterances are now beyond the pale.  The concept of “hate speech” has entered the political and legal lexicon.  To declare forthrightly or clearly the Christian ethical maxim that homosexuality is sinful and that homosexuals have been captured by evil and enslaved to it is to guilty of hate speech in many Western quarters.

Those not ignorant of our history know that this has been heard before.  It was alleged by the Roman imperium that Christians were “haters of the human race”.  They would not worship the gods–which needed to be placated to keep them onside, thus preventing natural disasters, war, famines and the like.  Failure to placate the idols meant that Christians must hate other people.  That allegation of hatred of mankind provided convenient justification for state persecution.

It is a very short bow to move from that ancient pagan construction to the secular West which increasingly characterises Christians as “haters”.  And so the maxim of our Lord proves true.  There is no middle ground.  One either gathers with the Lord of glory, or one opposes Him.  The neutrality of the secular Western state is a chimera.  Its militant secularism means that the state will increasingly bear down upon Christians and churches.

Let’s be prepared, not surprised.  Once again we will hear the challenge of the Lord’s prophet: if Yahweh is God, serve Him; but if Baal is god, serve him.  Why go limping between two opinions?  Christians are those people absolutely convinced of two things: the first is that Baal is not God; the second is that Yahweh is most certainly God.  We will not limp between the two.

It is a foolish and damned state which would move to require that Christians choose between loyalty to Christ and loyalty to itself.  We will not bless Caesar and  curse God.  Were to do so, we truly would be haters of the human race. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

The Great Cat Poo Medallion

Posted on Monday, August 26, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

Rod Dreher has a good piece here on the great looming alternative that now confronts us.

Within the biblical framework of a rightly-ordered patriotism, it is easy for Christians to take our native loyalties to our native land as a simple given, while reserving to ourselves the right to disagree with or oppose the decisions and mandates of the current administration. Jeremiah was no less a patriot for challenging King Zedekiah. Seems simple.

But when the canker of rebellious idolatry is well-advanced in any nation, the possibility of the regnant idolaters seeing believers as part of a loyal opposition begins to steadily erode. A totalitarian miasma sets in, and any disagreement with the current forms of legislated disobedience is taken either as mental illness or treason. When Stalin wanted to deal with his political enemies, he used psychiatry to define them into his version of the outer darkness. When the ancient Romans persecuted the Christians, they did so because the Christians were enemies of mankind. And in our day, simple disagreement with the proposals surrounding same sex mirage is categorized simply, routinely, and quite handily, as “hate.” That was an extraordinary move, and entirely predictable.

And someone who is mentally ill, or treasonous, is not someone who can be a loyal son of his nation. He cannot be one who simply disagrees with the current push for same sex mirages. He is outside the pale, and he is out there by definition.

So Christians need to start making some emotional adjustments, by way of preparation. “I love my country, I fear my government” is a common sentiment among us, reflecting the common distinction I mentioned above. And our position is that our fear of God necessitates that we oppose certain actions of our government, but we need not say that it necessitates a contempt for our people, customs, language, culture, etc. That is, it does not necessitate it on our end. It very well may become a requirement coming at us from the other direction. In fact, that is what is happening, and it has been the strategic play since the appearance of the very first “Hate is Not a Family Value” bumper sticker.

I do love my country, and detest the current regime (and by “regime” I am referring to more than the current administration). Well, of course the current regime has the ability to make us choose between their policies and Jesus — that’s the easy part — but they can also frame the debate in such a way that it appears we have to reject our people and nation for the sake of Christ. It does no good to complain about them taking hostages like this — one of the results of them being in power is they can manipulate things in this way. We are not all the way there yet, but we are most of the way there.

In other words, what happens when the definition of fundamental allegiance is formally and officially altered (actually, or in effect), such that any true believer in Christ would be prohibited from professing it? The early Christians were not persecuted because of their loyalty to Jesus. That was fine with the Romans. Whatever you wanted to worship in your spare time was fine with them. The problem was caused by the Christian loyalty to Jesus precluding a certain kind of loyalty to the state. The Christians were not persecuted because of their prayers to Jesus. They were persecuted because of their refusal to say a dinky little ceremonial prayer to Caesar.

As Chesterton puts it in The Everlasting Man . . .

“A convenient compromise had been made between all the multitudinous myths and religions of the Empire; that each group should worship freely and merely give a sort of official flourish of thanks to the tolerant Emperor, by tossing a little incense to him under his official title of Divus” (p. 163).

The only problem was that faithful Christians, a lot of them, wouldn’t do it. From a secular vantage point, the Romans really were being extremely tolerant, and were fully prepared to continue being that tolerant — as long as they were recognized as the final authority. And the Christians, refusing to make that concession, seemed to the authorities to be driven by sheer cussedness. But given God’s Word to us, Christians simply cannot do this kind of thing. Not to overstate the case, it is the “Supreme Court,” not the “Supreme Being.”

Because of this, again in Chesterton’s words, the enemies of Christ responded the way they always do, by surrounding us with their own peculiar forms of organized malice — “the halo of hatred around the Church of God.” And as American Christians, once free and happy, prepare themselves to start wearing that peculiar halo again, a recent move is to accuse them of being whiners about a bunch of nothing, a charge that appears to be right on schedule. You poor, delusional thing, you. “The people answered and said, Thou hast a devil: who goeth about to kill thee?” (John 7:20).

It is most clear that we are on the verge of that stage of the proceedings now. So when the decree comes down and we are told — as we are now being prepared to be told — that we cannot oppose same sex mirage and be good Americans, our first reply ought to be “very well then, have it your way. We shall be bad Americans.”

My citizenship, my affections, my loyalties whether national or regional, my manner of expression, my lever-action Winchester, my language, my love of pie, my Americanism . . . these are all contingent things. They are all creatures, because they are attributes of my life and existence, and I am a creature. Our nation, and all its pleasant things, is a creature. The grass withers, and the flower fades.

The purveyors of soft despotism want to arrange things so  that we conform fully to their agenda, or consign ourselves to their idea of the outer darkness, which turns out to be the same kind of place as Stalin’s.

Because I think like a Christian, I don’t necessarily think it is a necessary choice at all. But it is only not necessary in a nation that is not despotic — and ours is metastasizing into despotism. So under their terms, under their rule, such a choice is mandatory — because in times of persecution, they will make it necessary — which means that I will swallow the reductio. Force me to choose between Jesus and America, and then watch me choose Jesus.

The apostle Paul knew what it was to be a true Jew (Rom. 2:29). He loved his native people intensely (Rom. 9:3-5). But he also knew that it was possible for the earthly chess pieces to be maneuvered in such a way that we might have to sacrifice our queen, and real Christians are always prepared to do this gladly. This was something Paul was willing to do, and so if you successfully got him into the position where he had to decide between being a Hebrew of Hebrews, of the tribe of Benjamin (Phil. 3:5) and the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus Christ (Phil. 3:8), he didn’t even have to think about it. The prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus (Phil. 3:14) or the Medal of Freedom? Well, if you make me choose, friend, the Medal of Freedom strikes me as a haphazard affair, as a Pringles lid hung around some compromised neck with frayed shoe laces, and said lid heavily caked with cat poo.

Is it really the settled public policy of the American nation that we must choose between our love for Jesus Christ and His heavenly kingdom, on the one hand, and on the other, parades in all our major cities celebrating anal intercourse? Well, let me think about it. Can you give me some more time?

Those believers who have had an ordinary love of country, coupled with a naive (and very unbiblical) belief that America could never become an idolatrous adversary to the kingdom of God, are the kind of people who would be quick to acknowledge on paper that if we had to choose between God and country, we should always and everywhere choose God. But having ticked that box, they murmur to themselves that they are very glad that they could never be called upon to make that choice. Sorry, but here it is. Right on top of us.

Our nation is a nation just like all the others, and we can spiral into spiritual apostasy just like all the others. We are now more than halfway down the line of statues in the royal hall of Charn, where the look of our earlier nobility has vanished and we are just three elections away from the coldest forms of despair. Just think — all over the world, drone strikes making the world safe for sodomy.

As a nation like all others, we do have the option of repentance as well. But the first sin requiring the deepest repentance will have to be that damn-fool notion of American exceptionalism.

This is why pastors have a particular and pressing duty here. If this despotic modern state is the idol of our age — and it is — then pastors have a pressing duty to prepare their parishioners to resist it. We have a duty to prepare our people to refuse to bow down when they hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer (Dan. 3:5). Those instruments seem odd to us today, and so does Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, but you may depend upon it — at the time, bowing down to that statue to that music at that time was about as mainstream as you could possibly get, and the only people left standing were the extremists and weirdos.

John warns Christians as little children, telling them to keep themselves from idols (1 John 5:21). This will be a pressing danger when the idolatry is mainstream, when paying your mortgage depends on conforming, when all the networks are asking what the big deal is, when we can’t buy or sell without offering that pinch of incense to the emperor, and the music has been playing for a good minute and a half now. People are starting to look. You see an official in the back writing down your name.

It is quite true that idolatry can exist as a matter of heart motive. Paul does says that greed is idolatry, for example (Eph. 5:5; Col. 3:5). But the idolatrous state doesn’t care if you are an idolater in your heart only — they will at some point insist that you register. We sometimes have a rarefied view of idolatry, thinking that such a sin could only be determined when we appear before God at the great judgment seat. We will appear there in order to answer His series of trick questions, and when He asks us which is more important, being American or Christian, we need to say, “Christian! Of course!”

But the trick questions aren’t there — they are all here.  Pastors don’t need to be preparing men to not deny Christ before the Father. They need to teach them how to not deny Him before men (Matt. 10:33).

Letter From America (About College Hate Crimes)

The Coddling of College Hate-Crime Hoaxers

 

 

By Michelle Malkin

March 6, 2013National Review Online

American college campuses are the most fertile grounds for fake hate. They’re marinated in identity politics and packed with self-indulgent, tenured radicals suspended in the 1960s. In the name of enlightenment and tolerance, these institutions of higher learning breed a corrosive culture of left-wing self-victimization. Take my alma mater, Oberlin College. Please.

This week, the famously “progressive” college in Ohio made international headlines when it shut down classes after a series of purported hate crimes. According to the Oberlin Review (a student newspaper I once wrote for), anti-black and anti-gay vandalism/“hate speech” have plagued the campus since February 9.

“‘Whites Only’ was written above a water fountain, ‘N****r Oven’ was written inside the elevator, and ‘No N****rs’ was written on a bathroom door” at one dormitory, according to the publication.

Swastikas and epithets were drawn on posters around the school. Activists implied the incidents were tied to Black History Month. The final straw? A menacing presence on campus who allegedly donned a “KKK hood” and robe near the segregated black dormitory known as “Afrikan Heritage House.”

Oberlin president Marvin Krislov and three college deans ostentatiously published an “open letter” announcing the administration’s decision to “suspend formal classes and non-essential activities.” The campus body immediately jumped to conclusions and indulged in collective grievance-mongering. The New York Times, Black Entertainment Television, and the Associated Press all piled on with angst-ridden coverage of the puzzling crimes at one of the first U.S. colleges to admit blacks and women.

Oberlin alumna Lena Dunham, a cable-TV celebrity who starred in a pro-Obama ad likening her vote for him to losing her virginity, took to Twitter to rally her fellow “Obies.” The Associated Press dutifully reported Dunham’s plea as news: “Hey, Obies, remember the beautiful, inclusive and downright revolutionary history of the place you call home. Protect each other.”

But what the AP public-relations team for Dunham and the Oberlin mau-mau-ers didn’t report is the rest of the story. While Blame Righty propagandists bemoaned the frightening persistence of white supremacy in the tiny town of Oberlin, city police told a local reporter that eyewitnesses saw no one in KKK garb — but instead saw a pedestrian wearing a blanket. Yes, the dreaded Assault Blanket of Phantom Bias.

Moreover, after arresting two students involved in the spate of hate messages left around campus, police say “it is unclear if they were motivated by racial hatred or — as has been suggested — were attempting a commentary on free speech.”

Color me unsurprised. The truth is that Oberlin has been a hotbed of dubious hate-crime claims, dating back to the late 1980s and 1990s, when I was a student on campus. In 1988, giant signs reading “White Supremacy Rules (Kill All N****rs)” and “White Supremacy Rules, (F*** (slashed out and replaced with “Kill”) All Minorities)” were hung anonymously at the Student Union building. It has long been suspected that minority students themselves were responsible.

In 1993, a memorial arch on campus dedicated to Oberlin missionaries who died in the Boxer Rebellion was defaced with anti-Asian graffiti. The venomous messages — “Death to Ch***s Memorial” and “Dead ch***s, good ch***s” — led to a paroxysm of protests, administration self-flagellation, and sanctimonious resolutions condemning bigotry. But the hate crime was concocted by an Asian-American Oberlin student engaged in the twisted pursuit of raising awareness about hate by faking it, Tawana Brawley–style.

Segregated dorms, segregated graduations, and segregated academic departments foster paranoid and selective race-consciousness. While I was on campus, one Asian-American student accused a library worker of racism after the poor staffer asked the grievance-mongering student to lower the blinds where she was studying. Call the Department of Justice!

A black student accused an ice-cream-shop owner of racism after he told the student she was not allowed to sit at an outside table because she hadn’t purchased any items from his store. Alert the U.N. Commission on Human Rights!

In 2006, I went back to Oberlin to confront the campus with the hate-crime-hoax phenomenon. As I told students back then, liberals see racism where it doesn’t exist, fabricate it when they can’t find it, and ignore it within their own ranks. I documented case after case of phony racism by students and faculty, from Ole Miss to Arizona State to Claremont McKenna, and contrasted it with the vitriolic prejudice that tolerant lefties have for minorities who stray from the political plantation.

The response from “students of color”? They took offense, of course, and characterized my speech as self-hating hate. Just as their coddling faculty and college elders have taught them to do.

I repeat: Mix identity politics, multicultural studies, cowardly administrators, and biased media — and you’ve got a toxic recipe for opportunistic hate-crime hoaxes. Welcome to high-priced, higher mis-education, made and manufactured in the U.S.A.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies. © 2013 Creators.com

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

A World of Right Reason 

Money, Love, Desire – On Scandal
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 18 February 2013

When the apostle describes a generic condition of unbelief, it is interesting how he does it. When we lived in unbelief, what was the atmosphere we breathed continually?

“For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another” (Tit. 3:3).

For Paul, putting off the old man, the old way of being a human, involves shedding the snake skin of malicious snark. “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice” (Eph. 4:31). He says something very similar in Colossians. When we lived in the world of unbelief, all such things were natural. “But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth” (Col. 3:8).

This is not limited to the apostle Paul. It is not one of his personal hobby horses. James tells us that the spirit in us veers off toward envy (Jas. 4:5), but hastens to reassure us that God gives more grace. The implication is that apart from such grace, malice and envy are the normal default settings for us.
Peter assumes the same thing. When we come to Christ, we do so “laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speakings” (1 Pet. 2:1).

Now all this ties in with what I have been arguing about how the world runs on envy and accusation. You can see how easily a number of such sins cluster together. The best defense is always a good offense, and rather than waiting around to be accused, many who are riddled with guilt look for opportunities to point the finger first. Their envy selects the target, the accusation puts the target back on his heels, pride makes victory mandatory and lies necessary, and so forth.

Now God’s intention for the company of believers is not to have this spirit of accusation imported, only with the addition of theological and orthodox adjectives in the accusations. We are called to do something different, and not to do the same thing decorated differently.

This means that God’s picture of the world outside is a world of tangles, strategems, lies, vituperation, malice, back-biting, and all the rest of it. God’s picture of the company of saints is that of a great pavilion, set apart from the “strife of tongues” “Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence from the pride of man: Thou shalt keep them secretly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues”(Ps. 31:20).

But of course, this is not how the world of unbelief describes itself. The world of unbelief describes itself as a place or urbane sophistication, or frankness, of scientific inquiry, of openness in dialogue, of integrity and mutual affirmation. Remember that the devil, the accuser, is the father of lies (John 8:44), and this is the central lie. He loves the word integrity.

Acceptance of this line of propaganda is what keeps many dissatisfied unbelievers from asking the right kind of pointed questions. In their minds, there is no question but that their world is filled with malice and envy. The home they grew up in was full of it, their education was full of it, their circle of high school friends was full of it, and all their ex-lovers were the worst. But one of the things the spirit of accusation does is reassure the unsettled that the system is fine. Such a parishioner is told that the holy mother Church is above it all — he has just been unfortunate in his choice of pew. But Scripture declares that the whole church of High-Minded Accusation is riddled with hypocrisy. The whole thing is a mess, front to back.

When someone comes to realize that the whole system is bad, they have come to the point where they will consider “putting off the old man.” In order to come to Christ, a man has to do more than depart from himself, although he must certainly do that (Matt. 16:24). A man must depart from the world (1 John 2:15; Jas. 4:4). He must repudiate the system of accusation, and the entire apparatus of it. True conversion is departure from one world, and entry into another. Regeneration is the result of dying to the old humanity and coming to life in the new humanity. The work of the gospel in the world is to highlight and make manifest the high contrast between children of God and children of the slandering accuser.

The distinction is not found in temples. The Hindus have temples. The distinction is not altars. The Buddhists have altars. The distinction is not possession of a sacred text. The Muslims have that.  The distinction is not reason and science. The atheists have some of that.

“In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother. For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous” (1 John 3:10-12).

And because of this new birth into a world free of condemnation and accusation, we find that all these things have been added to us. We are a living temple made up of living stones, our lives are offered up as living sacrifices on a perpetual altar, we have a book teeming with everlasting life, and our brains, once broken and full of malice, have been set free. We are born into a world of right reason.

Letter From America (About Free Speech)

 Western Hypocrisy Mocked by Islamists

Every so often secular revolutionaries break out from the chains and constraints of the Commentariat.  They see some things that bear a remarkable resemblance to hypocrisy in the received wisdom of Western secularism.  More often than not the remedies proposed to the hypocrisy are way off the reservation, but the fundamental point being made remains sound. 

Here is William Saletan writing in Slate:

Hate-Speech Hypocrites

How can we ban hate speech against Jews while defending mockery of Muslims?

By William Saletan| 

Posted Friday, Sept. 28, 2012

Photograph by Hasham Ahmed/AFP/Getty Images. Pakistani Shiite Muslims shout slogans beside a burning Israeli flag during a rally against Israel and the United States to mark the Al-Quds (Jerusalem) day on the last Friday of the holiest month of Ramadan in Peshawar in August

Jews have too much influence over U.S. foreign policy. Gay men are too promiscuous. Muslims commit too much terrorism. Blacks commit too much crime. 

Each of those claims is poorly stated. Each, in its clumsy way, addresses a real problem or concern. And each violates laws against hate speech. In much of what we call the free world, for writing that paragraph, I could be jailed.

Libertarians, cultural conservatives, and racists have complained about these laws for years. But now the problem has turned global. Islamic governments, angered by an anti-Muslim video that provoked protests and riots in their countries, are demanding to know why insulting the Prophet Mohammed is free speech but vilifying Jews and denying the Holocaust isn’t. And we don’t have a good answer.

If we’re going to preach freedom of expression around the world, we have to practice it. We have to scrap our hate-speech laws. Muslim leaders want us to extend these laws. At this week’s meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, they lobbied for tighter censorship. Egypt’s president said freedom of expression shouldn’t include speech that is “used to incite hatred” or “directed towards one specific religion.” Pakistan’s president urged the “international community” to “criminalize” acts that “endanger world security by misusing freedom of expression.” Yemen’s president called for “international legislation” to suppress speech that “blasphemes the beliefs of nations and defames their figures.” The Arab League’s secretary-general proposed a binding “international legal framework” to “criminalize psychological and spiritual harm” caused by expressions that “insult the beliefs, culture and civilization of others.”

President Obama, while condemning the video, met these proposals with a stout defense of free speech. Switzerland’s president agreed: “Freedom of opinion and of expression are core values guaranteed universally which must be protected.” And when a French magazine published cartoons poking fun at Mohammed, the country’s prime minister insisted that French laws protecting free speech extend to caricatures.

This debate between East and West, between respect and pluralism, isn’t a crisis. It’s a stage of global progress. The Arab spring has freed hundreds of millions of Muslims from the political retardation of dictatorship. They’re taking responsibility for governing themselves and their relations with other countries. They’re debating one another and challenging us. And they should, because we’re hypocrites.

From Pakistan to Iran to Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Nigeria to the United Kingdom, Muslims scoff at our rhetoric about free speech. They point to European laws against questioning the Holocaust. Monday on CNN, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad needled British interviewer Piers Morgan: “Why in Europe has it been forbidden for anyone to conduct any research about this event? Why are researchers in prison? … Do you believe in the freedom of thought and ideas, or no?” On Tuesday, Pakistan’s U.N. ambassador, speaking for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, told the U.N. Human Rights Council:

We are all aware of the fact that laws exist in Europe and other countries which impose curbs, for instance, on anti-Semitic speech, Holocaust denial, or racial slurs. We need to acknowledge, once and for all, that Islamophobia in particular and discrimination on the basis of religion and belief are contemporary forms of racism and must be dealt with as such. Not to do so would be a clear example of double standards. Islamophobia has to be treated in law and practice equal to the treatment given to anti-Semitism.

He’s right. Laws throughout Europe forbid any expression that “minimizes,” “trivializes,” “belittles,” “plays down,” “contests,” or “puts in doubt” Nazi crimes. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic extend this prohibition to communist atrocities. These laws carry jail sentences of up to five years. Germany adds two years for anyone who “disparages the memory of a deceased person.”

Hate speech laws go further. Germany punishes anyone found guilty of “insulting” or “defaming segments of the population.” The Netherlands bans anything that “verbally or in writing or image, deliberately offends a group of people because of their race, their religion or beliefs, their hetero- or homosexual orientation or their physical, psychological or mental handicap.” It’s illegal to “insult” such a group in France, to “defame” them in Portugal, to “degrade” them in Denmark, or to “expresses contempt” for them in Sweden. In Switzerland, it’s illegal to “demean” them even with a “gesture.” Canada punishes anyone who “willfully promotes hatred.” The United Kingdom outlaws “insulting words or behavior” that arouse “racial hatred.” Romania forbids the possession of xenophobic “symbols.”

What have these laws produced? Look at the convictions upheld or accepted by the European Court of Human Rights. Four Swedes who distributed leaflets that called homosexuality “deviant” and “morally destructive” and blamed it for AIDS. An Englishman who displayed in his window a 9/11 poster proclaiming, “Islam out of Britain.” A Turk who published two letters from readers angry at the government’s treatment of Kurds. A Frenchman who wrote an article disputing the plausibility of poison gas technology at a Nazi concentration camp.

Look at the defendants rescued by the court. A Dane “convicted of aiding and abetting the dissemination of racist remarks” for making a documentary in which three people “made abusive and derogatory remarks about immigrants and ethnic groups.” A man “convicted of openly inciting the population to hatred” in Turkey by “criticizing secular and democratic principles and openly calling for the introduction of Sharia law.” Another Turkish resident “convicted of disseminating propaganda” after he “criticized the United States’ intervention in Iraq and the solitary confinement of the leader of a terrorist organization.” Two Frenchmen who wrote a newspaper article that “portrayed Marshal Pétain in a favorable light, drawing a veil over his policy of collaboration with the Nazi regime.”

Beyond the court’s docket, you’ll find more prosecutions of dissent. A Swedish pastor convicted of violating hate-speech laws by preaching against homosexuality. A Serb convicted of discrimination for saying, “We are against every gathering where homosexuals are demonstrating in the streets of Belgrade and want to show something, which is a disease, like it is normal.” An Australian columnist convicted of violating the Racial Discrimination Act by suggesting that “there are fair-skinned people in Australia with essentially European ancestry … who, motivated by career opportunities available to Aboriginal people or by political activism, have chosen to falsely identify as Aboriginal.”

My favorite case involves a Frenchman who sought free-speech protection under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights:

Denis Leroy is a cartoonist. One of his drawings representing the attack on the World Trade Centre was published in a Basque weekly newspaper … with a caption which read: “We have all dreamt of it … Hamas did it”. Having been sentenced to payment of a fine for “condoning terrorism”, Mr Leroy argued that his freedom of expression had been infringed.

The Court considered that, through his work, the applicant had glorified the violent destruction of American imperialism, expressed moral support for the perpetrators of the attacks of 11 September, commented approvingly on the violence perpetrated against thousands of civilians and diminished the dignity of the victims. Despite the newspaper’s limited circulation, the Court observed that the drawing’s publication had provoked a certain public reaction, capable of stirring up violence and of having a demonstrable impact on public order in the Basque Country. The Court held that there had been no violation of Article 10.

How can you justify prosecuting cases like these while defending cartoonists and video makers who ridicule Mohammed? You can’t. Either you censor both, or you censor neither. Given the choice, I’ll stand with Obama. “Efforts to restrict speech,” he warned the U. N., “can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities.”  

That principle, borne out by the wretched record of hate-speech prosecutions, is worth defending. But first, we have to live up to it.

Normophobia

Carl Trueman Finds the World to be Upside Down

Pleased to meet you. Hope you guessed my name.

Posted by Carl Trueman

Reformation 21 Blog

Every now and then I find myself reminded of just how much the world has changed.  One such moment came for me on Saturday.  I was up in Boston to preach for my friend and fellow member of a certain parachurch blacklist, Mike Abendroth. On Saturday afternoon, he offered to take me to Northampton, location of the early ministry of Jonathan Edwards.   As I always try to travel light, I ditched my jacket but had no choice but to wear my chinos and a button down shirt for the trip.  In short, I had the humiliation, as an OPC man, of walking around Northampton looking like some newly-minted associate pastor at your typical PCA church.

We went to Starbucks.  There I saw a lady who was, as we would say back in Blighty, clearly a ‘bloke’ dressed as a ‘bird.’  Now I have seen transgendered people before.
  On one level, the sight no longer shocks me as it once did, though I have to say that I can never overcome my firm belief that men usually make remarkably ugly women.  And I can assure you that this chap was no exception to the general aesthetic rule.

What surprised me, however, was how everybody else in the coffee shop (including, I have to confess, myself) simply went about their business as if everything was normal.  And, of course, the reason was simple: everything was indeed normal.  The sight of a man dressed as a woman is no longer weird. It is part of the rich tapestry of everyday life.  My grandfather would have had no categories even to compute such a sight; but now it passes without so much as snigger or a nudge-nudge.

None of this would have been so bad except for the fact that it was clear as I walked up the  street in Northampton that one or two heads were turning to stare at the weird guy dressed like a PCA associate pastor.   My very nondescript, ordinary, balding, middle-aged blandness made me stand out as utterly weird.  Even Mike’s soul patch and sub-AC DC standard tee gave him a little bit of cover; my wing tip shoes simply sealed my fate.   Indeed, I have to say that I have never been subject to such evident and oppressive neophiliac normaphobia in all my life.   The sooner normaphobes are categorised as hate criminals, the better it will be for those of us who belong to the despised minority of the once but clearly no longer normal.

Two things came to mind: the beautiful young things of the reformed renaissance have a hard choice to make in the next decade.  You really do kid only yourselves if you think you can be an orthodox Christian and be at the same time cool enough and hip enough to cut it in the wider world. Frankly, in a couple of years it will not matter how much urban ink you sport, how much fair trade coffee you drink, how many craft brews you can name, how much urban gibberish you spout, how many art house movies you can find that redeemer figure in, and how much money you divert from gospel preaching to social justice: maintaining biblical sexual ethics will be the equivalent in our culture of being a white supremacist.

And the second thing that came to mind were the lyrics of a Jagger-Richards song: ‘Just as every cop is a criminal And all the sinners saints’.  That is surely a brilliant statement of the topsy-turvy morality of the world which sin has produced and in which we now live. 

Oh, and the name of the song?  ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, of course

Letter From America (About the UK)

British Freedom of Speech Endangered

John Stuart Mill, where art thou?

By Charles C. W. Cooke
March 29, 2012
National Review Online

In Britain, the trend toward the curbing of free expression picked up speed on Monday, when British student Liam Stacey was sentenced to 56 days in prison for posting racist comments on Twitter. When Premier League footballer Fabrice Muamba had a heart attack during a soccer game and was rushed to hospital, a drunk Stacey took to the microblogging site and spewed a series of racially abhorrent tweets into the ether. Other Twitter users — including sports pundit and former top-flight footballer Stan Collymore — quickly noticed his words and reported Stacey to the police, who arrested him and charged him with incitement to racial hatred a few days later.

When Muamba collapsed, said the judge at Stacey’s trial, “not just the footballer’s family, not just the footballing world but the whole world were literally praying for his life. Your comments aggravated this situation.” In fact, it is hard to see how Stacey’s words aggravated anything much at all.
What he wrote, utterly appalling and unprintable as it was, had bearing neither on the efficacy of Muamba’s life-saving treatment nor on the likelihood of his survival. It prevented nobody from praying for his life or exercising any of their own rights. And it encouraged nobody to do anything illegal. Sure, what Stacey wrote may have — should have — upset many people. But in a free country, that cannot be a crime.

Explaining his decision to imprison Stacey, the judge noted that he had “no choice but to impose an immediate custodial sentence to reflect the public outrage at what [Stacey had] done.” “To reflect the public outrage”? Translation: British speech law is determined by the sentiments of the mob. That this is the case would constitute a tragedy anywhere that free men live, but it is especially egregious in the land of John Stuart Mill.

In On Liberty, Mill averred that “if all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” His words carried no small print, nor did his associated contention that “there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it might be considered.”

It is hard to fathom why exactly Stacey was singled out. It is a sad fact of modern life that people say racist and abhorrent things on social networks and public message boards all the time — YouTube’s comments section, particularly, is a sewer — and yet most go untouched. Given that a popular Twitter reaction to Stacey’s imprisonment on Monday was “I hope he gets raped by a black man in prison” — and there were other, even less charming, variants — one can but ask why such subsequent comments do not constitute as much of an incitement to racial hatred — to violence, perhaps — as the original, and why they are not worthy of the same punishment. If an eye for an eye makes the world blind, an insult for an insult would have seen thousands locked up in British jails this week if the law had been applied consistently.

What Liam Stacey said was horrible and mean-spirited. But he deserves our opprobrium, not jail time. Short-lived will be the society that overturns its foundational liberties for two-bit bigots. As always, free speech must apply as much to people we don’t like — to those who say obnoxious and awful things — as to those we do. Sadly, judging by the “hate speech” laws that are filling Britain’s books, and by the reaction to this case, few on the Sceptred Isle seem to care about such things anymore; nor really to understand that the statements “I deplore the Ku Klux Klan” and “but they have every right to speak” are not mutually exclusive propositions.

This is a problem, because at the root of seemingly widespread British pleasure toward Liam Stacey’s incarceration is not a desire for revenge, but a cancerous insecurity — an insecurity that hinges upon the fear that the British are just so easily tempted by authoritarianism and by the words of men who hold the wrong values that the government needs to arrest and silence the outliers.

This is a position that makes no sense. Liberty predates government and the freest governments are of the people. The British state, full of flawed men, cannot possibly ossify truth and set it in aspic to inure it from inquiry and injury inflicted by others. As Thomas Jefferson noted: “Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.”

Jefferson was defending free speech on the grounds that it fostered religious toleration and, in this particular case, “uniformity of opinion” is indeed desirable. Britain certainly does not need more racists like Liam Stacey to achieve a virtuous diversity of opinion. But there is a troubling paradox at the heart of the idea that racism is so uniformly rejected as a national value that those who demonstrate it need locking up, and it is one that is part of a worrying British trend.

A few newspaper columnists have suggested that Stacey was harshly treated. But very few have claimed freedom of speech as their justification. Instead, they have quibbled with the punishment. The writer Musa Okwonga wondered in the Independent whether “a very stiff community penalty would suffice.” Perhaps, he recommended, “Stacey could have been made to work the type of hours in the type of places that refugees work. Then he might have understood better their daily burdens, which hatred like his only serves to increase.” Others, such as the Telegraph’s Tom Chivers, suggested that his punishment had already been served in the form of damage to his reputation. But nobody cited principle. Nobody channeled John Stuart Mill. This is a disgrace, for while the young man sitting in the cell is small fry, the liberty being compromised in his name is not.

— Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate at National Review.

More Time, Please

Blasphemy Laws in the UK

Western societies are gradually enacting their version of blasphemy laws.  It is axiomatic that every nation, whatever its creed or governing belief about itself, regards some things as so sacred and holy it punishes the desecration of the same.  For some nations it may be burning or spitting on the flag.  For others it is defaming the gods.  Thus Socrates was condemned and killed.  For others, it is anyone who defames Dear Leader.  The gulag or firing squad awaits. 

Blasphemy laws indict any action which a particular state believes undermines its very foundations.
  The more power the state has aggregated to itself, the more broad and far ranging the kinds of speech indicted as undermining the realm and defaming the holy.  As the West has rebelled against the Lord Jesus Christ, casting Him to the outer darknesses of the realm, it has gradually changed the definition and application of blasphemy laws. 

In a Christian society, blasphemy is an act of public slander and defamation of the Name of God.  Naturally, in societies under the aegis of the Enlightenment such an archaic concept had to be ridiculed and derided as part of a primitive, ignorant past. Secular humanism became the established religion of Western nations.  Blasphemy laws were rubbed out of the statute books.  However, whilst professing tolerance of all religions and opinions, the West has gradually proscribed opinions and speech which defame the very foundations of the secular humanist religion.  Western blasphemy laws are now on the statute books and are being applied. 

We have been treated to a demonstration of this grand hypocrisy in the UK.  The Guardian summarises this example of the application of UK blasphemy laws:

A student has been jailed for 56 days for posting offensive comments on Twitter about the on-pitch collapse of Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba.  Liam Stacey was arrested after his tweets were reported to police by Twitter users from across Britain, including the former England striker Stan Collymore. The 21-year-old pleaded guilty to the Racially Aggravated s4A Public order Act 1986. He posted his offensive comments shortly after Muamba suffered a cardiac arrest during his team’s FA Cup quarter-final tie against Tottenham Hotspur on 17 March. . . .

District judge John Charles told Stacey: “It was racist abuse via a social networking site instigated as a result of a vile and abhorrent comment about a young footballer who was fighting for his life. At that moment, not just the footballer’s family, not just the footballing world but the whole world were literally praying for his life. Your comments aggravated this situation.

“I have no choice but to impose an immediate custodial sentence to reflect the public outrage at what you have done.

Judge John Charles must be a powerful intellect, virtually omniscient.  Apparently the whole world was apparently literally praying for Muamba’s life. The Judge must have the eye of a god, indeed. 

But we digress.  Stacey’s blasphemy consisted of two things: firstly, he was judged to have uttered racist statements.  This is a blasphemy against the peculiar notion of “tolerance”, which lies at the very foundation of the modern secular humanist state.  It thus attacks the established religion of the UK.  It is, therefore, a public blasphemy.  The chief prosecutor in the case gravely informed the court and the nation:

“Racist language is inappropriate in any setting and through any media. . . .  ”

That statement can only be true and just if Man is regarded as the ultimate holy being of the nation.  It is reasonable to conclude that racist speech and blasphemy are now one and the same in the UK.

The second aspect to the blasphemy committed by Stacey is that he mocked and ridiculed another human being, saying “vile and abhorrent” things about a young footballer.

For the humanist state, Man is the ultimate reality.  And a footballers is nearer to deity than most. To speak ill of another human being defames and undermines the very raison d’etre of the secular humanist state.

The convicted blasphemer is going to suffer not just the criminal indictment, but also public revulsion.  His former fellow students are quoted as wanting him expelled from Swansea University and the University looks as if it will comply.  Ostracism and exile are time honoured punishments for blasphemers. 

What other societies have blasphemy laws on the statute books?  Ah, yes–Islamic countries.  Pakistan, for example, has a  Penal Code which outlaws blasphemy against any religion.  However, blasphemy laws are only applied when someone allegedly defames Islam in some way.  Our contention is the way Pakistan blasphemy laws function in the predominantly Islamic society is precisely the way the UK’s blasphemy laws now function in the UK.  Both protect the established religion.  Both proscribe any offence against the god of the nation.  The only difference lies in the severity of the penalties imposed. 

But give the UK a bit more time: it is fast catching up. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Alinsky Ball

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 06 March 2012

Recent days have seen the media and/or new media in an uproar over a couple of incidents that invite a bit more investigation from the intellectually curious. I refer to Rush Limbaugh’s insult of Sandra Fluke, and Kirk Cameron’s gracious response to a question from Piers Morgan about homosexuality.

Now in the interests of accuracy, it should be noted that Rush has apologized for calling Ms. Fluke a slut, and so we should address the apology first. I confess I haven’t mastered all the details of this important situation as I ought to have done, but if Ms. Fluke indicated multiple guys, then the comment should stand. That’s what a slut is. But if she has a steady boyfriend, and she is faithful to him, then it really was uncalled for to call her that. She would be something more like a concubine.

Of sociological interest here is the same reaction for very different behavior, and different reactions for very similar behavior.
Rush says something provocative, and everybody goes bonkernuts. Kirk says something judicious and reasonable, and everybody goes bonkernuts. Then, when Bill Maher says things far worse than what Rush did (but in a similar vein and about conservative women), his reputation as the Voltaire of the guttersnipes only continues to rise. Kirsten Powers is notable among liberals for her very lonely objection to this kind of leftist women-bashing. Of course, conservatives point out this double standard all the time, but are serenely ignored. But why?

The answer is because complaints about this double-standard are a sure-fire indication that conservatives still do not have a clue about what is actually going on. They think they are playing football, and the other team is called “the liberals,” and that the same rules apply to both sides, because they are playing football too, right? There are, or ought to be, impartial referees to call the fouls in an equitable manner.

But that is not what is happening. Conservatives are playing football, sure enough, but the other side is playing Alinsky ball. When you line up on the ball, and the linemen on the other side have switchblades and revolvers, the game is not really football anymore. With football, the coach says things like “it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.” With Alinsky ball, it is not how you play the game, but whether you win or lose.

When the cheating is surreptitious, the game can remain the same kind of game, and just be a dirty one. But when the cheating is brazen and open, then what is happening is that the rules of the game are being rewritten. As it turns out the blue jerseys can carry heat. Says right here. But if someone with a red jersey tries it . . . “how dare you, sir? Have you no shame?”

Here is another example — but it is an almost exact parallel. An editorial cartoonist, about to make an insulting joke about Jesus, does not draw himself up at the last minute, thinking about the devastating consequences of the Baptists of Arkansas rioting, and burning Little Rock down. That same cartoonist, about to deliver a witticism at the expense of Muhammad, will sit for a minute, stroking his chin. Then he will put the pen down.

Pitching a fit is a way of getting what you want. If you can get what you want by doing that, then Alinsky would approve. You need to personalize the fight, he would say, and be as unfair to your personalized adversary as you need to be. If he wants you to stop, then he should give you what you want already. Conservatives should read Rules for Radicals, and stop being so surprised.

One final thing. Conservatives should not descend to this level. When the other side plays this way, it does not constitute permission to do the same — however poetic the justice might seem to us. We answer to someone outside the game entirely.

Someone might reply with the objection that he wants to make them howl. But don’t worry about that. Limit yourself to biblical expressions, tactics, epithets, humor, and so on, and they will howl plenty. All of us could get arrested for hate crimes without ever ranging outside the boundaries of our concordance.

The Cancer Just Got Bigger

When They Came for the Gypsies . . .

Further to yesterday’s post on the growth of a cancerous despotism in the West, here is a video from the UK.

H/T: Andrei at NZ Conservative.

Silence Like a Cancer Grows

 White Fellas in the Black

As the West turns away from the Living God it will slide irrevocably into the darkness.  We have published many pieces on the “soft” despotism that now grips Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world.  Eventually and inevitably the soft despotism will become hard.  There will be plenty of sign posts along the way. 

By the time the proverbial “man-in-the-street” wakes up and decides that he does not particularly like living under a despot and that in rejecting Christ as his King he never meant nor intended to end up under the heel of a totalitarian regime, it will be too late.  Prufrock’s  “That’s not what I meant at all” will be heard on the lips of the sheep.  Even as we write these words we anticipate the reaction, “Totalitarian?  You’ve got to be kidding.  In the West?  In New Zealand?  Never.  Ever.  It’s impossible.” 

But as Santayana observed, those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
  Limited, constrained government can only be sustained where a culture believes itself to be governed ultimately by the law of God.  Only then will the culture believe that government itself is itself under law and is proscribed and limited.  Without fear and reverence of the Living God, government power inevitably grows like a malignant cancer. 

In the West we have insisted that we can enjoy the freedom brought by the Christ without Him.  We have grounded it in “human rights”.  Increasingly those same rights are driving us more and more into despotism.  Here is the latest signpost, this time from Australia. 

Class action against columnist Andrew Bolt succeeds in Federal Court

THE assumed right of unfettered freedom of speech was trumped by laws protecting against racial vilification this morning after the Federal Court delivered its decision on the controversial “white Aborigines” case of Pat Eatock v Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. 
 
Justice Mordy Bromberg found Bolt and the Herald and Weekly Times contravened the Racial Discrimination Act by publishing two articles on racial identity which contained “errors in fact, distortions of the truth and inflammatory and provocative language”.  Speaking outside court, Bolt said it was “a terrible day for free speech in this country”.  “It is particularly a restriction on the freedom of all Australians to discusss multiculturalism and how people identify themselves,” Bolt said.

“I argued then and I argue now that we should not insist on the differences between us but focus instead on what unites us as human beings,” Bolt said.  The columnist said he would read and consider the full judgment before commenting further.

Justice Bromberg said it was important to note his judgment did not forbid debate or articles on racial identity issues if done “reasonably and in good faith in the making or publishing of a fair comment”.  “Nothing in the orders I make should suggest that it is unlawful for a publication to deal with racial identification, including by challenging the genuineness of the identification of a group of people,” Justice Bromberg said.

Ms Eatock and a group of eight other Aboriginals took Bolt and the Herald and Weekly Times to court claiming racial vilifiication over two articles in which he criticised fair-skinned Aborigines for what he argued was a choice they made, as people of mixed racial background, to emphasise their indigenous heritage over their white heritage.  Ms Eatock welcomed the judgment, saying it was a statement against discrimination.  She said the court’s decision meant racial identity could be debated, but with respect.

“It’s how you handle it, you can’t be malicious … he (Bolt) must handle it based on truth and fact,” she said outside court.  Ms Eatock told the Herald Sun she was aware of her Scottish ancestry from her mother’s side but saw herself as Aboriginal. 

In the articles, on April 15 and August 21, 2009, Bolt wrote that some fair-skinned Aboriginal people, whom he called “political Aborigines”, had received prominence or indigenous awards because they chose to identify with their Aboriginality.  The Eatock action claimed Bolt’s articles – which appeared under the headlines “It’s so hip to be black” and “White fellas in the black” – had “offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated” them and were a breach of racial vilification laws.

In court during hearings in April, Neil Young, QC, for Bolt, had argued that freedom of speech “trumped” other rights and was a cornerstone of democracy.  “Everything that’s said, even if it’s expressed colourfully, is rationally related to a thesis that’s a matter of public interest,” Mr Young had said.  He argued the legal test for racial vilification was how an informed person would interpret the views expressed in Bolt’s articles.

But Ron Merkel, QC, for the complainants, said there was no attempt by Ms Eatock or other members of the group to shut down freedom of speech or debate about racial identity issues.  Mr Merkel said Bolt was free to express his views on the subject but should not have chosen to attack the nine individuals he named in his columns and blog.

In the sometimes heated court exchanges, Bolt took exception to Mr Merkel’s comparison of the debate and Bolt’s views to Nazi race laws, the Holocaust and eugenics.  Bolt argued those who chose to identify with only one part of their background over another were contributing to racism and came at the cost of less focus on the important issues of education, housing, health and poverty.  The parties were asked by Justice Bromberg to meet and discuss what orders the court should make.

The nine Aborigines who took legal action against Mr Bolt were former ATSIC member Geoff Clark, artist Bindi Cole, academic Larissa Behrendt, author Anita Heiss, health worker Leeanne Enoch, native title expert Graham Atkinson, academic Wayne Atkinson, lawyer Mark McMillan and activist Pat Eatock.  Mr Bolt and several of the plaintiffs were in court for today’s decision.

Two-Faced Facebook

Facebook Hates the Christian Gospel

Social networking behemoth, Facebook has decided to promote homosexuality by classifying opinions and speech critical of homosexuality on Facebook as hate-speech.  As you all know, hate-speech is a big, big no no. It is the latest attempt at censorship and the denial of free speech. It always devolves into an attack upon Christians and Christianity.  The reason is that the Gospel is offensive to the natural man.

The Bible declares that the Unbeliever abides under the wrath of God (John 3:36).  Now to the natural man in his pride and arrogance, that is offensive.  He regards it as “hateful” speech. So, over time, banning “hate-speech” morphs into restrictions upon and persecution of Christians and the Church.
  When Christians declare that the Bible condemns homosexuality as abhorrent, a perversion, an evil–denounced in the same ethical terms as murder, theft, God-cursing and paedophilia–homosexuals and Unbelievers regard that as hate-speech.

Ironically, of course, the Unbeliever cannot argue or prosecute his cause without expressing hate-speech towards Christians and the Church.  Thus when your opponent expresses his views he is denounced as being guilty of hate-speech; when one denounces the “hater” it is regarded as just, and righteous, and fair.  The “hate-speech” construct is simply a device to exert hegemony over others. 

So, Facebook has decided to enter the lists and engage in hateful acts against those who condemn the ethical perversion of homosexuality.  Here is the Daily Caller‘s take on the matter.

Facebook: Criticizing gays no longer allowed, but hoping for Limbaugh’s slow death OK

By Caroline May – The Daily Caller    10/19/2010

At the end of last week Facebook announced that it had allied with the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) to remove what it considers anti-gay references from the social networking site.
“This violent, hateful speech has no place in our media – whether it is in print, on the airwaves or online,” GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios said in a press release. “Facebook has taken an important first step in making social media a place where anti-gay violence is not allowed. Our community needs to continue to be vigilant and report instances of hateful comments and images across the site to Facebook moderators as well as post messages of support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth.”

The site’s “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” already demands that users to adhere to basic precepts of civility while using Facebook. “You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user. You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence,” the agreement reads. Facebook further reserves the right to remove any content that violates these standards.

But not all threatening language is created equal, apparently. Among Facebook’s many online communities are groups such as, “I Hate Rush Limbaugh,” “I Can’t Wait For Rush Limbaugh to Die,” and “Rush Limbaugh Should Die Slowly.” Hateful? Yes. Threatening? Sure. So why are these groups still on Facebook?

In an email to The Daily Caller, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes did his best to explain why language criticizing homosexuality is hateful and will be censored, while calls for Rush Limbaugh’s slow death are legitimate and allowed. “Direct statements of hate against particular communities violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and are removed when reported to us,” Noyes wrote. “However, groups that express an opinion on a state, institution, or set of beliefs — even if that opinion is outrageous or offensive to some — do not by themselves violate our policies. When a group created to express an opinion devolves into hate speech, we will remove the hateful comments and may even remove the group itself.”

Got that? Looks like Limbaugh needs his own anti-defamation alliance.