The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Tyranny of ‘Equality’

Posted on | April 1, 2015 | 62 Comments

When people claim to be oppressed and demand equality, what happens after they get it? Tim Carney explains the post-Windsor world:

On one side is the CEO of the world’s largest company, the president of the United States and a growing chunk of the Fortune 500. On the other side is a solo wedding photographer in New Mexico, a 70-year-old grandma florist in Washington and a few bakers.
One side wants the state to conscript the religious businesswomen and men into participating in ceremonies that violate their beliefs. The other side wants to make it possible for religious people to live their own lives according to their consciences. . . .
Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple, the largest corporation in the world. He opposes religious freedom laws, and paints them as a growing scourge. “There’s something very dangerous happening in states across the country,” his Washington Post op-ed darkly began, warning of “A wave of legislation” to protect religious liberty.
This is hokum. Religious Freedom Restoration Acts have existed on the state and federal level for decades. What’s new here — the “wave” that’s actually sweeping over the country — is an emboldened and litigious cultural Left, unsated by its recent culture war victories, trying now to conscript the defeated soldiers at gunpoint. . . .
After millennia of marriage being uncontroversially a union between one man and one woman, and after a decade of electorates in most states (and President Obama in 2008) upholding that traditional definition, the Left has used the courts to redefine the institution. People are fired for having taken the losing side. On college campuses, the current fights are about banning even the articulation of traditional views.

Read the whole thing. What has happened is that people forgot history — or, to be more precise, they never learned history, because our education system doesn’t teach history. In the 1950s and early ’60s, the civil-rights movement, led by Christian ministers like the Rev. Martin Luther King, built a broad biracial coalition that gained widespread support by appealing to America’s basic sense of fairness. However, after the great triumph of 1964 — “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi and the passage of the Civil Rights Act — the movement quickly fractured. In early 1965, radicals asserted their control of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC had led sit-in protests across the South) and whites were purged from the organization’s leadership. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael became SNCC chairman and, declaring that non-violence had been a tactic rather than a principle, raised the slogan “Black Power.” Allying themselves with anti-war radicals, SNCC protesters disrupted draft boards and in July 1967, Carmichael’s successor as SNCC chairman, H. Rap Brown, was arrested for inciting a riot in Cambridge, Maryland. By that time, radicals in Oakland, California, inspired by SNCC’s militancy, had formed the Black Panthers, openly espousing a Marxist-Leninist rhetoric of armed revolution.

Thus, in a span of about five years, the civil rights movement had gone from the idealism of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech to the explicit advocacy of violent black nationalism. What began as a broad-based democratic movement for racial equality became instead a totalitarian cult of black supremacy, and this was surprising to everyone except a handful of conservatives who had studied history and could point to the example of the French Revolution as having followed a quite similar path of radicalism. Less than four years elapsed between the formation of the National Assembly in June 1789 to the execution of King Louis XVI in January 1793, and by June 1793, the bloody Reign of Terror had begun. By 1799, Napoleon was dictator of France.

“The modern Cult of Progress . . . has repeatedly afflicted humanity with enthusiastic schemes for political, social and economic change. Always these innovations require us first to destroy ‘hitherto existing society’ (to quote the Communist Manifesto), and to entrust our future to the control of elites. Always the result is the same. From the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France to the Bolshevik Terror in revolutionary Russia, from Kristallnacht in Germany to the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in China to the ‘Killing Fields’ in Cambodia, the path of ‘progress’ is a trail painted in blood, littered with the corpses of those murdered or starved to death for the sake of political theories.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Jan. 11

“Equality” is arguably the most dangerous word in the world. The deadly tyranny of Communism — which killed between 75 million and 100 million people in the 20th century — ought to have cured us of any illusions about this. Alas, people cannot learn lessons from a history they do not know, and the American public education system has deliberately fostered ignorance while promoting liberal mythology as “history,” and thus we are now Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption.




 

Category: Gays, History

Comments

62 Responses to “The Tyranny of ‘Equality’”

  1. ECM
    April 1st, 2015 @ 9:38 pm

    HATE APRIL FOOLS’…

  2. K-Bob
    April 2nd, 2015 @ 12:10 am

    Maybe take the square root of the answer to that division.

    It’s probably an imaginary number, to boot.

  3. K-Bob
    April 2nd, 2015 @ 12:11 am

    Looks like Ben Carson was right, after all.

  4. K-Bob
    April 2nd, 2015 @ 12:37 am

    Interesting.

    I confess to skimming, but Dreher seems at once to be both fatalistic and optimistic. I think that part comes through, so I won’t waste space on it.

    But his closing thought goes well with something I’ve been writing for years now: I usually point to the church leaders in this, but really, leaders of classic, Western Morality wherever they may be found, need to come together and revitalize/redefine the very concept of marriage.

    It needs its own name, separate from the word used today (‘marriage’), which has been effectively redefined by totalitarian forces to mean “anything you want it to mean, including after the fact.”

    So far, I’ve been using the phrase “Sanctified Union” as a placeholder for the concept until someone comes up with a better term. A Sanctified Union would be a commitment before the People and their Creator, between one man and one woman, that their life partnership shall be recognized by all agencies beyond dispute.

    It needs to be defined in a way that the state may not be allowed to interfere with it, because it is a social institution that belongs solely to the people, who have a vested interest in protecting the core unit of the immediate family that such a union engenders.

    I’ve gotten fairly weak pushback on the idea, but I so far it’s been of the form of the same fatalism I saw in Dreher’s article. (Sort of a, “We can’t win this, so why bother,” attitude.) The few people who have considered it seriously seem to think it has worth.

    The concept definitely needs work. But sitting around and watching it all go to hell without people doing that work seems like the worse option to me.

  5. Daniel Freeman
    April 2nd, 2015 @ 3:15 am

    Interesting article, and interesting links too. Now I know where “you will be made to care” comes from.

  6. Daniel Freeman
    April 2nd, 2015 @ 3:34 am

    They can redefine the legal meaning of marriage, but they can’t change how you think of it without your permission. I may be misremembering, but I believe that I’ve read of even non-Muslims in England going to sharia courts for civil matters such as divorce, apparently believing that they would handle it better than the government.

    All that’s really needed is for the Catholic Church to step up its game a little — it wouldn’t take much, all of the Christians on the SCOTUS are Catholics for a reason — and provide their own religious courts.

  7. Adobe_Walls
    April 2nd, 2015 @ 7:43 am

    What that concept needs is to have been adopted 10 or 15 years ago. The ship on an alternative to ”the union of a man and a woman, the union of two of the same sex is exactly the same and thou shalt rejoice”, sailed long ago. The possibility of a live and let live accommodation is extinct, the left senses VICTORY and insists on unconditional surrender. Religiosity outside of church and home will not be tolerated. Christians and the not so Christian but liberty minded can retreat to the catacombs or come out swinging.

  8. K-Bob
    April 2nd, 2015 @ 8:33 am

    I insist on unconditionally telling the left to FO.

  9. K-Bob
    April 2nd, 2015 @ 8:38 am

    I think at the very least it will require an ecumenical council.

  10. Adobe_Walls
    April 2nd, 2015 @ 8:41 am

    That’s a start.

  11. K-Bob
    April 2nd, 2015 @ 8:49 am

    I wrote more about this elsewhere, but I exceprted the part relevant to this thread:
    ——————————————————–
    I would ask each young person today why they would ever consider getting married. After all, the totalitarian control freaks are in the process of forcing you to accept that the word ‘marriage’ now means, “Anything you want it to mean, including after the fact.”

    When a word means anything at all, it ceases to be a part of language. It has lost all meaning.

    The bark of a dog or the facial expression of a mute carries more communication value than does the string of letters that formerly denoted a permanent union between one man and one woman.

  12. K-Bob
    April 3rd, 2015 @ 7:35 am

    It begins…

    Randy Krehbiel (Tulsa World): Oklahoma House votes to do away with state marriage licenses