The Tyranny of ‘Equality’

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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.




 

62 comments

  1. Because too many government officials are now hostile to how God defines marriage, government is being used to force me to recognize and even enable “marriage” that God tells me is morally repulsive. Just as we have a separation of church and state, we must now have a separation of marriage and state. When marriage is a private matter, then anyone can enter into any manner of relationship they please, but they cannot use government to impose their definition on others.

    This is not the ravings of a right wing-nut. From none other than the Newspaper of Record, the NYT, November 26, 2007:

    “The American colonies officially required marriages to be registered, but until the mid-19th century, state supreme courts routinely ruled that public cohabitation was sufficient evidence of a valid marriage. By the later part of that century, however, the United States began to nullify common-law marriages and exert more control over who was allowed to marry.

    By the 1920s, 38 states prohibited whites from marrying blacks, “mulattos,” Japanese, Chinese, Indians, “Mongolians,” “Malays” or Filipinos. Twelve states would not issue a marriage license if one partner was a drunk, an addict or a “mental defect.” Eighteen states set barriers to remarriage after divorce. “

    from:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/opinion/26coontz.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

    It all started in the Progressive Era when eugenics became fashionable and they wanted to influence who was allowed to conceive children and who wasn’t. So the history on this thread goes way back and is in fact existential for Progressives.

  4. People in the West focus waaaaaay too much on marriage as a religious institution. Marriage is, fundamentally, a heteronormative institution.

    Marriages exist for all sorts of very practical reasons and weddings celebrate the impending reproduction.

    It’s not about Jesus, it’s about Darwin.

  5. Here is the difference: For the Leftist/Progressive, religious belief is a hobby. It is the functional equivalent of model railroading. The Leftist/Progressive cannot conceive of deeply held beliefs outside of their own reality. Freedom of belief means nothing to these people even though they embrace a dogma which suppresses contrary beliefs at every opportunity.

  6. The more I read of leftist lunatics on this site, the more I hear these words in my head:

    “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…”

    Seriously: how much longer can we stand on the same land as these raging nut-cases? They are NOT going to back down. The more victories they win the louder they shriek!

    Give ’em an inch, they want a light year.

    Give ’em their weddings and they demand a cake.

  8. The sign in the picture at the top of this post seems to oppose “freedom to discriminate.” When one discriminates, one takes a choice in favor of one option over another or others.

    I wonder if the person holding the sign really isn’t “pro choice”?

  10. I’m confused. Are the homosexual-enablers going to protest Indiana bakeries before they protest the companies & corporations that discriminate against gun owners with their little “anti-gun” stickers or is this after they’re done protesting that?

  11. It is becoming increasingly obvious that religious freedom and ”gay rights” (as currently perceived) are mutually exclusive. Free speech is on a parallel path. I don’t see how this ”House divided” stands. Liberty either becomes serfdom and darkness or a ”frank exchange of views” ensues.

  12. Man, they are really pounding this lie (Indiana law). It’s a total mob mentality.

    “The IQ of a mob is the IQ of it’s dumbest member, divided by the number of mobsters” – Terry Pratchett

    I can’t think of a better illustration of why pure democracy is pure evil.

  16. Spoiler alert:

    The Bible tells us that serfdom and darkness wins, then God comes back and cleans house.

    Jesus warned that His followers would be persecuted. At least in this country, the gay mafia and their “progressive” enablers aren’t cutting our heads off or crucifying us. Yet.

  18. I think Ott shouldn’t give up so easily. There are still options you can try at places where they haven’t nationalized medicine.

    I hope he has a really short bucket list.

  20. Consider that you have just neatly demonstrated that you can’t conceive of deeply or sincerely held beliefs outside of your own. Really read what you just wrote and consider what it reveals about your worldview.

  23. Actually, if you look at the five moral spheres, liberals tend to just use a couple of them, so they literally don’t understand conservatives as well as the other way around. Also, political correctness is a form of mind control, so it is pre-emptive of religious beliefs. You might not like what RS said, but he is technically correct.

  24. That is a silly thing to say. The whole point of being in a mob is to draw satisfaction from the social proof. The people in the mob are aware of it and perversely proud of it.

  26. So equality is essentially the use of an overwhelming power disparity to pummel the substantially less powerful into submission.

  31. I can conceive of people who disagree with me. I can let them have their beliefs. I do not force them to believe what I do. That is not true with the Left. It pays lip service to freedom of speech and belief but then attempts to force others to agree with its perception of what is “correct.” As i said, religion is a “hobby” for them. It is not a world view. It is something which, in their mind, can and should be jettisoned when they, in their infinite wisdom, believe it is necessary.

    That is not freedom. That is tyranny.

  34. All he’s saying is the left is a cult, as fundamentalist as the Pharisees. No deviation is allowed. Just like the Pharisees killed Jesus for being a truth telling iconoclast; given the right circumstances the left will kill Christians. They always have and always will.
    The big difference in the two systems is our Savior is alive and yours is a formaldehyde soaked cadaver in Red Square or the Mao poster leftists spank the monkey to.

  35. Gehenna is a biblical reference for the lake of fire. It’s both jest (misspelling) and a reference for where the country is heading.

  41. They’ll be killing people before long. The Apostles of Tolerance can do no less to the Apostles of love and mercy.

  42. The left is bound and determined to create a new wave of Christian martyrs — real ones, not like Muslim “martyrs”. Most of the left hasn’t realized that’s their goal, but I don’t think they’d be all that troubled by it.

    Dear left: you have declared you will use violence to force people to commit blasphemy and so endanger their immortal souls. It doesn’t matter that you consider this ludicrous — people Believe. At some point a Believer will decide to resist to the point your only options will be to concede the issue or kill the Believer.

    I beg you to turn back, now. When that Rubicon is crossed, it won’t just be Believers you have to worry about, and the results will make us long for the days of the Civil War.

  45. The days of the war for Southern Independence were relatively sedate, unless the lead was flying. What the left wants is the French Revolution. They don’t much pay attention that that nonsense ate its parents in fairly short order. They would do well to study the period 1920-1953 in the Soviet Union.

  46. It is a creation ordinance. God created it with the first human beings and set the rules in concrete later on.

    Darwin was a poseur.

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