I haven’t said much of anything about the passage of the gay-marriage bill; I haven’t really had a dog (or a God) in that particular fight. I have gay friends and I’m happy for them, but I also see it as a relatively benign symptom of a much larger process: an ever-expanding radical anti-discrimination in Western culture that, because it is ideologically absolutist, has taken the form of a lethal auto-immune disease.
Lawrence Auster makes this point very well indeed this morning:
It is sort of an ultimate proof that the concept of equality cannot be kept within rational and sane limits, as American conservatives have always believed it can be. Once equality becomes the ruling political and moral principle of a society, it will proceed over time, notwithstanding all objections to the contrary, to demand the equalization of everything. Thus that supreme statement of classical liberalism in its American incarnation, the Declaration of Independence, with its idea of an inherent equality of rights among human beings, has evolved over time into a radical egalitarian doctrine of equality of results among all human beings and the destruction of all distinctions, including the very distinctions upon which the rights were originally based. The limited idea of equality that moved the Founders, that no man by birth should be better than another under law or custom, has evolved into the cultural-Marxist idea that nothing is better than anything else.
Thus, according to the emergent understanding, to say that marriage is by definition and through all of human history between a man and a woman, is to say that marriage between a man and a woman is better than “marriage” between two people of the same sex and thus should be allowed while the latter should not be allowed. And such a position is anti-equality and therefore immoral and invalid.
Ultimately equality swallows itself, since liberals reject the idea that equality as defined by the American tradition is better than, say, Islamic law. Islam, the antithesis and mortal enemy of our tradition, must be treated as equally true and valid as our tradition, leading to the destruction of our tradition along with all of its ideas of equality, whether the classical liberal equality of rights or the modern liberal equality of sexual choice.
It is questionable whether conservatives can do anything to stop this mad progress of liberal logic to ultimate destruction. Perhaps the best we can do is continue to point out the truth about liberalism and offer an alternative vision of society, so that when the liberal system finally crashes, or when it crashes in the conscience of each individual liberal, there will be a non-liberal alternative for liberals to turn to.
23 Comments
“Liberals reject the idea that equality as defined by the American tradition is better than, say, Islamic law.”
That’s complete nonsense.
An exaggeration, perhaps, in some cases, though you’d never know it from our liberal politicians’ pious pronouncements about Islam.
That’s nonsense too. What liberal politicians have endorsed Shariah law?
The point here is reluctance to say publicly that our system is better than Islam.
And anyway, there are lots of liberal bigwigs, particularly in Britain and Europe, who have pushed for inclusion of Sharia into Western judicial systems, or the acceptance of “no-go” areas for Western law. The Archbishop of Canterbury, for one.
OK, I didn’t know that politicians are supposed to go around saying that American jurisprudence is better than Shariah law. I guess it’s the 2011 equivalent of wearing a flag pin.
The Archbishop of Canterbury is a liberal bigwig? I didn’t know that either.
Live and learn.
Yup, live and learn.
Now and then one has to make clear whose side one is on. All we ever hear about Islam from public figures is oleaginous praise, ahistorical baloney about its having been an essential part of America from the start, and a lot of bilge about “hijacking” and “perversion”.
Your suggestion is that public figures ought to publicly declare that one religion is better than another?
Ah, now you’re showing your true colors.
Yes. I don’t see why we must be silent about the relative deficiencies of a system that legitimizes the oppression of women, demands the subjugation of infidels, etc.
In the name of Islam, Jews and Christians are insulted, harassed, and persecuted all over the world. Women are stoned and hanged for adultery, raped with impunity, excluded from education, hidden away from public view, and generally treated as chattel. (I thought women’s rights were supposed to be a big deal in liberal circles.) And so on.
As for “public figures”: Islamic public figures routinely (and unlike us, proudly and unapologetically) make it very clear indeed that they think their system is “better” (as well as calling for the destruction of Israel, the extermination of Jews, and the ruin of the West). Islam even goes so far as to codify in its very laws that Islam is “better” than other religions, and calls for unbelievers to be subject to the jizya tax and other indignities and restrictions.
So yes, if our public figures were to come right out and say that modern, secular, Western civilization is “better” than Islam, that’s just fine with me.
You’re positing a straw man which doesn’t exist. Nobody is “silent” about atrocities, whether they occur at the hands of Muslims or anybody else. Everybody knows that as a culture — right and left – we oppose stoning women, hanging adulterers, and so forth. It’s like being against genocide. Your suggestion is that public figures ought to spend their time going around stating the obvious?
As for women’s rights: giving girls access to education is arguably the most successful thing we’ve done in Afghanistan. Last week, Hillary Clinton publicly supported Saudi women’s right to drive. You can’t get much more left than the Nobel Prize committee, which gave Shirin Ebadi the Peace Prize. And so forth and so on.
As for “Islamic public figures routinely … (making) it very clear indeed that they think their system is ‘better:” this should be our role model? Because Islamic public figures — who also religious figures, at least in those countries which are theocracies — proclaim that their religion is better than others, then our secular politicians should do the same thing?
Well, we can agree on that one.
Where we are cringingly silent is in our refusal to make the obvious association between the things we disapprove of within Islamic societies all over the world — the intolerance and persecution of Jews and Christians, the readiness to take violent offense at the least slight, the oppression of women, support for Sharia as the law of the land, and all the rest of it — and Islam itself. (Some guy shoots up the place yelling “Allahu akbar!!!“, and the press scratches its head looking for a motive.)
We hear again and again our politicians and cultural “leaders” — people who’ve never studied Islam at all, and wouldn’t know taqqiya from tahini — assuring us that all of this is some monstrous “perversion”, when in fact it all flows quite naturally from mainstream Islamic theology and traditions.
Oh, and when the Nobel Committee awards Geert Wilders a prize, then I’ll sit up and take notice.
What we see instead is a perfect example of the liberal mindset: the idea that, culture and human nature being infinitely malleable, we can reasonably expect Islam to remake itself on a set of Western-friendly principles that we can cherry-pick according to our goodthinkful liberal axioms and refined secular tastes.
If anyone represents a “radical” form of Islam, it’s Shirin Ebadi, not those who call for Sharia.
Which is more irritating to you, Peter, the atrocities committed in the name of Islam or the mention of those atrocities by anyone who is not a liberal of your stripe?
The consistently farbissina Henry abandons his core competency of onanism long enough to make another mishuggenah remark.
I probably shouldn’t speak for Peter, Henry, but I suppose what was irritating him here was neither of the things you mentioned, but rather the observations being made about liberalism itself.
Be patient. If even John Lennon could come around, there’s hope for Peter too.
As someone who lived across the street from John Lennon, I am compelled to defend him from this calumny. Even for someone whose life had changed in oh so many ways, I think that transforming from an atheist pacifist who spent years fighting deportation to a closet supply sider is a leap too far. This outrageous claim is much more likely to be someone’s desire for fifteen minutes of fame by making an unverifiable and sensational claim about someone who’s been dead for years.
Nope, I’m buying it all the way. “Imagine” was just about the sappiest, most hypocritical puddle of goo ever written (to write “imagine no possessions” in a gigantic Georgian mansion on 72 acres of prime English real estate is almost getting into Al Gore’s league), and I bet that sometime years later, after he’d banked untold millions from it, the scales suddenly fell from his eyes.
Lennon was a mighty smart guy, and always one to think for himself, and he was just getting to the age when people like that start to come to their senses about how the world really works.
If he’d lived, he’d have been another Ted Nugent by now. Imagine!
A few years ago, I was having lunch at the sushi bar at the Nikko Hotel in Chicago. The sushi guy pointed to a woman at the end of the bar and said “Do you know who that is? That’s Yoko Ono.” I guess she gave him her American Express card, because he was as surprised as I was. If the risible story in the news today gains any traction, I’m sure that she will come to her late husband’s defense and insist that John was indeed a mighty smart guy who thought for himself, and in fact was way too smart and too independent to fall for the claptrap promulgated by Ronald Reagan.
Pah. Who’s going to believe her?
I remember seeing John and Yoko at Madison Square Garden performing their song Woman is the Nigger of the World. When that song gets performed at the Republican National Convention, I will kiss your ass in Macy’s window as the Thanksgiving parade goes by.
I’ll make a few calls.
I doubt it Mal. Peter, who is fixated on Yoko onanism and yucky Ono, and who yearns to kiss people’s asses in public (and other things that people of his sexual persuasion do with asses) is a hopeless Dick.
John Lennon, Republican