“To learn who rules over you, find out whom you are not allowed to criticize.”If you’re wondering what Americans can do as our ruling class sets about enforcing its redefinition of marriage, start by looking back at what it did to the citizens of Indiana when their legislature raised the possibility that someone might object to joining in celebrations of homosexual marriage.
— Voltaire
Support for homosexual unions was incidental to the insistence of the likeminded folks atop society’s commanding heights on punishing Indiana. What incurs their ire has less to do with any substantive matter than with the American people’s resistance to honoring their fantasies. These fantasies can be reversed without notice. (Obama opposed homosexual marriage until 2013.) But dissenting from any of them — whether about race, or sex, or science, or anything else — risks ostracism and disqualification from earning a living.
Indiana’s Republicans, its churches, and conservatives in general pled for the liberty to speak and act according to religious faith. They did not and do not argue the worth of the Judeo-Christian religious beliefs that the ruling class deems odious. This has proved to be self-defeating. Appeals for tolerance of all beliefs in the name of America’s traditional freedoms fail because they concede the ruling class’s assertion of its own moral-intellectual superiority, as well as its underlying assumption that good and evil, better and worse, are just other words for its own likes and dislikes.
SLIDESHOW: What Is Freedom?
The ruling class’s component groups jointly dismiss America’s traditional liberties because they aim to replace them with their own primacy. Having seized the power to redefine liberty, our rulers tighten their definitions around their opponents’ necks like nooses. Since their desire for primacy has no limit, they can’t stop tightening. The norms that they demand that we honor help sustain each constituency by letting its members feel good about themselves while looking down on others. Their “dignitary interests” (to use Justice Kennedy’s term for who must be honored vs. those who must submit to being vilified) simply trump those of others. This is why the ruling class demonizes any questioning of its demands’ substance by imposing modern equivalents of the slave-era “gag rule.” They wage identity politics as war.
As President Obama commented on (and commended) how the Indiana legislature had been quashed, he left no doubt about that war’s aims: “[W]e’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks.” Hillary Clinton similarly asserted the desire for mastery over society beyond any law: “[D]eep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” The point is to squeeze out the wiggle room. As Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci taught, “hegemony” over culture makes it impossible to even think of resisting rulers. Few of our princes of political correctness read Gramsci. But power over what we praise and blame, how we think and speak, is what they and theirs are all about.
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Consequently, if we wish to remain who we are in the face of threats and declamations meant to force us to honor intellectual and moral falsehoods, we have no alternative but clearly and loudly to distinguish between true and false, fully making the case for what we believe to be right. There is no viable alternative to confronting the ruling class’s fantasies and euphemisms substantively, in detail.
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Just as you must honor homosexuality, so you must affirm that certain Americans are “racists” addicted to “white privilege.” Do you demur? Then, Racist that you are, you must be shunned and should be fired. Do you support governmental efforts to reverse “anthropogenic global warming”? If you demur, you are a Denier who endangers our national security, and must be treated as a kook. Should you refuse to pledge your fealty to the proposition that life and the universe are the meaningless result of chance, you reveal yourself to be a Religious Zealot, an “American Taliban,” ineligible for public and private trust. Do you have reservations about the constitutionality or beneficence of administrative government? Then you are an Extremist, a proper target for Homeland Security, the IRS, the NSA, etc. Do you refuse to celebrate “terminating a pregnancy” as women’s fundamental right? Then you are a Warrior against Women, possibly a terrorist. Do you own guns? Ipso facto, you are a Violent Extremist.
The pretexts differ. But the reality is the same: Bow or be persecuted.
Law no longer protects you. The ruling class does not punish through laws, and seldom by official actions, nor in any manner amenable to argument. Its bites come from officials and judges, from the connected and protected, whose rule is “Stop me if you can,” and who shove reason aside with epithets such as “offensive” and “hateful.” Justice Anthony Kennedy ’s majority opinion in U.S. v. Windsor (2013) epitomized this: Objections to homosexual marriage “are inexplicable by anything except animus.” The same goes for all issues on which the ruling class pronounces.
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Nor will reason protect you. No discussion of merits is tolerated. Typically, the U.S. government’s interpretation of, for instance, the Affordable Care Act of 2010 or Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (prohibition of discrimination against women) is that to claim that the law means neither more nor less than what it says is to violate it. Our ruling class’s power to say “what the meaning of ‘is’ is” trumps all reason. Such is not law that bids to persuade fellow citizens. It is how conquerors treat defeated enemies. Yours is the burden of proving you’re on the correct side.
(Article continued at link--worth reading)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420743/truth-safeguards-liberty
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