It is one of the most atrocious consequences of the short-shrift that the "founders" gave the Bill of Rights that its language can be so easily twisted for malignant purposes. The terse, minor 18th century poetry of the First Amendment, alone, has been used by Supreme Courts and lower courts and lawyers and parties with personal and financial interests (probably the strongest of malignant forces relevant to what I'm saying, since the "Justices, judges, lawyers, etc. partake of those even as they disclaim them) . . . it has been very useful in pushing some of the very worst things in American life today which we are seeing destroy democracy.
"Freedom of speech" is a slogan that, through the absolutizing force of the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. a cynical, cruel and aristocratic fan of Darwinian brutality in the law, the ACLU working on behalf of the enemies of egalitarian democracy, later and rather pudding headed Supreme Courts who not only made lying with impuity impune, they enabled it through setting up impossible to meet standards based on the superstition of psychology. As it turns out, consulting the biographies and writings of the members of the ACLU, I don't trust their motives, I think they were hoping their preferred ideological gang could gain power through the power of lies, imagining that "the masses" were invulnerable to the lies of their ideological opponents, the neo-Nazis and neo-fascists and white supremacists who they officially opposed (even as they provided them with free legal help in promoting their anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, anti-freedom agendas).
I do think that on the part of many of them, Holmes and the ACLU, certainly, there was more than a bit of anti-religious, more specifically anti-Christian motivation behind much of what they did and their ideological platforms, especially. There were lots of rather stupid and gullible religious people who bought into that as if enabling lies, pornography, the promotion of Nazism, the KKK, other forms of fascism - most dangerously - and Marxism - in the idiotic pipe-dream of so many involved with ACLU style idiocy - I think a lot of that was the people who got divinity degrees and studied theology in college and grad school didn't want to be left behind in the cultural wave of modernism.
The worst expression of this is that it leads poeple, those with educational credentials, people who believe they favor egalitarian democracy, people who have a vague notion of being "leftist" or "liberal" or "progressive" to adopt exactly those ideological positions and habits which are as counter-productive to producing what they believe they want as they are totally unnecessary. I have been pointing out the sheerest idiocy of the pose of modernistic, educated niceness and free-speechyness that holds that we owe the Nazis the chance of doing again what they did in the 1920s and 1930s so they could do what they did starting in 1939 and which it took the combined forces of all of the Western democracies working with the moral equivalent of the Nazis in the Soviet Union to put down.
There is no more obviously stupid and amorally irresponsible stand than the one that holds that the total suppression of neo-Nazism is not only impossible to do decently BUT THAT IT VIOLATES some kind of necessity of "balance" or "fairness" or some notion of liberalish scrupulosity BECAUSE IF WE SUPPRESS THE RACISTS WHO ANNOUNCE THEIR INTENT TO COMMIT GENOCIDES ALL OVER WE ARE SOMEHOW IN DANGER OF DOING WHAT THEY WANT TO DO.
There is nothing that more clearly shows up the idiocy of that regime of modern thought than that notion that we are powerless or incompetent to distinguish between people who announce their intent to gain power to murder, literally, billions of people and liberals who have no such intention. Such idiocy was what led the Clinton administration to thwart the call for bombing the radio tower in Rwanda as it was sending out information to the mass murders, telling them where the people they were calling for them to kill were hiding so they could be murdered. The people in our government, IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY who made that genocide enabling call so as not to be guilty of violating the scurple about "freedom of the press - freedom of speech" are some of the most shameful civil libertarians in the spotty history of that ideological camp.
I have been finding in the past day that I'm finding the site Baptist News Global to be a totally unexpected and enormously important source of things to consider. I would call them a "liberal Baptist" site but I'm losing my belief that such categorization is at all accurate in this area. If someone told me 20 years ago that I'd be depending on Esquire, MSNBC, and such things as Baptist News Global for some of the most important information now, I'd have told them they were crazy*.
Here is an extremely important and interesting article by H. Stephen Shoemaker about the idea that we must divorce politics from morality.
Politics and moral values belong together. Jesus and the Hebrew prophets warned of the separation of religious practice and the political realm. Righteousness includes both personal morality and social morality – that is, where we seek the well-being of all people in a community and nation. Moreover, Hebrew and Christian scriptures urge special concern for the poor and most vulnerable in our midst, those whom Jesus called “the least of these.”
History has shown the destructive consequences when the realm of the sacred is divorced from the realm of politics. Into such a vacuum rushes totalitarianism. The “two kingdoms” theology of German Lutheranism so completely separated allegiance to God and allegiance to the State that it helped prepare the way for Hitler.
History has also shown the dangers when religion has sought to align itself with political power, preferring to rule rather than to serve – what some have called “Constantinian Christianity.” The founders of our nation were concerned to avoid theocracy in America; hence the First Amendment to the Constitution, which preserved freedom of religion and forbade the State’s establishment of one religion.
Religion serves best when it sees politics as an approximation of the values of the kingdom of God. When any religious or political group sees itself as THE expression of the kingdom of God, it turns idolatrous: “Politics as Baal.”
“Politics can be an awfully seductive substitute for God.”
In ancient Hebrew thought, the Baalim, or Baals, were the false gods that people worshipped, the “gods that are not gods” to quote the Apostle Paul. When our politics takes on divine pretension, it becomes idolatrous. Theologian Paul Tillich, who watched the rise of Hitler first hand, defined the “demonic” as when anything “finite” claims to be, or is taken to be, “infinite.”
When, therefore, the political realm itself is taken to be the final or ultimate realm, politics becomes Baal. Such is the danger of all totalitarian regimes and all political religions. Protestant Reformer John Calvin said that the human mind is a “perpetual idol factory.” Politics can be an awfully seductive substitute for God.
I think the secularization of American culture is the equivalent of that "two kingdoms theology". Only here, it is not theology but political dogma based on a particular ideological - fundamentalist reading of the "no establishment" clause and the First Amendment. One of the most astounding things I have discovered about the idiocy that results from the sciency, moderny, atheist, secularist, "left" is that their anti-religious ideology leads them to claim that morality can be divorced from politics. As if every claim of possession of rights does not depend not only on claims of moral absolutism but are as dependent on someone endowing us with rights. Nature does not exhibit such an endowment, the ideology of scientism is as guaranteed as Nazism (a scientistic ideology) to deny such an endowment.
As if every claim that a wrong has been done to someone doesn't absolutely depend on there being a moral standard that identifies acts as wrongs (sins) and the right of people to not have those done to them. It was a bolt from the (baby) blue blog when a self-identified Lesbian Of Color complained that she was so sick and tied of all of the talk about morality - with the other mostly college-credentialed lefties joining in to whine about morality in politics, in the law, in society. As I recall I pointed out that literally every political position that was advocated by the collected lefties there was absolutely based in claims of morality. As I recall I concluded I may as well have been speaking Loglan. They literally could not deal with the concept that they were continually spouting moral claims - the idea being so declassé and unfashionable.
I think it's as much a contributor to what has happened here in the past fifty years as it was in Germany leading up to WWII. I think not only Donald Trump, but the "white evangelical" heresy that supports him is a result of the vacuum that the secularization of American politics imposed by academic dogma, legal dogma, popular culture. It is analogous to what the creators and champions of "more speech" ignored, that the other side was there and they would take advantage of the amorality that was pushed by such things as privileging lies in the way that only the truth should be privileged, of the enforced secularization of politics on the more lefty side - the side that doesn't even seem to know that its very basis of existence is dependent on a source of morality and the moral absolutes that flow from our Creator. There is literally no other source for them.
I strongly suspect I will be leaning on the Baptist News Global site, it is deep and rich and, I suspect, indispensable.
* I still had a subscription to The Nation and In These Times, neither of which I'm finding to be anywhere near as useful or dependable, even with vanden Heuvel and her hubby a reduced presence. The Boston Globe is the wreck of itself I expected the NYT corp to make of it. I'm finding much of the "new media" that I read then is better as an example of what a bunch of idiots had grabbed hold of the left since 1964 than they are reliable.
No comments:
Post a Comment