It needs to be explained clearly, because no one is doing
it.
Conservatives, right-wingers, Christians, or any other
advocate of traditional notions of morality seen as out of date or “on the
wrong side of history” are becoming apologetics. And the irony is that it’s
because they are actually much more tolerant, open-minded, and even scared than
their political and social opponents.
Instead, they are fighting in an arena regulated by a liberal
agenda that couldn’t be called progressive any more than those of us still
holding out for Social Security.
The way it works is simple. If you don’t play by their
rules, you’re a bigot. So of course you play by their rules—one of which
requires that everyone who disagrees loses. Heads you lose, tails I win. That’s
politics and there is no God, so why are you complaining, bigot?
Well, that’s simple.
Because any policy of government that mandates the
universality of thought is already growing into a repressive arm of tyranny that threatens to destroy the liberty of nations.
I mean, let’s face it, the founding fathers didn’t start a
revolution so that everyone could be persecuted into the same conscience,
expression, and belief.
I know what you’re thinking. That’s exactly what the
liberals are trying to say, right? That’s the problem with the Christians,
right? Wrong. On the contrary, liberals hate diversity of belief so much that they
spend a lot of time outlining emotional arguments that vilify all their
political enemies as bigoted, behind-the-times morons who are dangerous to the
life of the nation.
Maybe you could use some more specifics. This week, an
Illinois school was federally mandated to allow a transgender student full
access to the girls locker room. In an attempt to preserve what the school
board member described as the privacy rights of some of the girls, the school
tried to argue that the policy could dangerously allow sex-driven males to pose
as transgender for a peek whenever they wanted.
That last point is being hotly debated. What’s not being
debated is the fact that making concessions to a transgender kid at the expense
of everyone who disagrees principally with the practice and would feel violated
despite how he/she personally identifies himself is STILL discrimination. Not
because one is right or wrong, but because one’s idea is being considered and
the other’s is not.
Since when does “equal rights” mean minorities
have unrestricted license to whatever behavioral patterns fits their fancy in
strict opposition to others who may oppose them?
That’s not equality. Guys, I’m not trying to be extreme
here, but allowing one class or interest group uninhibited power over any and
all opposition is the definition of tyranny.
You can’t call that freedom.
Take a look at abortion. You’ve heard them on the news.
Don’t bring your religion into this. Separation of church and state. It’s not
about your religious beliefs, it’s about science. Is the fetus a living human?
Would it be murder?
Let’s all take this opportunity to appreciate the fact that
murder somehow ambiguously remains unethical in our world of anything goes
except people who think that it doesn’t.
SO, let’s try and figure out liberal logic so that all this
chaos makes sense. There’s always a method, and in this case it was born in the
mind of a guy name John Rawls. You’ve probably never heard of him, but since he
is the king—and really, the creator—of modern liberal thought that now defines
every political discussion, you might want to know a little about him.
He wrote a book called a Theory of Justice. It basically suggests
a sort of mind game to figure out what good government looks like. Anyone can
play, too, so here we go.
Imagine there is a magical room called the “original
position.” Whenever you step inside, you forget everything about yourself:
gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, economic status. For all you know,
you could the town drunk, bum on the street, living on welfare. Or you could be
that right-wing, upper-class businessman that sometimes goes to church. Who knows?
Now, realizing that you have to balance both possibilities to maximize your chances
in the world, what sorts of laws would you make?
Rawls has a revealing a simple answer:
Fair ones. You’d want fair laws, duh, so you wouldn’t accidentally
cheat yourself.
So how did that idea change politics?
Rawls presupposes that religious and personal belief is
irrelevant in the discussion of rights and laws because it is a personal
doctrine that would be forgotten in the original position. By that standard,
laws are no longer created out of some moral responsibility (since morality is
arbitrary), but rather by risk-averted individuals’ attempts to maximize
interests. Interest-based politics.
We have laws against murder, because we don’t want anyone to
kill us.
We have a right to everything that doesn’t infringe on
someone else’s right—because we might end up being that someone else.
Self-preservation becomes the most basic of all rights
because we want it to be. All truths and laws are subject to what we want in
our attempt to maximize our interests in a world of amoral people solely
interested in appeasing themselves.
So that transgender kid should get whatever he wants
because—what if I was the transgender kid? It’s not about morality, it’s about
interest.
The oddity, of course, is that no liberal I have ever met
pulls the discussion through to its logical end:
There is no original
position.
In order to preserve the ideology of fairness as “diversity
blindness,” you’d have to force
people to forgo their personal truths and virtues in order to impose an interest-based society.
I mean to say, you become what you once hated. The
imposition of interest-based politics that forbids political persuasions to be
based on any source other than self-interest is just as dangerous as the
imposition of religion. No Christian I have ever met actually wants their
church to take over the government and turn everyone into tithing-paying, Sunday
school preaching, zealots who must deny same sex marriage in addition to
attending church every week. No one wants that.
It borders on logically inept to assume that a religious
state and opinions based on an individual’s personal religious beliefs are the
same thing. Because they are not. In a healthy democracy, no one cares where
your political beliefs come from—whether it’s God or that feeling you get after
ingesting peyote. In reality, it’s the source of our beliefs that are supposed
to be equal, not the actualization of them.
No one is supposed to care why you believe what you believe.
And no one is supposed to oppressed, persecuted, or discriminated against in
the realm of political discussion because of why they believe that.
Democratic politics was never intended to be an imposition
of one ideology.
That means that religion is as perfectly acceptable a reason
to oppose abortion as the women’s belief that she is the sole arbiter of her
own body.
There is one fact implied here that I should make explicit:
There will ALWAYS be a conflict in interests. There is no
such thing as rights that don’t impose on someone else’s right.
Ironically, many people who want the right to marry whoever
they want, or the right to expand their pocketbook without accountability also believe
that humans are an accident of time and space—meaning that any “rights” they have,
would actually be an invented claim from a survivalist race that doesn’t want
to disappear into the vortex of an eventually self-destructing universe.
But then, when someone claims a right based on a belief in God,
it’s as if the whole world erupts in anger and chaos. How could you claim a
right based on a being that’s made up and then reject the rights that I am
making up because I want them?
Am I the only one that sees the irony—no, the hypocrisy—in
this mindset? There is no morality in the original position. So how can anyone
be a bigot?
Maybe the founding fathers thought a lot more about this
than we give them credit. In defending the Constitution, Madison once outlined
how a large republic would be more beneficial than a small one because than no
one faction could gain any traction. The idea was that any interest group—large
or small, religious or not—should not dominate the political field.
The idea
was that if people voted on wise representatives who they trusted—who in turn
votes on the issues—than compromises could be created in attempts to appease as
many constituents as possible. And if you ended up in the minority, than you
could keep trying to convince people to agree with you in time for the next
election. States all had different laws so that no one state could be
dominated—so that people would have a safe haven if their state was the
minority in congress. There was no court system determined to redefine aspects
for humanity or side-step the political process of minorities working for their
personally desired rights. And in the end, it didn’t matter if you were
religious or not.
I’m not saying it’s perfect. Goodness knows we’ve made a lot
of mistakes. What I’m saying is that in a world of moral ambiguity coupled with
world violence and social apathy, the last thing we need is interest-based politics.
Why? Because interest is much easier to manipulate. After
all, it was a visionary, inspiring politician that convinced a nation to turn
on Jews, homosexuals, blacks, and the disabled and alike. Apparently, 11 million
deaths was all in the interest of their nation’s best.
I’m not preaching politics here; I’m not preaching religion.
What I’m preaching is a revival of civic republicanism that recognizes the
inherent necessity of standards of virtue and morality in successful government.
What I’m saying is that we can’t outlaw and ignore the concerns of the morally
strict in a world that requires morality, compromise, and understanding to survive.
After all, even the psychopaths and predators will eventually have to come out
of the original position. And once the blindness of their situation is gone,
what would stop them from turning on us?
Sometimes, a moral standard is all we’ve got.
Comments
Post a Comment