Diversity Thursday

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.

-Voltaire

Everything not forbidden is compulsory.

- Murray Gell-Mann's Totalitarian Principle

As I was about to highlight another example how part of your personnel budget is being used to pay six-figures to an otherwise unemployable person to be the designated Command bigot, I changed my mind.

I've decided to bring over something I posted yesterday on FB, as it really does fold in to some of the issues we raise on DivThu. I only do this grudgingly as well ... ya'll know about the only thing here I like less than DivThu posts, is having to tell other people that they were right, and I was a fool to roll with hope.

No matter what I will put down on this topic, I will lose someone - but that is what it is. I like to share with everyone what I'm pondering - but if you can't accept that without getting the vapors and bolting, then maybe you shouldn't be reading CDRS anyway.

Here you go.

For those who are watching the goings on in Indiana - as Ace reminds us, what you are seeing is a perfect example of Baseball Crank's "Seven Stages of Liberal Legal Activism" - except now it has morphed in to full foam-flecked mob form.

Like I said on twitter earlier this week, I am ashamed of my former allies in the repeal of DADT. They have become what we used to rail against the hardest - mindless bullies who hate, and especially those who hate with the threat of violence. Agree or disagree, but to actively support by joining in, or worse - passively saying nothing as all the "cool kids" join with the bully - that is the absolute worst. They are no better than the worst insecure gay-bashing bullies we knew from high school ... or the drunk idiot outside a bar at 2am that we knew from adulthood. No better. Instead of rising above the fray when victory has largely been achieved, they has sunk down to the jackbooted fascist mob.

1. It's a free country, X should not be illegal.
2. The Constitution prohibits X from being made illegal.
3. If the Constitution protects a right to X, how can it be immoral? Anyone who disagrees is a bigot.
4. If X is a Constitutional right, how can we deny it to the poor? Taxpayer money must be given to people to get X.
5. The Constitution requires that taxpayer money be given to people to get X.
6. People who refuse to participate in X are criminals.
7. People who publicly disagree with X are criminals.

Shame on you all. You/we have lost the moral high ground. It is no longer about equality and fairness, it is about dominance and power.

Also shame on those who allowed what was once an honorable and valid cause to be hijacked by the diversity industry and their jackbooted thugs. You have now left the circle of The Enlightenment, and have allowed your cause to be loaded in to the Cultural Marxist brigade baggage train of useful idiots.

You have sullied a good cause by throwing in with problem, as opposed to being part of the solution.

It torques me off mostly because it is a betrayal of a core belief founded on individual liberty - well maybe it was just me - but also that you have proved your/our most vocal enemies right. I hate when I have to nod to others and say, "On this point, you were correct."

As a side note, I still maintain my positions on the issue of the repeal of DADT and the general proposition that "I don't care" about who one falls in love with and who makes your mortal time a joy. It has been my opinion for decades, that isn't going to change. I am simply completely divorcing myself from my former allies and their useful idiots who by acts of commission or omission have become what they once opposed.

The cause was good and just; the organizations at the front and their leaders - it seems - are not.

I'll end with a longish quote from Kevin D. Williamson at NRO on what is a much more important foundational issue.

There are three problems with rewarding those who use accusations of bigotry as a political cudgel. First, those who seek to protect religious liberties are not bigots, and going along with false accusations that they are makes one a party to a lie. Second, it is an excellent way to lose political contests, since there is almost nothing — up to and including requiring algebra classes — that the Left will not denounce as bigotry. Third, and related, it rewards and encourages those who cynically deploy accusations of bigotry for their own political ends. 

An excellent illustration of this dynamic is on display in the recent pronouncements of columnist and gay-rights activist Dan Savage, who, in what seems to be an effort to resurrect every lame stereotype about the shrill, hysterical, theatrical gay man, declaimed that the efforts of those who do not wish to see butchers and bakers and wedding-bouquet makers forced by their government at gunpoint to violate their religious scruples is — you probably have guessed already — nothing less than the consecration of Jim Crow Junior. “Anti-black bigots, racist bigots, during Jim Crow and segregation made the exact same arguments that you’re hearing people make now,” Savage said. Given the dramatic difference in the social and political position of blacks in the time of Bull Connor and gays in the time of Ellen DeGeneres, this is strictly Hitler-was-a-vegetarian stuff, the elevation of trivial formal similarities over dramatic substantial differences. The choices for explaining this are a.) moral illiteracy; b.) intellectual dishonesty; c.) both a and b. 

Adlai Stevenson famously offered this definition: “A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” We do not live in that society.
...
The people who have hijacked the name “liberal” — the étatists — always win when social questions are decided by the state rather than in private life, because the expansion of the state, and the consequent diminution of private life, is their principal objective. The self-styled progressive sets himself in rhetorical opposition to Big Business, but the corporate manager often suffers from the same fatal conceit as the economic étatist — an unthinking, inhumane preference for uniformity, consistency, regimentation, and conformity. It is no surprise to see Apple and Walmart joining forces here against the private mind. There is a reason that the atmosphere and protocols of the corporate human-resources office are a great deal like those of the junior-high vice-principal’s office: All reeducation facilities have a little something in common. 

The ancient rival to étatism in the Western world is the church militant, both in its formal institutional expression and in the relatively newfangled (and thoroughly American) choose-your-own-adventure approach to Christianity. For the culture warrior, bringing these nonconformists to heel is a strategic priority. Gay couples contemplating nuptials are not just happening into cake shops and florists with Christian proprietors — this is an organized campaign to bring the private mind under political discipline, to render certain moral dispositions untenable. Like Antiochus and the Jews, the game here is to “oblige them to partake of the sacrifices” and “adopt the customs” of the rulers. We are not so far removed in time as we imagine: Among the acts intended to Hellenize the Jews was a ban on circumcision, a proposal that is still very much alive in our own time, with authorities in several European countries currently pressing for that prohibition. 

“I expect to die in bed,” Francis Eugene Cardinal George famously remarked. “My successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” Perhaps it will not come to that. But we already are on the precipice of sending men with guns to the homes and businesses of bakers to enforce compliance with dictates undreamt-of the day before yesterday. 

Yes, render unto Caesar, and all that. But render only what is Caesar’s — and not one mite more.