The Disloyal Opposition: Tom McCaffrey
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-disloyal-opposition
Former Red Sox star pitcher Kurt Schilling posted the following on Facebook this past April: “A man is a man no matter what they call themselves. I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the pe*is, women’s not so much. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.”
He followed this with a re-post of an item by someone else that showed an image of a man dressed as a woman, accompanied by the following: “Let him in! To the restroom with your daughter or else you’re a narrow-minded, judgmental, unloving, racist bigot who needs to die!!!” Mr. Schilling was fired as a sports commentator by ESPN for the posting.
I first heard of Mr. Schilling’s remarks while listening to ESPN on my car radio. I was struck by the moral certitude of the announcer, who said he would not dignify Schilling’s comments by repeating them. I wondered how he had arrived at such a high degree of certainty that anyone who chooses not to reorder his life to accommodate the men who think they are women must be morally depraved.
Surely it is reasonable to question the psychological health of any man who thinks he is a woman, or vice versa. We have believed that a person’s “gender,” as we say now, is determined by his sex for the entire history of the human race. So recently has this view been called into question that there is little, if any, science available to support the new, alternative view. And surely it is reasonable for a person to require some very persuasive science before abandoning the common sense view that no psychologically healthy man thinks he is a woman.
But persons like that sports announcer do not require science, precisely because they are not reasonable. In their readiness to accept newly-popular notions that contradict what their own minds tell them, and to do so without any supporting evidence, they are beyond the reach of reason.
They are not bothered by the illogic that transgender boys should be allowed into girls’ bath and locker rooms because they are uncomfortable around other boys, but that the girls who must accommodate them in their bath and locker rooms will just have to get over their discomfort.
And they are not bothered that Mr. Obama enacted his bathroom edict without any public discussion of the matter, and without consulting Congress, two things that any reasonable person would have insisted upon.
Indeed, in requiring its adherents to ignore their own minds-American cities have a police problem, not a black crime problem; Islam is a religion of peace, not the source of most of the world’s terrorism; social convention alone dictates that we treat men and women differently, not fundamental differences in their natures-political correctness leaves them no choice but to embrace irrationality as a principle of action. No need to think for yourself, just follow the party line.
Now the New York Times has reported the Obama Administration is in possession of intelligence that the Russians helped get Donald Trump elected by hacking into Democratic National Committee computers and then publicizing damaging emails found there. The administration will not disclose the evidence that supports their claims, because the evidence is secret. You’ll just have to take our word for it. And there is no shortage of true believers willing to do precisely that, led by the fearless independent thinkers, like that ESPN announcer, who populate the mainstream media.
Since Mr. Trump’s election victory, we have seen violence in the streets by disappointed Democratic voters, re-counts initiated by a fourth-place candidate who garnered about one percent of the vote, efforts to delegitimize the electoral college, efforts to cajole and intimidate Republican electors into violating their pledges to vote for their candidate, and now a transparent effort by the White House to discredit Mr. Trump’s victory by blaming the Russians for election tampering.
If anyone is guilty of election tampering here, it is the Obama White House. But, having got away with using the IRS to stifle Tea Party opposition during his second presidential campaign, and having succeeded in using the FBI and the Justice Department to keep candidate Hillary Clinton out of jail during her recent campaign, Mr. Obama knows better than to worry that anyone will hold him accountable for using the intelligence services to try delegitimize the results of a presidential election that did not go the Democrats’ way.
Since Mr. Obama’s election in 2008, it has become clear that a sizable minority of Americans believe that American culture as it evolved during the first two hundred years of our history is fundamentally unjust. They believe that to have allowed individuals to be free to order their lives as they chose, and to have allowed the culture to evolve accordingly, was a colossal mistake, because it resulted in “marginalizing,” to one extent or another, blacks, women, homosexuals-virtually everyone who was not able-bodied, Christian, heterosexual, white, or male. They believe this with all the certainty, and all the moralistic fervor, of a seventeenth century Massachusetts Puritan.
Now these holy warriors are on a mission against the forces of evil-against those Americans, that is, who still cling to the idea that the individual and his rights are primary. They are remaking our economy and destroying our industrial base in the name of saving the environment. They are correcting the “distribution” of our wealth by confiscating it from the productive and giving it to the non-productive. They are remaking our health care system, the greatest in the world, in order to help those who cannot afford health insurance. They have re-defined marriage, and consequently the family, to benefit homosexuals. They are re-defining the very concepts of male and female, as though all of mankind had it wrong all this time. And they are transforming the U.S. from a culturally unified country into a polyglot, multi-cultural one, with the distinct goal of rendering the advocates of individual rights and the U.S. Constitution a minority in their own country.
All the cultural elements that the Left are plowing under grew spontaneously out of the free choices of free individuals going about the business of living their lives. But the Left know better how individuals ought to live, and they know better how to re-engineer the culture accordingly. And they know that the biggest obstacle to their cultural utopianism is free people, thinking for themselves and acting on their own judgment. So, in true Maoist fashion, they are using the force of government to shove their ideas down our throats, as they have been doing since the 1960s.
As Mr. Obama has illustrated time and time again with his extra-constitutional executive orders, the utopians of the Left do not value our political principles and institutions. Indeed, they consider them a product of, and a means of perpetuating, the individualist culture they so abhor. Mr. Obama made this clear in a 2001 radio interview, in which he complained that the U.S. Constitution is a “charter of negative liberties.”
Negative rights, such as freedom of speech and press, keep individuals free of government restrictions and impositions. They secure liberty for individuals. Positive rights, such as the so-called right to health care, implicitly place obligations on some persons to provide goods or services for other individuals. They impose tyranny on individuals. A constitution of negative rights, such as the current U.S. Constitution, is the antithesis of what a constitution of positive rights, such as Mr. Obama implicitly advocated, would be.
The rule of law, the consent of the governed, (negative) individual rights, the U.S. Constitution, the separation of powers, and legislative supremacy are all fundamental elements of our political system, and every one of them has been under assault at one time or another during the Obama presidency. It is because the Left do not value such principles that they are willing to risk everything, including the hard-won claim to legitimacy that our institutions enjoy, in their scorched earth campaign to gain and keep power.
Today’s Democrats are not the loyal opposition of yesteryear. What they aspire to is the antithesis of everything the U.S. stands for. There can be no compromising with them, because we share no common ground with them. Their ideas are toxic to our culture, our political institutions, and our way of life.
And they are not going away any time soon, especially if they maintain their near-monopoly control of the propagation of ideas in the United States-via the media, Hollywood, and academia. Expect their attacks to grow bolder, more vicious, and more destructive of the social, cultural, and political fabric of the country.
This is not to say that all Democrats share the Left’s antipathy for our culture and our free political institutions. Far from it. But this points to another problem; a great many Americans who do not share the Left’s radicalism nevertheless vote for candidates like Mr. Obama out of ignorance or intellectual laziness. They are content to get their news pre-packaged from ABC, CBS, Comedy Central, and their local left-leaning newspaper. Or they are gulled by the radicals’ superficial appearance of caring for the “oppressed.” Moderation, on either side of the political divide, works to the advantage of the radicals.
These are the enablers of the cultural revolution. Their sanctioning-by-default of the Democrats’ cultural depredations over the past fifty-odd years has brought us perilously close to losing our republic. Many more Americans will have to recognize the Democratic Left for the destructive force they are and to oppose them in earnest before we can begin to restore our republic to good health. It will take a great deal more than a single election victory.
Tom McCaffrey is the author of Radical by Nature: The Green Assault on Liberty, Property, and Prosperity.
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