by Ann Coulter
Liberals are constantly accusing Christians of being intolerant and self-righteous, but the most earnest Christian has never approached the preachy intolerance of a liberal who has just discovered a lit cigarette in a nonsmoking section. (Or who has just discovered two born-again Christians in a Republican administration.)
Howard Dean calls the Republican Party “evil.” (Somebody better keep an eye on that guy Dean. One of these days he’s liable to say something crazy.) In 2005, Representative Nancy Pelosi told Democrats they should vote against the Republican budget “as an act of worship,” which at least is preferable to liberals’ usual devotional of offering to perform oral sex on Democrat presidents who keep abortion legal. (Former Time magazine White House correspondent Nina Burleigh told the Washington Post in 1998, “I’d be happy to give [Clinton oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”) Democrats get on their high horses about evil corporations making obscene profits, but try pointing out to them that trial lawyers also make enormous profits suing corporations owned by people who make less than trial lawyers. They think you’re just being obtuse for not understanding that trial lawyers are doing God’s work. Halliburton helps produce the oil and gasoline that keep us warm, feed us, allow us to travel, power our world, and so on. What do trial lawyers produce again?
The moment self-righteousness takes over, you are dealing with dangerous psychopaths. Liberals are constantly accusing Christians of monumental self-righteousness for daring to engage in free speech or for voting in accordance with their religious beliefs. Compare that with the behavior of practitioners of the liberal religion. Liberals felt entitled to excuse Stalin’s murderous regime on the grounds that he was simply trying to build a Communist paradise. Because they passionately believed in Marxism, liberals thought they had a right to lie about being Soviet spies. Yeah, well, some people passionately believe in white supremacy. How about George Clooney making a sympathetic movie about true-believing white supremacists and the evil prosecutors who forced them to name names?
If liberals could cut Stalin slack, there is no behavior they cannot excuse as justified by their passion. A president who was credibly accused of rape and displayed a pervasive pattern of what used to be known as “sexual harassment” was above reproach in liberal eyes. He had saved partial birth abortion! (Thus the charming tributes.) Liberals consider it self-evident that they are being persecuted simply for wanting to do the right thing and always believe their critics’ motives are vile and corrupt—which may be why Liberty University routinely kicks their butts in debate.
The people who call Republicans “evil” subscribe to a political platform that essentially consists of breaking the Ten Commandments one by one. They are for adultery, lying about adultery, covetousness, killing the unborn, and stealing from the middle class (the “rich”) and giving to teachers and trial lawyers (the “poor”). They create new myths and a new priesthood all to justify a worldview that is the rejection of the Judeo-Christian vision of man’s role in the universe. They have more shibboleths than the Old Testament tribe of Gileadites—Halliburton; global warming; antichoice; “Bush lied, kids died!” And they are full of towering, smug, intolerant, self-righteous rage.
If Democrats ever dared speak coherently about what they believe, the American people would lynch them. So they claim to believe in God, much as Paul Begala claims to go “duck hunting” (liberal code for “antiquing”). At the beginning of the 2004 presidential campaign, the Democratic Leadership Council held briefings to teach Democratic candidates how to simulate a belief in God. To ease the Druids into it, the DLC recommended using phrases like “God’s green earth.” (The DLC also suggested avoiding the use of phrases such as “goddamned, motherf—ing Republicans!”) During the primaries, Howard Dean began goading the press to talk about religion but, after claiming the Book of Job was his favorite book in the Bible, was unable to place it in the correct Testament. Regular Talmudic scholars, these Democrats.
Throughout the 2004 campaign, the Democrats were looking for a Democrat who believed in God—a pursuit similar to a woman searching for a boyfriend in a room full of choreographers. The religious outreach coordinator hired by the Democratic National Committee was Brenda Bartella Peterson, who had signed a brief to the Supreme Court advocating the removal of “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. Apparently, Madalyn Murray O’Hair was unavailable.
The religion adviser to John Kerry’s presidential campaign was Mara Vanderslice. She had previously been the religious outreach coordinator for Howard Dean—an assignment that would have required the patience of Job, whoever the hell he was. Vanderslice had spoken at rallies cosponsored by the radical gay group ACT UP, famous for a protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral at which its members spat the Eucharist on the floor. She had been an organizer of violent protests in Seattle and Washington, D.C., when liberals reacted as any normal person would by smashing Starbucks windows and torching police cars because some bankers had come to town for a meeting. Vanderslice majored in “peace studies” at Earlham College. There she was a member of the Marxist-Leninist group that supported convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. That’s devoutly religious for a Democrat. In fact, by Democratic standards Vanderslice was a veritable C. S. Lewis.
According to The Nation magazine, Vanderslice “cornered” Kate Michelman of NARAL ProChoice America at the 2004 Democratic convention (in the proverbial “back alley,” one can only hope) to ask Michelman for help “in convincing Catholics that Kerry was really against abortion.” (“NARAL” is an acronym for something with “abortion” in the title, but we don’t know what because the NARAL webpage won’t use the word abortion.) Inasmuch as NARAL’s raison d’etre is to keep abortion legal until the baby is around age thirteen, either Kerry’s religion adviser was casually enlisting NARAL to help lie to the American people or she is even dumber than the average Democrat.
At a church service at the Democratic National Convention held for People of Faith for Kerry (not to be confused with Muslims for Kerry), the church displayed a cloth sign proclaiming: “Lesbians, Gays & Friends at Old South Church” are “Open and Affirming.” James Forbes of the Riverside Church in Manhattan delivered the sermon, in which he called for “full employment,” “a true livable wage,” “universal access to prekindergarten and childcare programs,” a “progressive tax policy,” and various other items specifically mentioned during the Sermon on the Mount.
And Democrats remain genuinely mystified as to why they didn’t win the 2004 election. After the Democrats failed to get a majority of Americans to vote for them in the seventh straight presidential election—since Jimmy Carter won with 50.1 percent of the vote in 1976—liberal minister Jim Wallis leapt into the breach. He proposed to teach the Democrats how to “reframe” their language to make people think they believe in God. We don’t believe this crazy God crap, but let’s fake out the American people so we can enact gay marriage and partial birth abortion, and ban God from the Pledge of Allegiance. His big idea is to redefine Jesus’ genuine, personal, volitional love for the poor as the same as their impersonal, coercive, compassionless welfare machinery. (Wallis’s favorite part of the Gospel begins, “Blessed are the economically disadvantaged in spirit …”)
The Democrats got off to a good start after the 2004 election when the new head of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, denounced Republicans as “pretty much a white Christian party.” (Even when sneering at Christians—Christians!—Democrats use blacks for cover.) To be sure, 80 percent of the Republican Party is white and Christian, slightly higher than the nation as a whole, which is 70 percent white and Christian. Democrats cannot conceive of “hate speech” toward Christians because, in their eyes, Christians always deserve it.
After lashing out at Christians for no reason, Dean went on to say the Democrats are “more welcoming to different folks, because that’s the kind of people we are.” In addition to Christians, whom liberals hate, the Democrats are not particularly welcom
ing of “folks” who do not believe it is a Constitutional right to stick a fork in a baby’s head. They are not welcoming to people who think a human life is more important than a bird’s life. They don’t welcome judges who display the Ten Commandments in their courtrooms. They are not welcoming to people who believe marriage really is a sacred institution and not just an opportunity to sneak a right to contraception into the Constitution. They are not welcoming to people who think a multiple murderer gang leader like Tookie Williams should be given the death penalty. They are extremely unwelcoming to blacks who stray from the liberal orthodoxy and become Republicans. And David Geffen is distinctly unwelcoming to people who try to walk on the public beach that abuts his house in Malibu.
Democrats revile religion but insist on faking a belief in God in front of the voters claiming to be “spiritual.” They can’t forthrightly admit they are Druids, so they “reframe” their constant, relentless opposition to every Biblical precept as respect for “science” or the “Constitution”—both of which they hate. Their rage against us is their rage against the Judeo-Christian tradition. I don’t particularly care if liberals believe in God. In fact, I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven. So fine, rage against God, but how about being honest about it? Liberals can believe what they want to believe, but let us not flinch from identifying liberalism as the opposition party to God.
* * *
*Throughout this book, I often refer to Christians and Christianity because I am a Christian and I have a fairly good idea of what they believe, but the term is intended to include anyone who subscribes to the Bible of the God of Abraham, including Jews and others.
2
THE PASSION OF THE LIBERAL:
THOU SHALT NOT PUNISH THE
PERP
Assuming you aren’t a fetus, the Left’s most dangerous religious belief is their adoration of violent criminals. Environmentalists can be dismissed as stupid girls who like birds, but liberals’ admiration of dangerous predators is a direct threat to your health. Republicans may not have figured everything out when it comes to controlling crime, but Democrats have figured out nothing. We must maintain constant vigilance over the criminal justice system, because no matter how often liberals are caught coddling criminals, they always will go right back to it when no one’s watching.
Even after the complete failure of liberal policies on crime in the sixties and seventies, and the success of conservative policies on crime beginning in the eighties, liberals are itching to start springing criminals again. Attempts to rehabilitate liberals on this are futile. It’s in their DNA. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who followed the spectacularly successful mayor Rudy Giuliani, knows the one thing he can’t touch is the Giuliani crime policy. So liberals are biding their time, waiting for Bloomberg to be term-limited out of office. By then, the insanity of the Dinkins years will be a distant memory—no memory at all for the recently arrived New Yorkers who moved in after Giuliani made the city safe again. As soon as Bloomberg is out and a Democrat is in, the ACLU will be back again, hamstringing law enforcement, bringing endless police brutality cases, and setting violent predators free. (How does “Mayor Mumia Abu-Jamal” sound to you?)
Liberals believe it is important to never, ever punish criminals because—well, I’m not sure why. They produce a constantly scrolling list of reasons: The perpetrator is too young; the perpetrator is too old; the perpetrator has been rehabilitated; the perpetrator will not be rehabilitated in prison; similarly situated perpetrators got a different sentence; the perpetrator wrote a children’s book; the perpetrator was making a statement about society; the perpetrator says he didn’t do it (and we’re too busy writing him mash notes to look at the evidence); the perpetrator was on cold medication when he raped, murdered, and cannibalized a family of four.
Liberals complain about the cruel injustice of disparate sentences, but then they turn around and howl with indignation when legislatures try to implement some degree of consistency by imposing mandatory minimums. They say overcrowded prisons constitute cruel and unusual punishment, but they always oppose building more prisons. Voters are sternly advised how much new prisons will “cost the taxpayer.” When the voters still want to build more prisons anyway, politicians are attacked for “pandering” to voters on crime.
Needless to say, the death penalty is always verboten, except in the narrow case of Enron executives or clothing designers who use fur. Liberals just keep moving fast and talking loudly so you can never nail them on one reason.
Liberals say:
We’re the only modern democracy with the death penalty.
I think this should be treated as a selling point: “Come to the United States for the economic opportunity, stay because we fry our Ted Bundys!” Among our many other unique characteristics are these: We’re the only modern democracy founded on a belief that all men are created equal; we’re the only modern democracy that fought a revolution to redeem that idea and a civil war to prove it; we’re the only modern democracy that nearly single-handedly smashed Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia; of all modern democracies, we are the wealthiest, most productive, most religious, and most charitable. ’Do liberals want us to apologize for that, too? While we’re at it, I note that we’re also the only modern democracy to spurn nuclear power. How about we fire up the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station again and then talk about the death penalty? (Also, incidentally, Japan has the death penalty.)
Innocent men will be executed.
Apparently not. Death penalty opponents would love nothing more than to produce the case of an innocent person who has been executed in this country, but after decades of fanatical research going back more than half a century, they have not been able to find a single one. The last time liberals claimed to have examples of executed men later “proved innocent,” attorneys Stephen Markman and Paul Cassell reviewed the cases and found that “proof of innocence” included the word of the executed murderer; any confession by another murderer, no matter how preposterous the claim; defense counsel’s bald allegations in opening statements supported by no evidence at trial; and the innocence of a fictional character in a novel that was based on a true crime—even though the author himself repeatedly stated that his book was a work fiction and he believed the real defendant to have been guilty.
The death penalty does not deter.
How do liberals know? This is an article of faith, not a statement of empirical fact. If the death penalty doesn’t deter murder, how come Michael Moore is still alive and I’m not on death row? In the forties and fifties, before the courts started halting executions on the basis of the judges’ personal opposition to the death penalty, murder was rare. As soon as the Supreme Court declared the death penalty “unconstitutional” in 1972, the murder rate soared and has only begun to come down as capital sentences have been gradually reintroduced. Of course the death penalty might deter a little more effectively if the average time spent on death row were not nearly a decade or if death row inmates were not more likely to die of causes other than execution while awaiting their executions.
When convicts on death row are dying of old age, we may be a few tweaks short of an effective deterrent.
It is applied unfairly.
This is as opposed to murder and rape, which are distributed among the general population according to a complex formula ensuring fairness and proportionality. Any system of justice that allows compassion, discretion, and leniency will lead to wildly divergent sentences for seemingly similar crimes. For consistency, you want something like the Taliban’s Sharia law. Anyone found guilty of homosexuality under Sharia law has a wall dropped on him. End of story.
Capital punishment must be suspended until the exact same percentages of blacks and whites are executed.
What if they don’t commit the same number of murders? And how do we compare one murder case with the next? There are all sorts of factors that go into the imposition of the death penalty: premeditation, multiple murders, the k
illing of a police officer, torture, accompanying crimes, the background of the defendant, prior record, provocation, acceptance of responsibility, and on and on and on. As it stands, white murderers already receive more death sentences than black murderers4—a fact attested to by the current liberal complaint that the death penalty is racist because the system values the lives of white victims more than the lives of black victims. Murderers, it seems, behave much like the University of Michigan admissions committee and take race into account when choosing their victims. Thus, blacks are more likely to murder blacks and whites are more likely to murder whites. The only way to “value” the lives of black victims more is to start executing more black murderers. No matter what the facts, the death penalty can always be described as “racist”: Either we’re executing more black murderers than white murderers or we’re executing more murderers of whites than of blacks. And so it is, by people who don’t care whether or not the death penalty is racist, but simply op-pose the death penalty in all cases.
It’s a primitive act of retribution.
I’m not sure we need to be lectured on “primitive” behavior by the people who defend abortion on demand and suicide bombers, but eating and bathing are also “primitive” acts. The fact that something has been embraced by many cultures over a long period of time is generally not an argument against its practice. What is “primitive” about being arraigned, formally charged, tried, and convicted by a jury, having that conviction upheld on appeal, and then being executed in a far gentler manner than their victims? Far from primitive, this is the deliberative, sane act of an advanced civilization protecting itself from predators. If anything, modern execution methods are too humane (“Okay, it will only sting for a minute, Mr. Bundy….”).