Bullies

by Ben Shapiro

  Obama did not call Sarah Palin to offer his condolences for Bill Maher calling her a “c—,” long after Palin was a private citizen. He didn’t call Michelle Malkin after Keith Olbermann labeled her a “big, mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”

  It was a perverse political ploy, designed to cow everyone into submission about the contraception mandate. And the bullies weren’t done. Media Matters launched an astroturfed boycott campaign against Rush’s advertisers, trying to force them to pull their dollars from El Rushbo. It was a brilliant strategy. Media Matters wasn’t going to get people to stop listening to Rush—he’s too talented and popular. Instead, they focused on risk-averse advertisers, who simply want people to buy their product, and want to avoid controversy at all costs. Angelo Carusone, director of online strategy for the Obama outlet, admitted that Media Matters had dusted off an old “Stop Rush” campaign and activated allies to inundate advertisers. Carusone personally began contacting sponsors.10

  Media Matters wasn’t doing this on its own. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fund-raised off the incident. When Limbaugh read their letter on the air, they played victim. And they quoted St. Sandra, the newly elevated pope of Anti-Religious Bigotry: “The millions of American women who have and will continue to speak out in support of women’s health care and access to contraception prove that we will not be silenced.”11

  Meanwhile, the contraceptive mandate remained in place. It remains there to this day. The secularist bullies won. They usually do.

  But not always. When the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School fired one of their teachers for acting against church teachings, the Obama Department of Justice sued the church. The DOJ argued that there shouldn’t be any religious exception to employment laws—even though the First Amendment creates such an exception. It’s called “freedom of religion.” The Supreme Court justices found the government’s argument incredible. When Leondra Kruger, Obama’s lawyer in the case, tried to argue that there didn’t need to be special treatment for religious institutions, Justice Scalia jumped down her throat: “That’s extraordinary! There, black on white in the text of the Constitution, are special protections for religion. And you say it makes no difference?” The Court struck down the EEOC case 9–0. Even the Court’s liberals found this bullying of religious institutions too blatant.12

  President Obama isn’t content with forcing religious institutions to abandon their principles in favor of secular morality. He wants people to stop giving cash to religious charities altogether. Every one of President Obama’s proposed budgets has suggested that charitable donations from families making more than $250,000 and individuals making over $200,000 be taxed. According to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Obama’s proposal would “cost charities as much as $5.6 billion per year. . . . The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that other proposals to limit the charitable deduction could result in as much as a $10 billion drop in donations annually.” A huge number of these charities are religious.13

  “YOU’RE JUST LIKE THE TALIBAN”

  America, President Obama is fond of repeating, “is not a Christian nation.” He’s said this over and over and over again. He did it in that speech in 2006. He did it again shortly after his inauguration, when he visited Turkey. “We have a very large Christian population,” he told the Islamist regime. “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”14

  But what are those ideals and values?

  Obama would be loath to label them Judeo-Christian. That’s because he’s not a Christian. He’s not a Muslim, either—although under Muslim law he’s a Muslim, he certainly doesn’t slap down a prayer rug and bow toward Mecca (he saves his bowing for foreign dictators, not Allah). Obama’s an atheist, or at the very least an agnostic. His view on religion is pretty obvious: he’s not one of those bitter Americans clinging to God.

  So if, according to Obama, we’re not a Judeo-Christian nation, what are we? Here, Obama is lost. What he does know is that no traditional religious justification for action is legitimate. He believes, as most leftists do, in the absolute separation of church and state.

  And the leftist bullies use that nonconstitutional phrase as a baton with which to club their opponents into submission. Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church & State,” a phrase from his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, was meant not to prevent people from expressing religion in the public square but to prevent government from infringing on religious freedom. Here’s the phrase in context: “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” In short, government shouldn’t do what Obama has done with the Catholic Church. And Catholics aren’t expected to shut up, as Obama would undoubtedly prefer.

  But the left’s interpretation of Jefferson’s phraseology is less nuanced than this. It requires that religion never influence public policy, and that the government never fund any activities associated with religion. Jefferson would have been appalled by such a construction.

  Unfortunately, that construction is gaining ground. The secular left has succeeded in bullying religious people into a sort of abashed silence. It’s not merely through action; it’s through attitude. The scorn in which atheists hold believers is almost incredible—if atheists had the power to do so, they’d ban religion forthwith. As linguistics professor turned crappy commie philosopher (and owner of multiple homes) Noam Chomsky reportedly put it, “Take any country that has laws against hate crimes, inspiring hatred and genocide and so on. The first thing they would do is ban the Old Testament. There’s nothing like it in the literary canon that exalts genocide, to that extent. And it’s not a joke either. Like where I live, New England, the people who liberated it from the native scourge were religious fundamentalist lunatics, who came waving the holy book, declaring themselves to be the children of Israel who are killing the Amalekites, like God told them.”15

  Not coincidentally, there are other groups that want to ban the Bible to avoid conflict. One group wants the Supreme Court to ban the Bible to prevent certain sections from being used to insult others. That group is the radical clerics in Pakistan, who want their Supreme Court to step in and censor the Bible for political reasons.16 So, who’s the real Taliban here?

  According to the left, religious people are. Even though secular people haven’t generally been bullied in this country for their secularism, the secular bullies like to play the victim. Their latest label for religious people is “American Taliban.” The left loves it. It’s meant to denigrate Christians as potential threats to world peace (although the greatest threats of the last century, Nazism and communism, were both secular). It’s meant to paint the right as a bunch of whackos ready to hop on their nags, grab some torches, and go looking for the nearest woman to wrap in a burlap sack.

  And thus Daily Kos runs posts explaining that the religious right isn’t interested in religious freedom (false), wants a national religion established (false), wants to “dominate women and tell them how to act” (false), doesn’t care about freedom of speech (false), and thinks homosexuality is a sin (true).17 They’re just like the Taliban! Except of course, for how the Taliban want to do all those things—and still like to shag each other in the hills of Tora Bora.

  It’s not just random posters on Daily Kos. It’s Markos Moulitsas, the website’s creepy founder. He wrote an entire book called American Taliban, which posited that “war, sex, sin and power bind jihadists and the religious right.” Sadly, the book sold three copies, all re
portedly to Osama bin Laden. And even he used them as doorstops.

  Bill Maher, whose drug use has clearly affected his sense of humor first and foremost, says that 2012 presidential candidate Rick Santorum is “anti-knowledge.” He said that while Muslims just want to go back to the eighth century, Christians want to go back before the Tree of Knowledge. The three scariest words to religious people, says Maher, are “here’s an idea.”18 He’s wrong. The three scariest words are “let’s watch Religulous.”

  Or “now on Hardball.” Chris Matthews echoes Maher when he says, “[T]he group in this country that most resembles the Taliban, ironically, is the religious right.”19

  Hollywood, too, paints Christians as an incipient Torquemadas. As it happens, liberals are the only folks who expect the Spanish Inquisition. The actual Spanish Inquisition. Every movie pastor is John Lithgow in Footloose; every religious Christian is a prude or a simpleton or a serial killer. Every small Christian town is just waiting to unleash their inner witch-burning cretin (who, it should be noted, was technically Jewish). Hollywood lives in constant fear of the cross-waving, pitchfork-wielding mobs. “There are a lot of people who really have medieval minds in all sorts of ways,” Susan Harris, creator of the hit liberal TV show Soap, told me. “Who aren’t open to anything new. Aren’t open to anything reasonable. Think science is a matter of belief. And that’s who you’re dealing with. . . . It’s not an audience, I think, I could ever speak to.”20 Back in the 1980s, Thomas Wyman, a top executive at CBS, actually labeled Christian conservatives a “constitutionally immoral minority.”

  But we’re the intolerant ones.

  Who are the real Taliban? Ask the ubiquitous Dan Savage. Actually, you don’t even have to ask—he’ll tell you. And if you don’t want to listen, he’ll yell it at you. For some reason beyond human comprehension, the administration behind the National High School Journalism Conference decided to ask Savage to speak—presumably not about butt plugs. Instead, he launched into an anti-Bible rant, telling students that religious people hate gays. “We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people . . . the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation,” spouted the doorknob-licking Mensa member. “We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of things.”

  This was that same old 2000 email again, listing all the supposedly obsolete parts of the Bible. And Christian students weren’t tremendously interested in this brainless screed. So they got up and walked out. As they did, he berated them from a giant, 1984-style screen: “It’s funny, as someone who’s been on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-assed some people react when you push back.”

  Now, Savage may be unfamiliar with basic standards of polite behavior, but what the students did was polite. Instead of rushing the stage and beating him up, as the Taliban would do, they walked out. But this made Savage insane. He quasi-apologized: “I didn’t call anyone’s religion bullshit. I did say that there is bullshit—‘Untrue words or ideas’—in the Bible. . . . I would like to apologize for describing that walkout as a pansy-assed move. I wasn’t calling the handful of students who left pansies (2,800+ students, most of them Christian, stayed and listened), just the walkout itself.”21 He added, “I did not attack Christianity. I attacked hypocrisy.”22

  Well, no. He attacked Christianity. And Christians.

  He bullied. If he could blow up statues of Jesus, he’d do it. And he’d replace them with bathhouses, pure Taliban style.

  THE “PRO-SCIENCE” BULLIES

  The secular bullies believe they have an exclusive patent on scientific knowledge. Of all the antireligious slander perpetrated by the secularists, the most common and the most damaging is the self-flattering leftist notion that only the left is interested in science. Barack Obama himself is a lead purveyor of this myth. In one of his first acts as president, Obama signed an executive order granting federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

  President Bush had stopped federal funding of embryonic stem cell research based on the notion that a balance had to be drawn between the dictates of science and the dictates of morality—creating human life to destroy it for the purpose of saving other human life was not an acceptable pursuit, in President Bush’s belief. Charles Krauthammer rightly called Bush’s address on the subject “the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president”—and Krauthammer disagreed with Bush on stem cell research.23

  But Obama saw no such complexity. Instead he ripped President Bush’s decision to stop federal funding of certain lines of embryonic stem cell research as little more than benighted Dark Ages superstition. “[I]n recent years, when it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values. In this case, I believe the two are not inconsistent. As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering. I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research—and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly. . . . [T]he proper course has become clear . . . [we must] develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making.”24

  This was asinine. Bush had never stripped scientific integrity. He had merely done what all moral people must do on questions of science: he had measured the ends of science against the means used to get there. Perhaps his measurements were off; that was open to debate. What was not open to debate was the fact that Bush did the right thing in attempting the moral question.

  But the left is not interested in such moral questions. To them, the religious right is waging a “war on science.” Chris Mooney, a journalist for the Washington Post, the Washington Monthly, and Mother Jones, penned an entire book called The Republican War on Science. Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher and owner of the Nation, says that “Republicans have become proudly and unquestionably anti-science. (It is their litmus test, though they would probably reject the science behind litmus paper.)”25 Slate says, “The Republican war on science is un-American.”26 Hillary Clinton said that the Bush administration had declared “open season on open inquiry.”27

  This type of rhetoric is all too common among secularists on the left. They paint a false dichotomy between religion and science. They say that religious people are anti-science, because science makes God irrelevant—therefore, religious people want to stop scientific progress. They point to the fact that many religious people are skeptical about the theory of evolution—as though skepticism of a scientific finding were in and of itself unscientific. The left likes to say that religious people who have questions about evolution are like people who oppose the theory of gravity. They seem to miss the irony that if Einstein hadn’t been skeptical of Newton’s theory of gravity, there would be no General Theory of Relativity. That’s not to say that the theory of evolution is wrong—I believe strongly in the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution. And, as a religious believer, I believe that God acted through the natural world in creating such a system.

  The truth is that it is the left that consistently wages a war on science. As a general matter, the right is far less worried about scientific results than it is the means by which those results were obtained. So, for example, in the embryonic stem cell context, religious people are worried about the morality of destroying a potential human life to save a human life. But they don’t argue with the results of the scientific research.

  The left, by contrast, is far less interested in scientific means than it is in scientific ends. They’ll do anything to obtain a scientific result . . . but if the result doesn’t meet their expectations, they’ll attack the science. So, for example, the left is fine with research that uses fetuses. But they reject, ignore, and demonize anyone who says that new scientific findings about the development of the fetus show the barbarity of abortion. I
f the scientific results show that abortion is the murder of an unborn child, the left screams bloody murder. That’s why Planned Parenthood and its allies dislike 4-D ultrasounds and oppose legislation to use them—they don’t want potential mothers seeing that their unborn children aren’t actually random blobs of tissue. The left isn’t interested in the science. They hate the results, so they silence them.

  The same holds true with regard to homosexuality. Scientific studies tend to show that homosexuality is not entirely genetic—studies show that identical twins are not both gay a solid 50 percent of the time. But the left ignores such studies. Instead it simply announces, sans evidence, that homosexuality is entirely genetic and has no environmental component. When there are any efforts made to delve into the actual science behind homosexuality, the left goes berserk.

  In Oregon, scientist Charles Roselli started a study researching why 8 percent of rams were gay. The goal of the study: to find the brain differences between gay rams and straight rams, and to cure gay rams. As it turns out, gay rams are not nearly as useful to society as straight rams, for obvious reasons: they don’t procreate. And unlike gay human beings, rams have a few specified purposes on the planet, first and foremost of which is procreation.