Chapter 1: On the Seventh Day, God Rested and Liberals Schemed
Liberals love to boast that they are not “religious,” which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as “religion.”
Under the guise of not favoring religion, liberals favor one cosmology over another and demand total indoctrination into theirs. The state religion of liberalism demands obeisance (to the National Organization for Women), tithing (to teachers’ unions), reverence (for abortion), and formulaic imprecations (“Bush lied, kids died!” “Keep your laws off my body!” “Arms for hostages!”). Everyone is taxed to support indoctrination into the state religion through the public schools, where innocent children are taught a specific belief system, rather than, say, math.
Liberal doctrines are less scientifically provable than the story of Noah’s ark, but their belief system is taught as fact in government schools, while the Biblical belief system is banned from government schools by law. As a matter of faith, liberals believe: Darwinism is a fact, people are born gay, child-molesters can be rehabilitated, recycling is a virtue, and chastity is not. If people are born gay, why hasn’t Darwinism weeded out people who don’t reproduce? (For that, we need a theory of survival of the most fabulous.) And if gays can’t change, why do liberals think child-molesters can? Pedophilia is a sexual preference. If they’re born that way, instead of rehabilitation, how about keeping them locked up? Why must children be taught that recycling is the only answer? Why aren’t we teaching children “safe littering”?
We aren’t allowed to ask. Believers in the liberal faith might turn violent—much like the practitioners of Islam, the Religion of Peace, who ransacked Danish embassies worldwide because a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Mohammed. This is something else that can’t be taught in government schools: Muslims’ predilection for violence. On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attack, the National Education Association’s instruction materials exhorted teachers, “Do not suggest that any group is responsible” for the attack of 9/11.
If a Martian landed in America and set out to determine the nation’s official state religion, he would have to conclude it is liberalism, while Christianity and Judaism are prohibited by law. And not just in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it’s actually on the books, but throughout the land. This is a country in which taxpayers are forced to subsidize “artistic” exhibits of aborted fetuses, crucifixes in urine, and gay pornography. Meanwhile, it’s unconstitutional to display a Nativity scene at Christmas or the Ten Commandments on government property if the purpose is to promote monotheistic religion.
Nearly half the members of the Supreme Court—the ones generally known as “liberals”—are itching to ban the references to God on our coins and in the Pledge of Allegiance. They resisted in 2004 on procedural grounds only because it was an election year. The absence of a divinity makes liberals’ belief system no less religious. Liberals define religion as only those belief systems that subscribe to the notion of a divine being in order to dismiss other religions as mere religion and theirs as something greater. Shintoism and Buddhism have no Creator God either, and they are considered religions. Curiously, those are two of the most popular religions among leftists—at least until 9/11, when Islam became all the rage.
Liberalism is a comprehensive belief system denying the Christian belief in man’s immortal soul. Their religion holds that there is nothing sacred about human consciousness. It’s just an accident no more significant than our possession of opposable thumbs. They deny what we know about ourselves: that we are moral beings in God’s image. Without this fundamental understanding of man’s place in the world, we risk being lured into misguided pursuits, including bestiality, slavery, and PETA membership. Liberals swoon in pagan admiration of Mother Earth, mystified and overawed by her power. They deny the Biblical idea of dominion and progress, the most ringing affirmation of which is the United States of America. Although they are Druids, liberals masquerade as rationalists, adopting a sneering tone of scientific sophistication, which is a little like being condescended to by a tarot card reader.
Liberals hate science and react badly to it. They will literally run from the room, lightheaded and nauseated, when told of data that might suggest that the sexes have different abilities in math and science. They repudiate science when it contradicts their pagan beliefs—that the AIDS virus doesn’t discriminate, that there is no such thing as IQ, that nuclear power is dangerous and scary, or that breast implants cause disease. Liberals use the word science exactly as they use the word constitutional.
Both words are nothing more or less than a general statement of liberal approval, having nothing to do with either science or the Constitution. (Thus, for example, the following sentence makes sense to liberals: President Clinton saved the Constitution by repeatedly ejaculating on a fat Jewish girl in the Oval Office.) The core of the Judeo-Christian tradition says that we are utterly and distinctly apart from other species. We have dominion over the plants and the animals on Earth. God gave it to us, it’s ours—as stated succinctly in the book of Genesis. Liberals would sooner trust the stewardship of the Earth to Shetland ponies and dung beetles. All their pseudoscience supports an alternative religion that says we are an insignificant part of nature.
Environmentalists want mass infanticide, zero population growth, reduced standards of living, and vegetarianism. The core of environmentalism is that they hate mankind. Everything liberals believe is in elegant opposition to basic Biblical precepts.
- Our religion says that human progress proceeds from the spark of divinity in the human soul; their religion holds that human progress is achieved through sex and death.
- We believe in invention and creation; they catalogue with stupefaction the current state of our diminishing resources and tell us to stop consuming.
- We say humans stand apart from the world and our charge is Planet Earth; they say we are part of the world, and our hubristic use of nature is sinful.
- We say humans are in God’s image; they say we are no different morally from the apes.
- We believe in populating the Earth until there’s standing room only and then colonizing Mars; they believe humans are in the twilight of their existence.
Our book is Genesis. Their book is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the original environmental hoax. Carson brainwashed an entire generation into imagining a world without birds, killed by DDT. Because of liberals’ druidical religious beliefs, they won’t allow us to save Africans dying in droves of malaria with DDT because DDT might hurt the birds. A few years after oil drilling began in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, a saboteur set off an explosion blowing a hole in the pipeline and releasing an estimated 550,000 gallons of oil. It was one of the most devastating environmental disasters in recent history. Six weeks later, all the birds were back. Birds are like rats—you couldn’t get rid of them if you tried.
The various weeds and vermin liberals are always trying to save are no more distinguishable than individual styles of rap music. The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River in Maine, was halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant previously believed to be extinct. Liberals didn’t even know this plant still existed, but suddenly they were seized with affection for it. They had been missing it all that time! (Granted, the rediscovery of the Furbish lousewort has improved the lives of every man, woman, and child in America in ways too numerous to count, but even so . . . ) Liberals are more upset when a tree is chopped down than when a child is aborted. Even if one rates an unborn child less than a full-blown person, doesn’t the unborn child rate slightly higher than vegetation? Liberals are constantly warning us that man is overloading the environment to the detriment of the plants. Howard Dean left the Episcopal Church—which is barely even a church—because his church, in Montpelier, Vermont, would not cede land for a bike path. Environmentally friendly exercise was more important than tending to the human soul.
That’s all you need to know about the Democrats.
Blessed be the peacemakers who create a diverse, nonsexist working environment in paperless offices. Suspiciously, the Democrats’ idea of an energy policy never involves the creation of new energy. They want solar power, wind power, barley power. How about creating a new source of energy? Nuclear reactors do that with no risk of funding Arab terrorists or—more repellent to liberals—Big Oil Companies. But in a spasm of left-wing insanity in the seventies, nuclear power was curtailed in this country.
Japan has nuclear power, France has nuclear power—almost all modern countries have nuclear power. But we had Jane Fonda in the movie The China Syndrome. Liberals are very picky about their admiration for Western Europe.
Now it turns out even Chernobyl wasn’t as bad as people thought. In a feat of Soviet engineering, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded in 1986, sending chunks of the reactor core flying into nearby farms and igniting a fire at the reactor that burned for ten days. It was the worst nuclear disaster in history—finally giving us a nuclear power plant that killed more people than died in Teddy Kennedy’s car. But as the New York Times reported in September 2005, “Nearly 20 years after the huge accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, a new scientific report has found that its aftereffects on health and the environment have not proved as dire as scientists had predicted.” Instead of tens of thousands of cancer deaths from acute radiation exposure, there were 4,000. Only 50 deaths were directly attributable to the explosion. There has been no increase in leukemia, birth defects, or fertility problems in the surrounding area.
And, I mention again, this was in the Soviet Union. Soviet engineers couldn’t make Jell-O. They’d show up at the World’s Fair and stare at a flush toilet like it was a rocket ship. They turned half of Germany into an inefficient manufacturing center. Do you know how hard that is? It’s like botching a train wreck. Of course the Soviets screwed up nuclear power! Instead of taking the environmentalist hamstrings off the muscular American economy—so we can split atoms, drill, mine, and strip—the Democrats want to preside over our state-managed descent into hell.
Liberals want us to live like Swedes, with their genial, mediocre lives, ratcheting back our expectations, practicing fuel austerity, and sitting by the fire in a cardigan sweater like Jimmy Carter. If one posits that we have a fixed amount of energy and have to start rationing it, then we are dying as a species. The theory of vegetarianism is that Americans consume “too much” energy. It takes a lot of energy to grow corn to feed animals to feed us—so why don’t we become a bunch of grazing farmyard animals ourselves? We can eat grass and share our energy with the birds!
Environmentalists’ energy plan is the repudiation of America and Christian destiny, which is Jet Skis, steak on the electric grill, hot showers, and night skiing. Perennially irritating to environmentalists is mankind’s single greatest invention: the flush toilet. You knew it had to happen. Apostles of “dry toilets” insist that we “have to get beyond flush-and forget technology,” as it was put by Sim Van der Ryn, founder of the Ecological Design Institute. Flush-and-forget abortions are one thing, but this is solid human waste we’re talking about! Apparently, we need to spend more time thinking about our excrement. Van der Ryn explained that the goal was “to deal with one’s own waste as close to the source as possible”—precisely the opposite of what humans have wanted to do with their excrement since the beginning of time.
Nonflush toilets were first introduced in America—well, originally by the Indians—but then again in the sixties by a Rockefeller scion who promoted a “dry toilet” called the Clivus Multrum. They pop up again every few years but, oddly enough, never seem to catch on. Dry toilets are like the metric system of human waste disposal.
In 1995, the New York Times was enthusiastically reporting on the move away from mankind’s greatest invention by homeowners “fed up with overdevelopment, contaminated ground water, and overflowing septic tanks”—but evidently not fed up with living on top of their own excrement. These homeowners were creating environmentally friendly ways to keep their excrement close to them. They created miniature wetlands in their backyards, solar toilets, or composting toilets. Only recently have advocates of nonflush toilets begun to recognize their product’s central shortcoming, which is the natural human aversion to the “routine emptying of excrement from the toilets.”
Instead of the organic method of living in your own excrement, most people prefer the inorganic method of flushing it away from themselves. Consequently, the federal government has done the next best thing for the official state religion, which is to make it a felony to replace a 1.3-gallon toilet bowl with an old-fashioned 7-gallon toilet bowl—or as we call it, “a working toilet.”
The whole purpose of living in your own excrement is to save . . . water. Water. Liberals are worried we’re going to run out of something that literally falls from the sky. Here’s an idea: Just wait. It will rain. Every possible personal use of water combined—steam baths, swimming pools, showers, toilets, and kitchen sinks—amounts to less than 10 percent of all water usage. Agricultural use accounts for about 70 percent of water usage and industrial use more than 20 percent. But again in 2003, the Greens were calling flush toilets “an environmental disaster.” They want us to go to the bathroom outdoors because, you know, we’re animals.
Question: Are liberals clueless about waste management? Answer: Do bears crap in the woods? Liberals have fervently believed that humans are a blight on the Earth since Thomas Malthus penned “An Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798. Like the flushless toilet, it’s an idea that won’t die. In the 1970s, Paul Ehrlich wrote the best-selling book The Population Bomb, predicting global famine and warning that entire nations would cease to exist by the end of the twentieth century—among them, England. “[I]t is now too late,” he wrote, “to take action to save many of those people.” In 2001—despite the perplexing persistent existence of England—the Sierra Club listed Ehrlich’s Population Bomb as among its books recommended by Sierra readers.
How many trees had to be chopped down to make the paper for all those copies of The Population Bomb?
Liberals beatify health, no-smoking, camping, non–fossil-fuel travel, organic foods—all while creating exotic new diseases in pursuit of polymorphous perversity. Don’t be confused by your capacity for reason! We’re just apes. A chief ingredient of the liberal religion is the bestialization of humanity. So on one hand, we have to give up SUVs, snowmobiles, and indoor plumbing, but on the other hand, at least we get the funky bestial behavior. (Including actual bestiality— keep reading!)
They believe in the coarse physical appropriation of women by men—hookups, trophy wives, strip clubs. Through movies, magazines, and TV, liberals promote a cult of idealized beauty that is so extreme as to be unimaginable. We must listen to Hollywood airheads like Julia Roberts and George Clooney because they are beautiful.
Today’s worship of physical perfection is more grotesque than Hitler’s notion of the Aryan.
Ugly feminists—or as the New York Times describes them, “by the standards of the time, unlovely”—impotently rail against “sexist men” and “sexual harassment” while simultaneously promoting the view that sex has no sacred purpose, it’s just for fun.
Sex must be dissociated from the idea of raising children, liberated from the transmission of humanity. It’s a natural function that should carry no more moral consequence than drinking a glass of water, as their demiurge Lenin said. It’s in our genes, and therefore it cannot be immoral. We’re beasts. Let’s rock!
Toward the goal of divorcing sex from reproduction, liberals will lie about anything. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court discovered a constitutional right for married couples to buy contraceptives, premised on the Court’s assertion that marriage is a “sacred” institution, protected by “a Right to Privacy older than the Bill of Rights itself.” Within a decade, Justice William Brennan would dump the married stuff and extend the right to contraceptives to unmarried people.
In a classic boneheaded, factless, legislative pronunciamento, in Eisenstadt v. Baird (March 22, 1972), Brennan wrote, “It is inconceivable that the need for health controls varies with the purpose for which the contraceptive is to be used when the physical act in all cases is one and the same.” Ten years later, the New York Times named AIDS in a May 11, 1982, article headlined “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials.”
A year after Eisenstadt, the malleable “right to privacy” metastasized from a right to contraception for married couples to a right to destroy human life in Roe v. Wade.
What about the poor little tyke’s privacy? The question misses the point.
“Constitutional right” means “Whatever Liberals Want.” Society cannot legislate what goes on “in the bedroom.” But if we can’t legislate what goes on in the bedroom, why can’t I hide money from the IRS under my mattress?
The cult of liberalism is preposterously fixated on youth—all the while devaluing life at the end, by demanding a “right to die.” Richard Lamm, the Democratic governor of Colorado, famously said in 1984, “We’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.” How about you first, Dick?
Instead of seeking wisdom, liberals desire to be seen as clever by being counterintuitive, crazy, and outré. They have an irreducible fascination with barbarism and will defend anything hateful—Tookie, Mumia, Saddam Hussein, Hedda Nussbaum, abortion, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, New York Times columnist Frank Rich. If Hitler hadn’t turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would have stuck by him, too. Liberals defend unreason against reason and then call themselves rationalists. They are too important to be bothered by the things that frighten middle-class people worried about the equity in their homes. The truly pathetic liberals are the ones who aren’t rich but ape the belief structure of fabulously wealthy Hollywood leftists anyway. Like the bums who stood outside restaurants during the Depression with toothpicks in their mouths, they seem not to realize that the crucial part of being rich is that you have money, not attitudes.
The whole panoply of nutty things liberals believe flows from their belief that man is just another animal. (And not just Kanye West—they’re talking about all men.) Only their core rejection of God can explain the bewildering array of liberal positions: We must save Tookie Williams, while slaughtering the unborn. We must eat natural foods, but the right to acquire disease in casual hookups is a holy ritual. We must halt human development so that the Furbish lousewort can be fruitful and multiply, but humans are multiplying too much and threatening the biosphere of the Furbish lousewort. Women are no different from men, but we need a library of laws and codes to protect women from sexual harassment. As Chesterson said, where we once had a few big rules, now we need an encyclopedia of little rules.
Usually zealots can’t make money doing insane things. But liberals have the entire taxpayer-funded “education” apparatus to support them. Public schools are what columnist Joe Sobran calls “liberalism’s reproductive system.” In lieu of teaching Biblical truth, which—are you sitting down?—used to be the purpose of education, the government schools teach an “amalgam of liberalism, feminism, Darwinism, and the Playboy philosophy.” No longer content to ruin their own children, liberals insist on being subsidized by the taxpayer to ruin everyone else’s children, too. (Remember the good old days when bums and malcontents would ruin your children for free?)
Among the things the Supreme Court has held “unconstitutional” are prayer in public schools, moments of silence in public schools (which the Court cleverly recognized as an invidious invitation to engage in “silent prayer”), and displays of the Ten Commandments in public schools. In 1992, the Court ruled it “unconstitutional” for a Reform rabbi to give a nonsectarian invocation at a high school graduation ceremony on the perfectly plausible grounds that Rhode Island was trying to establish Reform Judaism as the official state religion. (Opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy.)
Yes, those scheming Jews have had their eyes on the Ocean State as long as I can remember. Let one Reform rabbi say a prayer in a school there, you might just as well change the state’s name to “Jewland.” Even the rare sane rulings from the Supreme Court face massive resistance from the lower courts. Liberal judges feel free to disregard the Supreme Court to achieve the overriding objective of keeping real religion out of government schools. All-important “precedent” matters only when we’re talking about Roe v. Wade, not rulings on religion.
In a 2001 opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court upheld the right of religious groups to participate in after-school activities along with other clubs. It was the second time the High Court had instructed the schools to stop specifically singling out religious groups for discrimination. (One imagines the sound of a rooster crowing if that same court denied the church groups a third time.)
Indeed, the case Good News Club v. Milford Central School was nearly identical to another case in which the Supreme Court had reversed the exact same court a few years earlier. In his majority opinion, Justice Thomas remarked on the oddity of having to reverse the same court twice on the same issue. Thomas said that while the appellate courts aren’t required to cite all the Supreme Court’s precedents, they might want to take note of the last time they were reversed on the exact same facts.
Concerned that someone might be reading Leviticus during school hours, Justice David Souter dissented from Thomas’s opinion in a hairsplitting exegesis about the precise time classes let out (2:56 p.m.) versus the time the organizers would enter school property (2:30 p.m.). Then again, I suppose arguments about the precise moment something begins have never been liberals’ strong suit. At least the 6–3 decision gave us an accurate count of the atheists on the Court, probably as accurate as my dream of giving them all polygraph tests someday. (Do you believe in a Higher Being? . . . No, seriously.)
Public schools are forbidden from mentioning religion not because of the Constitution, but because public schools are the Left’s madrassas. According to Cornell law professor Gary Simson, sex education courses that teach abstinence until marriage are unconstitutional because they violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Simson says recommending sexual abstinence to teenagers is wrong because it “teaches that this one belief is the only proper one.”
Liberals used to tell us they were teaching fisting to fourth-graders because “kids are going to have sex anyway!” (Yes, “fisting” is exactly what it sounds like; have a nice day!) Now they’ve dispensed with that and openly concede that they believe virtue is just one of many equally valid points of view that must be counterbalanced with the argument for promiscuity, group sex, fisting, and other lifestyle choices. At least the crazy Muslims get funding from Saudi Arabia for their madrassas. Liberals force normal Americans to pay for their religious schools.
While any reference to Moses in the schools is strictly prohibited, school authorities can force minors to attend sexually explicit presentations on anal sex and condom use. In 1992, Chelmsford (Massachusetts) High School hired Suzi Landolphi to give a mandatory “AIDS Awareness presentation” to the entire school, apparently designed to reach the one or two human beings on Planet Earth who hadn’t heard about AIDS.
By her own account, Landolphi is the product of a broken family. She says her mother was an alcoholic who committed suicide, her father physically abused her, and she herself was a chronic bed wetter until age ten. Landolphi was a five-time loser at marriage. So she is definitely the sort of person most parents would want talking to their children about sex. Naturally, the Chelmsford High School administrators realized they had found an Aristotle in their midst.
In her presentation, “Hot, Sexy, and Safer,” Landolphi began by telling the teenagers—who were forced by school authorities to be there—“I can’t believe how many people came here to listen to someone talk about sex, instead of staying home and having it yourself.” In the dry legal language of the complaint later filed by parents of some of the students, Landolphi also “used profane, lewd, and lascivious language to describe body parts and excretory functions,” including “eighteen references to orgasms, six references to male genitals, and eight references to female genitals.” (And that was just while thanking the school principal for inviting her.) She asked students to show their “orgasm faces” in front of a camera—which would certainly come in handy for any future on-camera careers in the adult film industry. She invited a male student on stage to lick a condom with her.
After discussing anal sex, Landolphi remarked that one would be “in deep sh—.” She told one male student he “had a nice butt” and another that his baggy pants were “erection wear.” This did not constitute sexual harassment under the law, because, like Bill Clinton, Landolphi supports abortion rights, one may assume. She concluded ninety minutes of this relentless vulgarity by asking a female student to place an oversized condom on the head of a male student and blow it up.
Like most people who enjoy talking to strangers about sex, Miss Landolphi, to put it as charitably as possible, is physically repulsive in appearance. With a presentation that was about as erotic as phone sex with Andrea Dworkin—or actual sex with Andrea Dworkin, come to think of it—Landolphi may have inadvertently promoted abstinence among the student body by generating widespread aversion to the various activities she described.
It’s no wonder Bible Belt, right-wing Christians get the greatest enjoyment out of sex (another scientific study hated by liberals)—they never have to endure listening to liberals talk about sex.
Parents of Chelmsford students immediately brought suit alleging that by forcing their children to attend Landolphi’s presentation without prior notice, the school had violated their privacy right to direct the upbringing of their children. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit could find no such right in the “living Constitution.” The “right to privacy” refers to the right of unmarried couples to obtain contraception. It encompasses the right to kill an unborn baby. It means the right of men to sodomize one another. Where these parents got the idea that “privacy” included their right to keep their children from being forced to make “orgasm faces” in school was anybody’s guess.
Tellingly, the federal appeals court also rejected the parents’ Free Exercise claim, questioning “whether the Free Exercise Clause even applies to public education.”
Thus, the court declared a clearly visible Constitutional clause—not buried in the penumbras—officially inapplicable to government schools. (Perhaps what threw them off was the fact that the free exercise of religion—unlike abortion, gay marriage, and sodomy—is specifically mentioned in the Constitution. You can see how that would be confusing.) Allowing parents to interfere with their children’s education might impair the state’s efforts to indoctrinate children into the official state religion of promiscuity, recycling, and freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Colleges pick up where the public schools leave off, inculcating students in the religion of hating America and hating God. While college professors like the University of Colorado’s Ward Churchill act like on-the-edge radicals for calling American bond traders “little Eichmanns,” professors are the most cosseted, pussified, subsidized group of people in the U.S. workforce. They have concocted a system to preemptively protect themselves for not doing their jobs, known as “tenure.” They make a lot of money, have health plans that would make New York City municipal workers’ jaws drop, and work—at most—fifteen hours a week.
In theory, the only job requirement of a college professor is to be intelligent, provocative, and open-minded, but their reigning attribute is that they are ignorant, boring, and narrow-minded. These zealous pagans teach the official state religion of liberalism as axiomatic truth.
The stupidest of their students become journalists, churning out illiterate attacks on dissidents from the liberal religion. Within a few weeks of each other in early 2006, both Rolling Stone and Newsweek magazines displayed their ignorance of Biblical passages cited during interviews. In a Rolling Stone interview, Republican senator Sam Brownback criticized countries like Sweden that had legalized gay marriage, quoting the line from Matthew “you shall know them by their fruits.”
The interviewer, Jeff Sharlet, interpreted Brownback’s scriptural quotation as a homophobic slur. Soon gay groups were demanding an apology from the senator. (All I can say to that is: how niggardly of them.)
Meanwhile, Newsweek ran an article about the looming danger of evangelicals learning to debate, noting that Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University had the number-one debate club in the country. The reporter quoted Falwell saying, “We are training debaters who can perform assault ministry.” These evangelicals are scary! Newsweek later ran a correction stating: “Newsweek misquoted Falwell as referring to ‘assault ministry.’
In fact, Falwell was referring to ‘a salt ministry’—a reference to Matthew 5:13, where Jesus says, ‘Ye are the salt of the earth.’ We regret the error.”
When Al Gore tried to suck up to Christians during the second presidential debate in the 2000 campaign, he utterly mangled Scripture— and not one mainstream media reporter noticed. By way of explaining his nutty environmental beliefs, Gore said, “In my faith tradition, it is written in the book of Matthew, ‘Where your heart is, there’s your treasure also.’ And I believe that we ought to recognize the value to our children and grandchildren of taking steps that preserve the environment in a way that’s good for them.”
Gore had not merely transformed a core Christian belief into a Confucian fortune cookie, he had reversed Christian doctrine. The actual Bible—Matthew 6:21—says precisely the opposite of what Gore said, admonishing us to make heaven our only treasure—“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Not only were Bible illiterates in the media unaware of Gore’s faux pas, they actually praised Gore for his brilliant use of Scripture to appeal to the God voters. Writing in Slate, William Saletan said Gore scored points in the second debate when he “answered a question about the environment by quoting from the scripture of my ‘faith tradition.’ The quote—‘Where your heart is, there is your treasure also’— had nothing to do with the environment but everything to do with projecting heart and faith.”
It also had nothing to do with Scripture.
Father Richard John Neuhaus describes being interviewed by a reporter about the pope and referring to the pope by one of his formal titles, “the Bishop of Rome.” The reporter responded, “That raises an interesting point. Is it unusual that this pope is also the bishop of Rome?” In another interview, Neuhaus told a reporter that political corruption had “been around ever since that unfortunate afternoon in the garden.” This time, the reporter mulled it over before asking, “What garden was that?”
In defense of the American educational system, every single one of these reporters knew how to put on a condom.
In 2003, reporters hounded British prime minister Tony Blair about whether he had prayed with George Bush—as if they were asking whether the world leaders had shot heroin together or shared a hooker. There was so much negative publicity over Blair praying with Bush that Blair’s handlers forbade him to attend church with Bush later that year. It’s hard to imagine an activity Bush and Blair could have shared that would have been more scandalous, short of taking an SUV to an all-men’s club that allowed cigar smoking.
In the book Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, Jon Krakauer writes of the Bush administration, “This, after all, is a country led by a born-again Christian . . . who characterizes international relations as a biblical clash between forces of good and evil. The highest law officer in the land, Attorney General John Ashcroft, is a dyed-inthe- wool follower of a fundamentalist Christian sect—the Pentecostal Assemblies of God of America . . . and subscribes to a vividly apocalyptic worldview that has much in common with key millenarian beliefs held by the Lafferty brothers and the residents of Colorado City.”
Yes, it’s really those devout Christians we have to keep our eyes on. Who can ever forget all the rioting and bloodshed around the world after hip-hop impresario Kanye West appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine as the crucified Jesus?
Krakauer—my guess, not a Christian—is worried about a theocracy based on one born-again Christian in the cabinet of a Christian president and compares Ashcroft to psychopath murderer Dan Lafferty, a member of a radical Mormon sect who brutally murdered a twenty four-year-old woman and her child. Comparing the attorney general to Lafferty is roughly the equivalent of saying, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who belongs to the same religious sect as the Son of Sam . . .”
If liberals are on Red Alert with one born-again Christian in the cabinet of a Christian president, imagine how they would react if there were five. Between 25 and 45 percent of the population calls itself “born-again” or “evangelical” Christian. Jews make up less than 2 percent of the nation’s population, and yet Clinton had five in his cabinet. He appointed two to the Supreme Court. Now guess which administration is called a neoconservative conspiracy?
Whether Jews or Christians, liberals are always on a witch hunt against people who appear to believe in God.
Incidentally, the country was also allegedly led by an evangelical Christian when Jimmy Carter was president—you know, the kind of evangelical Christian who appears prominently in pornographic magazines while running for president. I guess that 1976 interview with Playboy was enough to do penance with liberals for believing in God.
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 Pro-Choice 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’être 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 pre-kindergarten 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 welcoming 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.
From the Hardcover edition.
