It’s almost a week ago now that pundit Steven Crowder posted a video of Muslim bakers in Dearborn, Michigan, refusing to service faux weddings. And for almost a week now the mainstream media have basically ignored the story. For this reason, many critics would point out that the recent high-profile controversies involving Christian bakers and other Christian businessmen who’ve done precisely the same thing — and the government’s persecution of them — aren’t first and foremost about attacking “religious liberty” per se.
They’re about attacking Christianity.
It’s hard to escape this conclusion. A perusal of the first two pages of Google results based on the search phrase “Muslim bakers refuse to bake gay wedding cake video” turned up just one major paper, the conservative Washington Times. As for liberal sites, only a few small ones appeared on those pages. One, called IfYouOnlyNews.com, justified the media double standard by claiming the Christian businessmen’s stories are more newsworthy because they involve lawsuits. But this doesn’t wash. Coming on the heels of the front-page Christian-oriented incidents, video of Muslims behaving identically is news-copy gold; it adds perspective, gives the story even greater legs, and expands readership. It’s much as if the media made a federal case out of a recent spate of feral-dog attacks on people but ignored a spate of feral-cat attacks occurring at the same time. One might conclude that the press corps was replete with catty cat lovers but was no friend to man’s best friend.
It isn’t just the media, either. Apple Corporation CEO Tim Cook recently inveighed against the religious-freedom laws in Indiana and Arkansas, yet he readily does business in Muslim countries that make homosexuality a crime punishable by death. It seems Cook’s principles take a back seat to his pocketbook.
Yet this leftist double standard is nothing new. The media devoted much ink to the notion that WWII-era pontiff Pope Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope.” But when the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc intelligence officer to ever defect to the West, General Ion Mihai Pacepa, revealed in 2007 that the notion was the result of a Soviet agitprop campaign to defame Pius, reporters were wholly uninterested in what should have been a story of the year. Apparently, the media’s “good work” of unfairly besmirching a Christian institution was done. Why undo it with the truth?
Then there’s the matter of the sexual abuse of minors. The media focused incessantly on the pederasty committed by some Catholic priests, even though most of the cases originated prior to 1990 precisely because the matter had already been addressed. At the same time, the media ignored the allegedly rampant pedophilia in Hollywood and the ongoing government-school child-sex-abuse scandal, even though a university study found the latter to be 100 times the magnitude of the church scandal.
In fact, given that the media are quite noncommittal (to say the least) with respect to the legitimization of pedophilia — as I illustrated in “The Slippery Slope to Pedophilia” — one could wonder if they care about the crime at all. Likewise, are they really concerned about homosexuals? Or is something else in play?
There are many reasons why the Left attacks Christianity. For starters, it stands in the way of leftist hegemony; it’s no coincidence that the least Christian Western nations (e.g., Sweden) are also the most liberal. Then, as believers might contend and G.K. Chesterton put it, Christianity is always under attack because, being the Truth, it touches everything. Yet there is an underappreciated factor.
Reason does not rule people’s thinking as much as some of us like to think. In fact, as this Barna Group study showed, most Americans make decisions based on feelings. This is especially true in our emotionally charged political debates. And the reality is that most homosexual-agenda advocates are running on passion and anger; this helps account for their all-rhetoric, no-reason arguments (that, and dishonor on the part of people who will do anything to advance their own will).
This phenomenon helps explain leftist double standards in hatred. What irritates us is the grain of sand inside our shell, not the billions of grains beyond it, even though they’re certainly more formidable. In other words, you may despise an intolerable (to you) next door neighbor far more than a genocidal tyrant across the ocean, despite the latter being an infinitely worse person. For the neighbor is inside your shell.
Yet there’s a difference between how a Truth-oriented individual and a relativist (a leftist) will react. The former may say, “Yes, my feelings for my neighbor are worse, but I understand that, viewing the matter objectively, it’s unreasonable to cast him as more evil than the tyrant. Feelings don’t determine fact.” But a prerequisite for viewing things objectively is belief in the objective, in things such as Objective Moral Truth. A relativist doesn’t, leaving him with no better yardstick for decision-making than emotion; it becomes the ultimate arbiter. This is why leftists felt the United States was worse than the Soviet Union; it’s why they feel Western is worse than Third World culture. And it’s why they feel Christianity is worse than Islam.
Christianity is inside their shell.
And their shell is a very small place, indeed.
This is part of the reason why Christians’ freedoms are being squelched. It’s not uncommon for people to want to suppress opinions that enrage them; it’s a way of taking vengeance on those who have dared evoke bad feelings in you with their words. Yet while this emotional reaction partially explains the singling out of Christians, this doesn’t mean that within this context there isn’t method to the madness.
Dale Carnegie famously said, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” Of course, a man still of the same opinion hasn’t been convinced at all, but political correctness isn’t about changing minds.
It’s about changing society.
There’s little question that certain social engineers, who have thought (to a degree) and not just felt with respect to their dark craft, know they won’t change the beliefs of today’s staunch Christians. And although certain other minds will be snatched, perhaps they don’t even much care to. Rather, consider this: Imagine that, as homosexual activists Kirk and Madsen wrote in their book After the Ball, that leftists can “cow and silence” today’s opponents of the homosexual agenda. Now the next generation is raised in an environment in which, as the authors also wrote, there has been “a major realignment solidly in favour of gay rights”; where laws grant homosexuals special protection and no one dares utter a word of protest; where everything said on the matter, whether out of sincerity or posturing, reflects the assumption that homosexual behavior is normal and positive. Fed only this one set of data and bearing in mind that what’s assumed is what’s learned best, what will children growing up in such a time believe?
People can think whatever they want today. If you can control their words and actions, however, what tomorrow’s people think about the issue will be very, very different.
