Why liberals hate Christians

It just occurred to me. It all comes down to homosexuality. No serious Christian will ever approve homosexual conduct. Liberals know this. Therefore all serious Christianity must be marginalized, punished, abolished.

It is an irreconcilable conflict.

- end of initial entry -


Samson J. writes:

Yes, modern liberals hate Christians because of homosexuality. It often really is that simple, and I’m glad to see you arrive at the same conclusion (I discovered this several years ago, I guess, having been a university student not so long ago). Their minds rage at the mention of Christianity, because to avow that one is a Christian means there are still people in the world who believe that homosexual behaviour is objectively immoral, and the liberals cannot stand this. Why, I am not sure, but I believe there is a very good reason why the story of Sodom and Gomorrah occupies such a prominent place in Scripture: it’s not only about the danger of tolerating homosexual behaviour. It’s also a warning about the sorts of people who will hate you if you say that homosexuality is wrong.

September 2

Doug H. writes:

This may be a little too spiritual for some, but the liberals and others hate Christians because they are filled with the spirit of anti-Christ the same as anyone else who would deny Christ’s deity and thus his authority to impose moral codes on us.

David F. writes:

I think that homosexuality is useful to liberals as a means of isolating serious Christians and attacking them on supposedly moral grounds. It has been a successful strategy, since liberal arguments that homosexual rights “harm no one” seem more superficially correct than a claim that “a woman’s right to choose” harms no one. Even nonreligious people rarely can muster genuine enthusiasm for abortion.

On the other hand, I do not think homosexuality is fundamental to liberal hostility to Christianity. It is a particular case of hostility to the Christian God, and the implications of His existence. For most moderns, the idea that we are subject to moral law that we did not create and is not “fair” to our desires is simply intolerable.

Ken Hechtman writes:

I agree with part of this. For those Christians who have made opposition to homosexuality the hill they’re ready to die on, yes, the conflict is irreconcilable. There’s no splitting the difference or agreeing to disagree. One side has to win and one side has to lose. I initially didn’t get the intensity of the Chick-fil-A pile-on until I read this piece.

It’s a gay activist explaining why he’s not willing to live and let live with Dan Cathy:

This isn’t about mutual tolerance because there’s nothing mutual about it. If we agree to disagree on this issue, you walk away a full member of this society and I don’t. There is no “live and let live” on this issue because Dan Cathy is spending millions to very specifically NOT let me live. I’m not trying to do that to him.

Asking for “mutual tolerance” on this is like running up to a bully beating a kid to death on the playground and scolding them both for not getting along. I’m not trying to dissolve Mr. Cathy’s marriage or make his sex illegal. I’m not trying to make him a second-class citizen, or get him killed. He’s doing that to me, folks; I’m just fighting back. [LA replies: this is the typical liberal/homosexualist insanity on the issue. They think that if people of the same sex cannot be “married,” that is somehow analogous to being killed. Or, as I’ve often said, it’s not insane, but simply a logically consistent application of agreed-on liberal principles. Either way, no compromise is possible.]

On the other hand I don’t buy that all liberals understand that opposition to homosexuality is necessarily the litmus test for “serious” Christianity, much less why it is. I certainly don’t understand it. And I think the more “non-serious” Christians come to outnumber “serious” ones, the harder it’s going to be to understand it at all.

Here’s something else. Twenty years ago, the fault line was between secular liberals and all Christians. Today it’s between liberal Christians and evangelicals. Once the millenial generation comes of age, the fault line is going to run right down the middle of the evangelical churches. Evangelicals who can read a demographic projection [pdf] are starting to realize they have a problem.

Gintas writes:

Homosexuality is just one front in a large war. Now that homosexuality has triumphed, they aren’t resting. There is polygamy, bestiality, and pedophilia to go. I’m sure there is more, but I don’t want to dwell on it. [LA replies: Homosexuality is not just one front, equal to other fronts. Polygamy, for example, is not a burning issue for liberals. Yes, they will push it, but it’s not nearly as salient as homosexuality is for them.]

Polygamy is on the march:

Three Brazilians in love have their nation up in arms over whether their relationship, now enshrined in a three-way marriage, is legal. The public notary who conducted their marriage says there’s no reason the threesome—or “thruple,” as the internet has charmingly labeled it—shouldn’t enjoy the same kinds of rights imparted upon two people who get hitched. But traditionalists are not impressed: lawyer Regina Beatriz Tavares da Silva, of the Commission for the rights of the Family, has it “absurd and totally illegal.”

Leftists just can’t help but try to make traditional marriage “incredibly weird”:

A good old-fashioned monogamous marriage works beautifully for some. But even the most successful marriages are special and unique and incredibly weird.

D. Bowen writes:

Good observation Mr. Auster but you got it backwards. Liberalism hates Christianity by default and is antithetical to it. Homosexuality is just one more tool liberals have at their disposal to dismantle the church and traditional Western society. In other words, homosexuality is just one more stick (or some may say fascist bundle of sticks) to beat conservatives over the head with. The revolutionaries know that accepting homosexuality is one thing Christians won’t do and if they can portray homosexuals as victims then they have the perfect means of portraying all Christians as bigots and “haters.”

LA replies:

Again I think readers are not seeing the unique importance of the homosexuality issue for liberals.

Ken Hechtman writes:

You wrote:

Again I think readers are not seeing the unique importance of the homosexuality issue for liberals.

Every generation seems to have a single “Which side are you on?” litmus test issue. It was Civil Rights in the 1950s, the Vietnam War in the 1960s and abortion in the 1980s. Today it’s unquestionably homosexuality. If you’re for same-sex marriage, you can break with the liberal orthodoxy on many other issues and still be accepted as a liberal. But if you hold the traditional Christian view of homosexuality, the other liberals simply won’t accept you as one of them. [LA replies: It seems to have taken a leftist/liberal like Mr. Hechtman to see the truth of what I was saying.]

I saw the Brazilian triad story. There’s much less to it than the Guardian column suggests. It’s not a marriage, it’s a declaration of civil union. And it’s not a legislative or even judicial decision. It’s one notary in private practice issuing a document. No instance of the Brazilian government is bound to recognize the union.

Ken Hechtman writes:

You wrote:

[T]his is the typical liberal/homosexualist insanity on the issue. They think that if people of the same sex cannot be “married,” that is somehow analogous to being killed.

I gave you that two-paragraph quote out of context. Here are the previous two paragraphs:

- In 75 countries in the world, being gay is illegal. In many, the penalty is life in prison. These are countries we can’t openly visit. In 9 countries, being gay is punishable by death. In many others, violence against gays is tacitly accepted by the authorities. These are countries where we would be killed. Killed.

- Two organizations that work very hard to maintain this status quo and roll back any protections that we may have are the Family Research Council and the Marriage & Family Foundation. For example, the Family Research council leadership has officially stated that same-gender-loving behavior should be criminalized in this country. They draw their pay, in part, from the donations of companies like Chick-Fil-A. Both groups have also done “missionary” work abroad that served to strengthen and promote criminalization of same-sex relations.

Wayne Self isn’t talking in analogies. At all. The claim is this and it’s not unique to Wayne Self: There’s a direct line from Chick-Fil-A to its lobbying and disbursement arm Winshape to one or another of these third-party organizations to the recently-passed Ugandan law making homosexuality a death penalty offence. I don’t know how well the claim holds up. I suspect it doesn’t but it’ll take me some time to look it up.

LA replies:

“the Family Research council leadership has officially stated that same-gender-loving behavior should be criminalized in this country.”

This is untrue. Wikipedia’s article on the FRC reports:

In February 2010 the Family Research Council’s Senior Researcher for Policy Studies, Peter Sprigg, stated on NBC’s Hardball that gay behavior should be outlawed and that “criminal sanctions against homosexual behavior” should be enforced.[28] In May that same year, Sprigg publicly suggested that repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy would encourage molestation of heterosexual service members.[29] In November FRC President Tony Perkins was asked about Sprigg’s comments regarding the criminalization of same-sex behavior: he responded that criminalizing homosexuality is not a goal of the Family Research Council. [Emphasis added.] [30][31]

So the head of FRC says that the FRC does not seek the criminalization of homosexual conduct.

Also, Third World countries’ laws pertaining to homosexual conduct is irrelevant. Why does your side bring it up, except to create fear which is then transferred to American Christians? And as for the countries that punish homosexual conduct with life imprisonment or the death penalty, I’ll bet that most of them are Muslim countries. Yet the left supports America’s non-discriminatory mass Third-World immigration and wants to bring many more Muslims to America, even as it seeks to marginalize and silence American Christians as “haters.” What this shows is that the left’s passion for homosexual equality, as great as it is, is not their ultimate passion. Their ultimate passion is for the destruction of America.

Also, it should be repeated that in America the question of the legality of homosexual conduct is not—or rather was not, until the unconstitutional, revolutionary 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision—a national issue, but a state issue. States were free to have whatever laws in this area they saw fit. Lawrence declared that all state laws outlawing homosexual conduct were unconstitutional.

September 3

KO writes:

On the above subject I agree with David F. In particular, I think the defense of so-called homosexuality masks the Western world’s dirty little secret, that a considerable percentage of the population is sexually egocentric. As David implies, it sounds far more noble to declare oneself opposed to “anti-gay” Christians than it does to admit that one is driven by the unchristian desire to use others for one’s own gratification.

A reader writes:

Like you say, I don’t know that liberals will ever seriously push polygamy, especially since they likely view it as oppression against women. What they might push though is for a de-normalization of monogamy. Certain male homosexual activists are quite vocal about the idea that “emotional monogamy” is all that is necessary in their relationships (i.e., cheating is OK as long as it is agreed-upon.) This is referred to as polyamory, sort of a “hip” modern version of polygamy if you will.

Will it have a massive societal impact? I don’t know—even without a principled secular rationale for why marriages should be monogamous, I have a hard time seeing how that many women in particular would ever accept such an attitude in practice. But it’s definitely something certain leftists officially express an amoral “live and let live” attitude toward.

On a related note, there is a bill that recently passed the California Assembly that allows for children to be assigned three legal parents.


Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 31, 2012 11:10 AM | Send
    

Email entry

Email this entry to:


Your email address:


Message (optional):