You will be made to care

Episode 136 of the Consider This Podcast (one of the Top 50 Conservative Podcasts according to Newsmax) has been released; conservative commentary in 10 minutes or less.

In this episode, I’m thrilled and honored to be interviewing Erick Erickson, conservative blogger, radio talk show host, and author of the book “You Will Be Made to Care: The war on faith, family, and your freedom to believe”. I talk with him about the book and the loss of religious liberty we’re seeing in the US, about who this affects, what the underlying cause is, and where the solution starts.

Questions include:

• Does this just affect people on the Right? Don’t most people believe in religious liberty?
• What is the core problem that is causing this erosion of religious liberty? Is it primarily a political issue, or not?
• Would Jesus bake a cake for a same-sex wedding? Shouldn’t Christians?
• If the courts can take away our freedom with just 5 votes, how do we reclaim control of our freedom?

Let me know your thoughts on these or other subjects. Click on the link for the show notes and ways to send your feedback, including calling 267-CALL-CT-0 (267-225-5280) or emailing considerthis@ctpodcasting.com. Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher, Blubrry, or Player.fm.

The company claimed the prayers advocated the persecution of people who support abortion, and so they wouldn’t print it. So now, praying for conversion, enlightenment and salvation is considered an act of persecution. You know, it doesn’t matter your religious beliefs, how can anyone consider that the slightest bit of persecution?

If a Christian printer were given a flyer to print that advocated something he or she disagreed with on religious grounds, you know what the outcome would be? And yet Office Depot can come up with its own policy out of thin air, refuse to take some business, and few even take notice.

The double-standard is persecution, especially when it includes excessive fines and re-education. Yeah, yeah, it’s nothing like how Christians are persecuted under ISIS or the Chinese government, but it’s indicative of a trend in this country that goes against the tolerance that the Left claims to revere.

I’ll say it again; businesses are allowed to decide who they’ll do business with. They are all equal in this regard, but apparently some are more equal than others.

Related to this is an article that asks, “Is the Left Losing Their Hold on Pop Culture?” It provides a few quotes from celebrities who, while clearly on the Left otherwise, standing up for Christian bakers, and Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. Here’s one to consider:

Once again, the gay community feels the need to be sore winners. Is it so difficult to allow this woman her religion? Or must we destroy her in order for her to betray her faith. No matter how we judge, it’s truth. The rights we have all fought for, mean nothing, if we deny her hers.

If you don’t recognize the name Christopher Ciccone, that’s OK. I wouldn’t have either if he hadn’t been identified in the article as Madonna’s openly gay brother. Just a few people are quoted, but it at least gives me hope that the over-reaction from the Left on these issues are at least causing the more sober thinkers on the Left to reconsider the slippery slope that they’ve put us on. I guess the question is; how big an impact is this having? The article I reference in the show notes does indicate a 4-to-1 agreement with freedom over force, which is an encouraging sign. But businesses are still being put out of business over this, so it seems that we’ve got quite a vocal minority winning the day.

I don’t like it when cartoonists mock Jesus, but in America the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, and so they are allowed to. In France, this same idea was behind the Je Suis Charlie movement. We will not be intimidated by extremists.

Right up until we are.

Recently, the Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief, whose name is in the article in the show notes and which I will not attempt in case I butcher it, waved the white flag of surrender and said that the magazine would no longer draw cartoons of Mohammed. A dozen of his colleagues died for, and the world erupted in support of, their right to mock. All that was for naught. Violence prevailed. The terrorists won.

To be sure, you can understand their concern. Who wants to poke that particular hornet’s nest again? Why put yourself in that literal line of fire? But his reasoning seemed to be strained. He claimed, “The mistakes you could blame Islam for can be found in other religions.” Perhaps, although the offices were not shot up by enraged Evangelicals, cantankerous Catholics, agitated Jews, or belligerent Buddhists. In fact, the terrorism perpetrated worldwide has predominantly come from one particular religion, but it’s not politically correct to notice that. Oh, and interestingly, no word from Charlie Hebdo about no longer drawing cartoons mocking Jesus. They know perfectly well that the Christian response will most likely be a strongly-worded letter. #ReligionOfPeace

So just in case you were wondering whatever happened to all that solidarity and righteous indignation spent in the service of free speech, that’s what happened. The French surrendered.

That’s what I want to stress here. In every other way, he was qualified for the job, but he had opinions that some disagreed with, and they created an atmosphere where Eich could not function in that job. That, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely what the word “intolerance” means. The irony is that those who created that atmosphere would very likely consider themselves the tolerant ones. The sad part is, they are unable to see intolerance in themselves because of the way they have redefined the word “intolerance” to mean “disagreeing with me”.

That was exhibit A. Exhibit B showed up a couple weeks ago when twin brothers Jason and David Benham were green-lit to host a new show on Home and Garden TV – HGTV – about fixing up dilapidated houses for families in need. Who in the world could be against that?

Well, in a radio interview, David Benham said this, and made some people mad.

We don’t realize that, okay, if 87 percent of Americans are Christians and yet we have abortion on demand, we have no-fault divorce, we have pornography and perversion, we have a homosexuality and its agenda that is attacking the nation, we have adultery. We even have allowed demonic ideologies to take our universities and our public school systems while the church sits silent and just builds big churches.

So this is a rant against an apathetic church that doesn’t stand up for what it believes in. And he lists off several issues that the Christian church, in general, does find wrong. Not all of them agree on all of the issues, true, but the larger point he is making is that all this is happening while the churches build bigger buildings but too many don’t actually do anything about the issues they do agree are problems. A fair point.

But did you catch the problem? The blog Right Wing Watch did. These ideas expressed by the Benhams were simply not politically correct and did not line up with their opinions, so they “tolerantly” screamed loud and long over it, and HGTV rolled over, cancelling the show before it even aired.

The real problem here, aside from more instances of being judged guilty of Thought Crimes by the “tolerant” Left, is that this was no fan outcry (the show hadn’t even aired yet), nor a huge outcry. One blog with, I guess in the eyes of HGTV, enough influence, was enough to get them to cave in to the bullying and drop the show. A few folks, who can muster the required offense and indignation, are enough to shut down people who are, again, qualified for their job, but whose thoughts on unrelated issues are not orthodox enough for the Left.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

Matt Walsh summed up this issue succinctly on his blog entry on the subject with this sentence, “[I]f you mention the ‘gay agenda,’ the gay agenda will prove there is no gay agenda by having you fired for mentioning the gay agenda.” Indeed, the Benham’s point out in the CNN interview video you can find in the show notes, that their issue is with the agenda; not specifically homosexual persons, but the agenda that is being pushed on our culture, by those who are straight as well as gay.

But a commenter on the Google+ page for my "Consider This" podcast made a good point in regard to this. He said, “Liberals don’t hate christians .. they just hate their ‘agenda’.” Aside from his suggestion that a real Christian can’t be liberal (a suggestion he reinforced in our conversation, and which I’m sure a few of my liberal Christian friends, or even I, could easily take apart), it’s a fair question; can you be against an agenda without being against the individuals covered by said agenda?

I would say “Yes”, and here’s why. When you are against an agenda, you seek to influence the culture and/or government. When you are against individuals, you seek to punish individuals. Eich and the Benhams sought to influence government, in Eich’s Prop 8 donation case, or influence the culture, in the Benham’s case where they would just be who they are on their show. Conversely, those who disagreed with them sought to take out their pound of flesh on those men personally.

Yes, I’m sure that, somewhere, there are contrary examples, but on the whole, this is how the fight has been. And I’m sure that those who are for same-sex marriage would like to paint Prop 8 as a case of going after individuals. It is not. It’s a question of whether it’s good for our culture to redefine an institution that has served us well for as far back as you care to look. And in spite of how you want to frame it, Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, as a couple of examples I pulled out of my head at random, do not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, both in serving and in hiring.

The difference between the two sides is clarifying.

I really have to wonder how many people are really represented by those who are doing this bullying. Would most gays have really cared that the Benhams were Christians? How many would have looked past their differences and enjoyed watching the charitable work they were doing? I guess HGTV thought, not enough. But I guess we’ll never know.

I have a suggestion for a new law and I’d like to run it by you. This podcast has a small voice in politics. It doesn’t have that much influence, if any at all. It’s just me and a microphone, talking to you out there who feel it’s worth listening to, even if you don’t agree with me. I do appreciate all my listeners.

However, I’ve noticed a rather huge imbalance, an unfairness, in the scheme of things. There are huge radio networks out there with millions of listeners, broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. How in the world am I supposed to compete with that? Why should their ideas and opinions get more influence than mine? Extremely unfair, right?

So I propose that national news networks be limited to 10 minutes or less a day. Well, they do have more equipment, talent, and money than I do, and they should be able to say perhaps a bit more than I do, so let’s be generous and make that 30 minutes or less. I mean, we want to level the playing field, right? The individual podcaster should be able to compete with the national network if we really want to stick up for the little guy and let everyone’s voice be heard, right?

What’s that you say? The networks have invested in all that talent and equipment, so they should be allowed to say what they want with it? Well then, I’d counter by saying that the CEOs running those networks didn’t oversee that success from the beginning; they are simply the latest head honcho, and while they may have made a contribution to the company’s success, they inherited most of it. I’ve built my success, such as it is, with my own, personal, hard work.

So, does this sound rather silly to you, that folks with bigger radio transmitters, or newspaper subscriptions, than I do should have a cap to how much influence they can have? Well tell ya’ what; so do I. Which is why I find it odd how many on the Left have both celebrated such caps, and are upset that some of those caps were recently removed.

The courts have said that political contributions are political speech, even though, while money talks, it does not do so literally. Of course, exotic dancing has been considered speech, protected by the First Amendment, so the dictionary definition of “speech” is clearly not what we’re talking about here. Just ask Brendan Eich. Campaign contributions are as much political speech as this podcast, and people with more means, be it more audio equipment, pages in a magazine, or cash, should not have their First Amendment protections infringed like that. But when the Supreme Court decided, in the recent McCutcheon case, that some of those limits should be removed, the liberals on the court were upset that this, “weakened America’s democracy”.

So we should shut off those printing presses and broadcast antennas, because America’s democracy depends on it? Absolutely not.