Traditional moral views: If Christian, bad. If Muslim, (no comment)
These days some points of view are deemed dangerous. They are extreme and may lead to violence. We can’t allow them to terrorize us under the guise of so-called “free speech.”
Or at least that’s how it’s characterized by the powerful propagandists of our age. But this should be reworded. Even if we deem the views they hate as dangerous (which I don’t), I have noticed that those views may not be so bad, actually, depending on who is expressing them. Specifically, we have to ask whether the moral viewpoint is coming from a Christian context or an Islamic one. The leftist hypothetical logic here is pretty straightforward.
If Christian, then …
The first hypothetical proposition says that if the traditional moral beliefs are coming from Christians (or Jews for that matter), they are dangerously bad, and it is urgent that we repress that violent speech at once. We’re talking, of course, about the kind of beliefs that have been, until a few years ago, mostly universal across time and culture. Consider the simple proposition that male and female are distinct genders, that they are objective in nature rather than social constructions, and that the two exhaust the category of gender.
This would have been taken as obvious by nearly all of the thousands of distinct ethnic peoples across the globe throughout the centuries. Today’s progressives won’t say aloud that they think all of those people across all of those cultures were and are vile bigots. But again, if Christian (or Jewish), then evil.
In fact, you don’t really even have to be Christian in any recognizable way to get branded with the scarlet letter(s) of the left. When a mentally ill person identifying as “non-binary” went on a deadly shooting spree at a gay night club in Colorado Springs recently, shameless media activists pretended that their favorite enemies were responsible.
A USA Today “correspondent” wrote some of the same tired, predictable drivel we’re used to seeing. It’s all the fault of right-wingers, white supremacists, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric on Fox News, he said. Everything is lumped in together. It’s the religious conservatives and their “obsession” with drag queens that fueled the violence. They’re the same as Q-Anon, “Proud Boys” or whoever else is supposed to make low-information leftist readers gasp and clutch their pearls. As we all know, nothing typifies the millions of weekly churchgoers around America like zealous adherence to underground militant extremist groups … and “non-binary” gender identification, apparently.
If Muslim, then …
The second hypothetical proposition goes like this: If the traditional views of gender or sexuality are coming from Muslims, then … (clears throat softly, looks around nervously, checks watch, smiles awkwardly, whistles a tune, hears crickets).
Were you under the impression that the only parents who have protested pedophilic indoctrination in their schools are those reprehensible evangelical types who need to be investigated as terrorists by the FBI? In fact there were plenty of angry parents in the majority-Muslim city of Dearborn, MI who came out in force to protest pornographic material in their kids’ schools.
I doubt you heard as much about that one. I doubt the FBI went after any of them. I’m sure you didn’t read any pieces about the grave threat of Muslims with their bigoted, retrograde views about sexuality. No talk of Muslims threatening democracy, wanting to force their views on us in a repressive “Handmaid’s Tale” theocracy.
As I write this, the World Cup is being held in Qatar. They’re not exactly “progressive” about gender and sexuality, as evidenced by laws prohibiting homosexuality outright. When Westerners decided to wear rainbow gear to protest, they got shut down hard. But it’s a Muslim thing, so no worries. Just more awkward silence.
We Notice
A hallmark of intellectual honesty is consistency. This means that your standards remain the same. But when your main standard is the “double” kind, your credibility suffers. The powerful elites may be vexed by the dismal opinion of the public toward wealthy media, but if they have any self-awareness at all, they will see the blindingly obvious. When you take sides on every story in such overt partisan ways, when you hide things you don’t like and amplify things that help your favorite political narratives, we notice.
We see the cowardice by which the elite media machine won’t say of Muslim-rooted views on gender and sexuality the kinds of things they say of Judeo-Christian-rooted views on those subjects, even though they are basically the same views.
It follows the same pattern as violent acts. If a crazy caucasion right-wing nutjob commits it, it’s front page and lead story for the next month. If a radical Muslim (or for that matter a Black Hebrew Israelite) is the guilty party, it’s quietly mentioned and we move on.
We’ve all heard a thousand times how the January 6 rioters murdered capitol police. But they did no such thing. The only murder was of an unarmed woman by an officer. An officer who died of a heart attack the following day was said by media to have been bludgeoned by the crowd. That was a lie.
BUT, a few months later, someone actually did murder a capitol policeman intentionally by running him over with his vehicle as he crashed through the barrier. You may be curious about that. You may not have heard much about it. You may be wondering why that officer’s name isn’t famous in the manner of the aforementioned heart attack victim Brian Sicknick. By now I’ll bet you can guess why. The perpetrator was black, a follower of the Nation of Islam and an avowed devotee of the teachings of Louis Farakkhan. Therefore, … (whistles, looks around, checks watch, hears yet again from those melodious crickets).