In yet another effort to eliminate Christian opinion from public discourse, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union recently asserted that the freedom of religion is merely “an American value”—and, moreover, a value in conflict with the newly discovered “right not to be offended.”
It is, in fact, nothing of the kind. The freedom of religion is one of the most important cornerstones of our constitutional rights.
As such, it is enshrined in the First Amendment, alongside, and inseparable from, those other fundamental God-given rights—the freedom of expression and the freedom of association.
Indeed, asserting our freedom of religion to be a mere “value” might persuasively be described as a bald-faced effort by the ACLU to subvert the constitution of the United States.
What’s more, as the ACLU cannot fail to understand, infringing Christians’ freedom to express their views in the public square also sets a precedent for the subversion of other God-given rights. The blatant hypocrisy of the ACLU’s position is evident in its support of pornographers. Granted, pornographic sites are allegedly the most popular on the Internet, but there is still a substantial minority of people who are offended by it. Yet there is no sign of the ACLU fighting for their rights not to be offended.
The reason for this is that the only speech that needs the protection of the First Amendment is offensive speech—whether the offensiveness be political, sexual or religious.
Political correctness of the type championed by the ACLU is already infringing freedom of expression in other spheres—even our super hero comics. An artist, writing in The Wall Street Journal, recently revealed that illustrators thought to hold conservative opinions are finding it hard to get work.
Actually, there is nothing new about this. The assault on the funny pages was well under way more than a decade ago. General Halftrack of the Beetle Bailey cartoon and the Near Sighted Mr. McGoo nearly fell victim to the forces of political correctitude.
It was claimed Halftrack’s geriatric libidinousness was insulting to women, while McGoo’s myopic misperceptions were alleged to ridicule the short-sighted.
On the basis of such logic, folks with pronounced over bites should by rights be fighting to ban Bugs Bunny, while folks of less than average stature should be protesting Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Like the ACLU in the matter of religion, the PC fanatics who campaigned against Halftrack and Mr. McGoo were guilty of humbug and hypocrisy.
Halftrack, in fact, satirizes elderly men who lust after young ladies, and McGoo parodies not short-sightedness, but our all-too-human refusal to accept things as they really are.
If anyone has a right to be offended by them, it is lustful seniors and wishful thinkers.
The bizarre notions of the humorless puritans who seek to impose political correctness on the rest of us would be quite funny if they didn’t have such serious consequences.
Many of Russia’s most serious current problems, for example, are the legacy of more than 70 years of political correctness.
In order to uphold false but politically correct Marxist theory, Soviet history so extensively and systematically falsified history, it is still difficult to sift fact from fiction. Even photographic records have been altered.
Nobody knows, for instance, how many died in the gulag. The official number used to be 20 million. But today the figure is thought to be 40 million and possibly even 60 million. Thanks to political correctness, we shall never know for sure the true death toll.
Researching the history of the Soviet economy is similarly difficult. The falsifications extend from the secret returns made by government ministries to the production returns filed by factory foremen.
Even crime statistics were falsified in order to maintain the fiction that there was no serious crime in the Soviet paradise. Today, the mobsters and mafiosi who flourished in the Soviet era are still destabilizing Russia economically and socially. Even more worrisome, their arms-trafficking threatens the stability of the entire world.
Thanks to our current obsession with political correctness, a similarly dangerous—albeit slightly more subtle—falsification of the past is under way in the U.S.
In the name of political correctness, the pivotal role played by Christianity in forging the ethos of the United States and in framing its constitution and system of government is being suppressed.
Instead, our children are taught that the nation was founded by skeptics so concerned about the subversive nature of Christianity they tried to shelter government from its influence.
Proponents of political correctness claim they are trying, among other things, to make non-Western immigrants and non-Christians feel comfortable. But they ignore a crucial fact: Non-Christians immigrants flock here to experience the freedoms our devoutly Christian founding fathers bequeathed us.
Far from making them feel comfortable, lies told in the name of political correctness threaten to rob them of the very freedoms they cherish. GPH✠
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