Stephanie
Diamond Member
- Jul 11, 2004
- 70,230
- 10,864
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scary and it's the truth. and most of them don't even realize it until it'll be too late.
snip;
Policies to Achieve ‘Equality’
By Kim Holmes | March 1, 2016 | 10:01 AM EST
Boy Scouts wave rainbow flags and American flags. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
There are few ideas today that seize the minds of liberals more than equality. It is the central tenet of progressive liberalism. It drives practically everything liberals do and believe in, from income equality to marriage equality. We usually think about the problem as an economist or sociologist would—as in whether everyone has the same incomes or enjoy the same social status.
I’d like to ask a different question.
What is it about how liberals think of equality that makes them so prone to recommend authoritarian policies to achieve it—confiscatory tax policies, campus speech codes and fining pastors and the like?
As I explain in my forthcoming book, “The Closing of the Liberal Mind,” it has a lot to do with how they frame the issue. In short, they assume (at least theoretically) that any variation in how human beings fare in society, no matter how small, is more often than not an injustice. People who make less money than others are victims of economic oppression, not just someone who may be willing to work less.
If a young boy suffers from gender dysphoria and wants to be treated as a girl, he is supposedly being treated unequally if a school system won’t let him enter a girl’s bathroom. Same-sex couples who don’t get legal recognition of their unions as marriages are said to be treated unequally, even though the real issue isn’t equality, but as the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges made clear, a gay couple’s self-perception of dignity.
An Aggressive Approach
The first things you notice about this approach to equality are the aggressive means to achieve it. Money must be taken from some people and given to others.
You can’t force a boy into a girl’s bathroom with nice words. You need a court order. And you can’t overturn a millennia-old definition of marriage without making a fundamental change, by the majority stroke of a single Supreme Court Justice’s pen, to the Constitution.
The coercion is built into the absolute nature of the demands. We are talking about making a cultural revolution here, and nothing short of breaking lots of eggs to make the new progressive omelet is required.
I don’t use the word “authoritarian” lightly, because it has the connotation of using force. But that is the mindset of these people. Try refusing to participate in a same-sex marriage ceremony and watch the fines and court orders mount.
Try, as Ben Shapiro did, to deliver a talk at Cal State Los Angeles about how multiculturalism threatens free speech, and watch as activists block the event and the university’s president tries to cancel it. Both instances involve official coercion, and they arise from an authoritarian mindset—one in which legal force and public shaming rituals are used to suppress dissent.
A Disappearing Act
The second thing you notice is that the individual human being completely disappears. No single person is responsible for anything (unless of course you are a banker or conservative free speech advocate).
all of it here:
The Left’s Embrace of Radical Authoritarian Policies to Achieve ‘Equality’
snip;
Policies to Achieve ‘Equality’
By Kim Holmes | March 1, 2016 | 10:01 AM EST
Boy Scouts wave rainbow flags and American flags. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
There are few ideas today that seize the minds of liberals more than equality. It is the central tenet of progressive liberalism. It drives practically everything liberals do and believe in, from income equality to marriage equality. We usually think about the problem as an economist or sociologist would—as in whether everyone has the same incomes or enjoy the same social status.
I’d like to ask a different question.
What is it about how liberals think of equality that makes them so prone to recommend authoritarian policies to achieve it—confiscatory tax policies, campus speech codes and fining pastors and the like?
As I explain in my forthcoming book, “The Closing of the Liberal Mind,” it has a lot to do with how they frame the issue. In short, they assume (at least theoretically) that any variation in how human beings fare in society, no matter how small, is more often than not an injustice. People who make less money than others are victims of economic oppression, not just someone who may be willing to work less.
If a young boy suffers from gender dysphoria and wants to be treated as a girl, he is supposedly being treated unequally if a school system won’t let him enter a girl’s bathroom. Same-sex couples who don’t get legal recognition of their unions as marriages are said to be treated unequally, even though the real issue isn’t equality, but as the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges made clear, a gay couple’s self-perception of dignity.
An Aggressive Approach
The first things you notice about this approach to equality are the aggressive means to achieve it. Money must be taken from some people and given to others.
You can’t force a boy into a girl’s bathroom with nice words. You need a court order. And you can’t overturn a millennia-old definition of marriage without making a fundamental change, by the majority stroke of a single Supreme Court Justice’s pen, to the Constitution.
The coercion is built into the absolute nature of the demands. We are talking about making a cultural revolution here, and nothing short of breaking lots of eggs to make the new progressive omelet is required.
I don’t use the word “authoritarian” lightly, because it has the connotation of using force. But that is the mindset of these people. Try refusing to participate in a same-sex marriage ceremony and watch the fines and court orders mount.
Try, as Ben Shapiro did, to deliver a talk at Cal State Los Angeles about how multiculturalism threatens free speech, and watch as activists block the event and the university’s president tries to cancel it. Both instances involve official coercion, and they arise from an authoritarian mindset—one in which legal force and public shaming rituals are used to suppress dissent.
A Disappearing Act
The second thing you notice is that the individual human being completely disappears. No single person is responsible for anything (unless of course you are a banker or conservative free speech advocate).
all of it here:
The Left’s Embrace of Radical Authoritarian Policies to Achieve ‘Equality’
