In a new collection of words, generously called a “book,” South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint plans to decry the use of “liberal censorship” to silence and reduce to “whispering” fundamentalist Christians opposed to homosexuality. To hear them talk about it, it’s just awful! CBN report on the censorship epidemic -
It’s reached the point where some people of faith feel too intimidated to speak up for what they believe.
These days, speaking out loudly against things like homosexual marriage or abortion on moral grounds can bring a flood of criticism from the media and secular elites.
Wait… that doesn’t sound like censorship. That just sounds like they’re losing arguments left and right, and don’t like it. To out-think and out-debate a fundamentalist is now, to DeMint, to censor. In the free marketplace of ideas, these guys are just looking for a handout.
Hint to Senator DeMint: if your ideas provoke more criticism than sympathy, the problem might be that your ideas lack merit, not that they’re not being given a fair chance to compete. As Cassius would advise, “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
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Post necromancy: every once in a long while, an important news story slips through the crack of the mainstream media, and especially when I’ve written about it, I feel obliged to ressurect the issue.
Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services wants to redefine the term “abortion” in some important federal laws to incorporate the belief that life begins at conception, bringing about a subtle shift that will potentially deprive women everywhere of birth control pills. We might be looking at George W. Bush’s parthian shot to American women. Read and be angry.
This bothers me tremendously, actually. Perhaps the aspect of modern conservatism that I’m most sympathetic to is its generally low tolerance for claims that certain types of speech are unjustly oppressive. If you’ve accurately described it, this is just whining, and hypocritical whining at that. People have a right to say that something is stupid and evil. Rail against an overly PC culture all you like, but don’t turn around and demand the protections of the system you’re decrying.
I have a hard time getting angry about the abortion-implantation thing. For one, I’m inclined to agree that anything that kills a blastocyst just before implantation is morally equivalent to anything that kills it just after, so I find this definition of abortion to be more intellectually consistent. For another, I have enough of an engineer’s bias that I find it hard to care about social issues at all except in an abstract philosophical way. Agreed, it’s a bad thing and all, and I’d sign a petition, but I’m not taking to the streets just yet.
Posted by Gotchaye | July 22, 2008, 1:11 amThis reminded me of this clip from “30 Days” http://www.hulu.com/watch/21013/30-days-not-just-the-burgers-getting-grilled#s-p1-st-i1
And I agree Ames, in that…I think it’s the first time where “fundamentalist christians” are becoming overwhelmingly on the unpouplar side of the issues. And that causes some alarm for them. Especially on issues like homosexuality, where for the first time in…centuries…that the people actually being criticized/attacked (however you want to put it) can speak up for themselves.
Posted by oneiroi | July 22, 2008, 4:29 am