A Warehouse Full of Guile
[In this important piece Douglas Wilson addresses the issues of the religious foundations of secularism and how that religion is being enforced upon Western citizens. The specific occasion is the brouhaha that has broken out over the entertainment company A&E trying to enforce its morality upon its staff and contractees--in this case the Duck Dynasty, Robertson family. The secularists and the talking heads and the Commentariat generally think this is a jolly good thing. Beliefs and views such as those held by the Robertson's are to be expunged from the public square. And, the argument runs, A&E are perfectly entitled to insist that their contractees do and act as they require. Except, bakers and photographers have been prosecuted for refusing their services to homosexuals pretending to marry. The secularists hold to both positions. What comes out in the wash is a startling declaration of how secularism wants to repress and oppress that which it utterly rejects--namely, the Lord Jesus Christ and His Church. Ed.]
The contradictions of the secularist mindset have been exposed numerous times, but it is a rare opportunity when this happens while millions of people are staring at it.
Put another way, the rhetoric of tolerance and mutual respect as preached by these intoleristas is a sham, a farce, a lie, a trick, a subterfuge, a whopper — it turns out we have a lot of words for this activity — a fabrication, a deceit, a mendacity, an inaccuracy, and a warehouse full of guile.
They constantly practice their form of the bait and switch, and every once in a while they get caught. And every once in a great while, they get caught with half the country looking on. When this happens, their attempts to explain themselves usually attain to the level of “Uh, aliens kidnapped me. What year is it?”
After my first post on L’affaire Robertson, one of my commenters raised a point which I then passed on to my Twitter feed, to wit, “Why does A&E get to refuse to do business with someone based on their views on sex, but bakers and photographers can’t?” This got retweeted a bunch, and this is how I think the question came swimming into the ken of folks who usually don’t have to try to answer these things. But millions are looking at this tolerance face plant . . . let’s have a try.
So one responded, “Easy, the baker, and photo people are retail, and must accept anyone.” So I replied, “Ah, got it. So Chick Fil A could refuse to buy from a wholesaler run by homosexuals, for that reason?”
Someone else argued that A&E had the right to choose who would represent them. I then replied, “So then, a restaurant owner can decline to hire homosexual waiters because he doesn’t want to be represented by them?” Before posting this, I went back to get the exact wording of the tweet I was responding to, but it had been taken down. I don’t remember whose tweet it was either, but I think it must have been brave, brave Sir Robin.
These people are in a bad jam. They want to pretend they are creating a society where all ideas are equal, but they are now caught with the necessity of saying that some ideas are more equal than others, those ideas turning out (conveniently) to be theirs. But this makes them sound like something out of Animal Farm, and not in a good way either. What to do?
So another commenter fell back on the old reliable of vituperation. “You are just a bigot preacher that preaches a message of hatred and division . . . ”
So keep your eyes fixed on this one thing. The mantra of secularism is that we can all believe, say and do things that others of us find reprehensible, but in the public square, the genius of secularism is that they have found a way for all of us to function with an admirable neutrality. The Christian photographer may personally disapprove of homosexual behavior but because he has stepped out into the marketplace with that camera of his for hire, he must set that personal conviction aside. And everyone must do this, or so the theory goes. But A&E didn’t do this. Robertson said something on his own time, and he was handed his hat about as quickly as Katherine Sebellius hasn’t been. A&E said that they had been ardent supporters of the whole LGBT thing ever since forever, darling.
I don’t want to get distracted from my main point here, but I would like to enquire what deep hatreds are making those execs leave off the Q. It is LGBTQ, people. But perhaps this is an indication of A&E acting in self-defense? They had been broadcasting Duck Dynasty for too long, and the sexual normativity was starting to spread? One day they noticed that Q was gone . . . They had to act fast.
So here is the bottom line. Every society must have standards, and must have a god of those standards. This is precisely what secularism has, because it has to, and a good part of the reason for the success of this scam has been their ability to pretend that in this society, their society, this inexorable law need not be true. But it is true, as millions of people can easily see for themselves. Want to prove me wrong? Then treat A&E like an evangelical baker or photographer.
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