Barack Obama can run for office as an anti-gay-marriage candidate — which he did, more than once — and that is a ho-hum business, because nobody believed him to be sincere. Brendan Eich was driven out of the company he helped found for holding a substantially identical view sincerely — and that sincerity is an unforgivable sin in a society in thrall to the teapot-totalitarian temptation. When there is no private property — the great legal fiction of “public accommodation” saw to its effective abolition — then everything is subject to brute-force politics, and there can be no live-and-let-live ethic, which is why a nation facing financial ruination and the emergence of a bloodthirsty Islamic caliphate is suffering paroxysms over the question of whether we can clap confectioners into prison for declining to bake a cake for a wedding in which there is no bride.
…The self-styled progressive sets himself in rhetorical opposition to Big Business, but the corporate manager often suffers from the same fatal conceit as the economic étatist — an unthinking, inhumane preference for uniformity, consistency, regimentation, and conformity…..
…For the culture warrior, bringing these nonconformists to heel is a strategic priority. Gay couples contemplating nuptials are not just happening into cake shops and florists with Christian proprietors — this is an organized campaign to bring the private mind under political discipline, to render certain moral dispositions untenable. Like Antiochus and the Jews, the game here is to “oblige them to partake of the sacrifices” and “adopt the customs” of the rulers. We are not so far removed in time as we imagine: Among the acts intended to Hellenize the Jews was a ban on circumcision, a proposal that is still very much alive in our own time, with authorities in several European countries currently pressing for that prohibition. [emphasis added–rsc]
—Kevin D. Williamson, The War On the Private Mind
Williamson is a good writer, but his NR, if not neocon, slip is showing.
The “emergence of a bloodthirsty Islamic caliphate” is a direct result of the unconstitutional war to bring democracy to Iraq. Saddam was a thug, but he kept the real religious fanatics under control.
Still, the power of the state always grows in war and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Our modern state will brook no opposition abroad or at home.
It was unpatriotic to oppose G.W. Bush and his war in Iraq, torture or one of the first “too big to read” omnibus bills, the Patriot Act….
“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
Benito Mussolini
Frontpage Magazine: This Culture War We’re In
How are wars won?
To win a war you don’t need to kill every soldier on the other side. What you need to do is destroy the other army as an organized force. You destroy the ability of the officers to command and the morale of the men. You destroy their perception of the worth of their side and of their own self-worth.
All wars are culture wars. To win you must destroy the values of the other side. (That is one reason why we’re losing to Islam no matter how many times we beat them on the battlefield.) You must destroy their sense of purpose and the values instilled in them to break them as an organization.
That is what the left has been doing to us.
Read more: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/this-culture-war-were-in/
“in a society in thrall to the teapot-totalitarian temptation.”
Gotta love some good alliteration. Would you call what is going on regarding Indiana “teapot-totalitarian temper-tantrums?”