Lord God of Liberals

The evil fascist skinhead self-loathing misogynist pro-patriarchy masculinist, Jack Malebranche/Donovan, (pbuh) alerted me to an article by a conservative Catholic writer from Brooklyn (!), James Kalb, in which Kalb points out the totalitarian drive underlying liberalism's apparent, well, liberal-ness. He names "the extraordinary moralism and intolerance of liberalism, its tendency to treat any tolerance for non-liberal standards and distinctions as the worst human quality imaginable."

Kalb joins people like Jonah Goldberg, John Kekes, and Stephen Hicks in targetting the fundamental inconsistency in this ideology as it unfolds and comes to power: “ 'getting government out of our bedrooms' has turned out to mean sensitivity training, sexual harassment law, compulsory radical redefinition of marriage, and training children to put condoms on cucumbers."

It is really no accident that the generation which was inaugurated by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement ends up by enforcing restrictive speech codes on the campus of UC Berkeley. In this fallen world, enantiodromia is all too common a fact of life.

Some sections from gay bishop Gene Robinson's pre-inaugural prayer/speech are illustrative. I could fisk the whole infomercial, but it's too obvious and not so interesting.

One amusing element of this is that while he was scheduled to speak at 9.20 AM, CNN's broadcast of the event did not start til 9.30, so he was cut out of the world-wide feed. A parable of Obama's (and the Democrats') bait and switch game with GLBT's?

Anyway. First, he sets the stage by demoting and desacralizing the moment with a folksy invitation that lets everyone know that the primary reality is the party unfolding, and reducing the role of God to a "pause" on the way to the "fun".

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

Rather than attempting to set the Inauguration sub specie aeternitatis, he does what pretty well all hired shamans and poets do for their masters, suborns the Deity to the service of the state instead.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

His prayer for the transcendance of mere tolerance is just the kind of unconscious animus that drives the Left. If you have to get beyond tolerating, that is, accepting to live with what you would rather not, then your only choice is to celebrate and affirm points of view and values which actually undermine your own. As long as they are on the approved list of diversities.

I am sure that a big warm hug to Islam is included in the bishop's shout-out to his "God of our many understandings" but somehow I can't imagine that it makes room for the unapologetic traditional Protestantism of the conservative evangelicals of America. They, as we know, must be converted away from the sin of discrimination against the approved groups.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

I speculate that if one of the Rev's children from his marriage were to convert to Islam, he would be supportive and have to warmly embrace her difference, but if the child became a Southern Baptist or worse, he would be grieved.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Funny how folks who are all "wall of separation" become enthusiastic chaplains when the head of state is one of their own. And apparently Obama is not one of those "politicians" who have deceived us with these "answers". Talk about American exceptionalism.

One of the smug mantras of the Boomer clergy --along with "speaking truth to power" ---is that the task of Christians is to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." By affecting a furrowed brow and some well-placed "concern", these usually well-entrenched clerics gain faux-credit as prophets by taking on the mantle of advocates for the approved victims by brow-beating their ordinary congregants. A lot of these guys and girls wind up sounding like velvet-gloved secularized versions of Jonathan Edwards: Consumers in the Hands of an Angry Gaia.

The part which irked me most is his request for this:

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

This from a man who had to know that accepting his post as an Episcopalian bishop would bring discord to his church and to the wider Anglican communion, and in the face of a global schism, has chosen, with all the self-righteousness of the sacred victim, his own needs.

But then, the Anglican church owes its existence to just such a man, so maybe Gene is a traditionalist after all.

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