Saving the Culture Means Defeating Deceit

Saving the Culture Means Defeating Deceit
3-8-2012 Quin Hillyer

The culture warriors of the left are insidious, invidious, dishonest, ruthless, and very, very clever. As soon as they assert the absolute right to new ground they have never before held or even suggested acquiring, they then start accusing traditionalists of "rolling back" the "right" to the ground the left doesn't yet actually hold.

It's as if Russia claimed Japan should be a Russian province, and then one week later announced that Japan fortifying its coast amounted to an aggressive act against Russia's existing sovereignty over the islands.

Or something like that.

With a willfully dishonest establishment media backing them up, the left pulls this sort of trick all the time - and the American public, paying only a small amount of attention, accepts this new media line as gospel and cedes the ground without even knowing what the fight was about.

What prompts these comments is the amazing act of political jujitsu the defilers of the culture have pulled with relation to the federal government's new requirement that almost all health insurers provide free sterilization and abortion-inducing prescriptions (along with other contraceptive prescriptions). Because most religiously affiliated institutions are not exempt from the requirement, this of course raises serious questions about religious liberty - and, more broadly, the new requirement violates the rights of conscience and free religious exercise belonging to individuals, not just institutions.

When the year 2012 dawned, it was true that never before in the history of the United States had the federal government required, as a cost of doing business, the provision of free contraception. Nor had the government ever before dared to so directly interfere with any churches' doctrinal-related actions. The abortifacient mandate is thus a dual attack on free enterprise and free conscience, on ground that had never been fought over before.

Yet somehow, suddenly, the media is portraying this issue as if it is an "attack on a woman's right to use contraception." Never mind that not a soul has suggested that contraception be forbidden from those who want it; all anybody has done is resisted the notion that somebody else should be forced to pay for it. What was an assault from the left against the right, from libertines against traditionalists, from big-government against freedom, suddenly is portrayed as an attack from the latter groups against the former.

It is the same story with the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Never before in the history of the United States had Congress dared to coerce Americans into commercial activity. Sure, Congress had regulated commercial activity itself with few restrictions, but never had it "regulated" inactivity, or more accurately the decision not to engage in an economic activity at all. Yet now that the government has created the mandate, its supporters pretend not that they have infringed on anything, but instead insist that those who resist the mandate are engaged in "denying" health care to others by their refusal to join "the system."

Likewise, we've seen an act of integrity - referring a patient to another counselor when the original would-be counselor feels conflicted - treated, and punished, as an affront against human rights, with the counselor subsequently deprived of her own ability to pursue her chosen field.

And, of course, we've seen an attack on traditional marriage somehow turned by a court of law into a question of whether traditionalists defending several millennia of human practice are themselves violating human and constitutional "rights" that never before have even been thought to exist.

Thus do the victims become portrayed as the aggressors, while the despoilers are portrayed as defenders of all that is right and good. Discarded in the process of inverting the political looking glass are freedom, common culture, age-tested values, morals, and faith.

The American people must somehow be roused from their slumber. Tyranny creeps in on little cat feet, but it eventually rips into its victims like a ravenous tiger. Once you've been half-eaten by a tiger, it's safe to say that your uneaten half is of very little value. The fight over culture is a fight for our very survival. It is a fight in which traditionalists must fully engage, and which we must win.
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To read another article by Quin Hillyer, click here.