Culture Warriors category archive

Its heritage might surprise you. A bit:

Now, the war on Christmas wasn’t always a joke. According to journalist Daniel Denvir, it was first created by anti-Semites in the 1920s as a way of attacking what they saw as an international Jewish conspiracy. Then it was briefly brought back to life in the mid-1950s by the far-right John Birch Society, which posited that the United Nations was targeting Christmas to advance the cause of global communism.

It then lay dormant until around 2004, when Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and a handful of Christian conservatives created the war on Christmas that we know today. They spun corporate America’s profit-driven tendency to wish consumers an inclusive “happy holidays” into a plot by godless liberals to banish Christianity from our holy shopping malls.

In a fantastickal leap of bothsiderism, Dick Meyer argues that right-wingers who demand license for bigotry are somehow the same as (insert “whiny” here) college students who wish to be treated without bigotry.

Trumpism and Trumpistas fit a pattern of right-wing populism familiar in our history and Europe’s. They talk like they’re under siege, furious over their diminished security, prospects and status. They see themselves as the real underdogs, the real victims. They aren’t much interested in the sob stories of “less American” groups. They are disgusted by “the system” and in a mood to punish.

Similar fears and social anxieties, I suggest, are driving the current style of student activism.

It is preoccupied with safety and protection, physical but, even more, emotional. It seems more driven by insecurity than idealism. Colleges are asked to issue “trigger warnings” when presenting material that might be upsetting to students — for any imaginable reason. Commonplace words, phrases and behaviors are called out as offensive micro-aggressions even if there is no whiff of malice.

This is a case of trying to claim that hitting someone with a bowling ball is the same as hitting him or her with a ping-pong ball. It’s not. If you doubt me, I’ll happily hit you with my bowling ball upon receipt of a signed, witnessed, and notarized consent form.

The analogy breaks down when one realizes that none of the whiny college students that Meyer decries has yet tried to blow up a mosque or beat up a professor for being.

Granted, there have been a few instances of silliness on campus, but the examples of campus silliness are, frankly, relatively few and decidedly meek, though the Meyers of the world magnify them relentlessly.

Dennis Parker gets much closer to what is actually going on.

Far from being defenses of academic integrity and openness, those who dismiss the students only perpetuate a sad history of refusal to confront the continued existence of discrimination and inequality on campus. Recent articles, such as “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic and other media, have described professors and students feeling so afraid that they will offend someone in class that they feel that the school has ceased to be a marketplace of ideas. Undoubtedly, some students are overly sensitive, but to equate this to the hurt and fear experienced by students and faculty called the n-word at their colleges, or feeling that their presence is only reluctantly tolerated as shown by their small numbers and the sense that they don’t belong, belittles the legitimate hurt that has its roots in the country’s long history of deliberate exclusion and subordination.

One more time, those who complain of “political correctness” desire permission to offend with impunity.

Follow the links to read the full articles.

Suspended twits.

As Elon James White is fond of pointing out, sometimes the best thing to say is nothing.

Now ain’t these forces just special?

Dennis Chinoy dares to ask the question:

That question is: Don’t recent events warrant that we curtail immigration of Christians to our shores in order to combat the threat of radical Christian terrorism?

Consider this: The mass shootings in Colorado by Christian fanatic Robert Lewis Dear followed his Internet proclamation, “Turn to JESUS or burn in hell […] WAKE UP SINNERS U CANT SAVE YOURSELF U WILL DIE AN WORMS SHALL EAT YOUR FLESH” (emphasis his). His terrorist act is the most recent of a series of assassinations and mass killings perpetrated in Christianity’s name, heinous crimes that should repulse us all.

(snip)

If Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and their ilk crying “Radical Islamic Terrorism” at the top of their lungs object to this substitution of Christian for Muslim, Bible for Koran, Old Testament injunctions for Sharia Law, then they are obliged to tell us how Muslim, Christian or Jewish zealots are any different from each other.

Follow the link for more.

Via Job’s Anger.

Via Juanita Jean.

Chez Pazienda catalogs reports from the front in the War on Christmas.

In my local rag, an evangelical Christian speaks out eloquently against religious bigotry, in particular the current right-wing vendetta against Muslims and Islam.

Given the hatred issuing from so many persons who, as the old man back home used to say, “calls themselves Christians,” I think his article worth noting, even though his theology may differ from my own. Here’s a bit.

The U.S. government should fight, and fight hard, against radical Islamic jihadism. The government should close the borders to anyone suspected of even a passing involvement with any radical cell or terrorist network. But the government should not penalize law-abiding people, especially those who are U.S. citizens, for holding their religious convictions.

(snip)

Make no mistake; a government that can shut down mosques simply because they are mosques can shut down Bible studies because they are Bible studies. A government that can close the borders to all Muslims simply on the basis of their religious belief can do the same thing for evangelical Christians.

This is in Dutch, but the subtitles tell the story.

Via Delaware Liberal, which has commentary.