Friday 23 May 2014

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Gaylag Archipelago

Blog and Mablog 
Douglas Wilson


So a marginal football player got drafted into the NFL, kissed his boyfriend smack on the lips, and then another football player tweeted something that expressed the sentiment ick gross, and so the second player was hustled into sensitivity training. Got that?

As the revolution is established, there will be no heckling. Kirsten Powers got it right. I have as much of an expectation of broad-minded tolerance from the left these days as I do of somebody hoisting up a John 3:16 sign at a North Korean missile parade. These people are coercion junkies.

How will they stop the heckling? Vee haff vays. Notice that I did that obliquely because I didn’t want to violate Godwin’s Law — the first person in a debate to invoke Nazi parallels loses. This is because it is a well known principle of political science that political coercion and tyranny was only possible in the 1940s. All claims about oppressive coercion in our day are therefore bogus by definition, and one begins to suspect that the person who won’t stop expressing his views when the establishment wishes for him to express theirs is cruising for a sensitivity seminar. I also brought up Godwin’s Law because Nazi analogies are not the only negative examples that we should take into account.

Look. If you use language in ways they disapprove of, they will show the world what thorough-going malice looks like. That is why I make a point of doing it. They will send you off to the Gaylag Archipelago — there’s an example of what I do — where they will upbraid you for your intolerance until you come to realize that love is the answer. Love is all you need. Love is the best. Love is what Big Br . . . love is a good thing. Who could be against love except for the haters?


Anybody who says they believe in free speech, but who insists that Christians start groveling lest we “hurt” the perpetually hurt is someone who is himself a central part of the problem. The church is full of effeminate cowards who want us to truckle before the machinery of our passive aggressive police state. Beneath the visor of the leader of the SWAT team hauling me off, I saw a slow tear trickling down. I guess my language was hurtful. I see that now.

Second, they like to marginalize anybody who observes the obvious and comments on it, and they do this by claiming that some Christians can’t get over their loss of privilege, and are just a bunch of whiners. Now I have many faults, deep and grievous, but I think that whining is not one of them. Try another one.

As to the charge that I am fighting for Christian privilege, the reply is “you bet I am.” When the Christian faith is privileged, then freedom for everyone becomes a possibility. When Christian privilege is made illegal, and its denunciation mandatory, as it has been in our time, the first thing that happens is that we see the essentially coercive nature of unbelief revealed. Unbelievers have never built a free society and they never will. They have been running this one for just a few minutes now, and they are already driving up and down the streets with their Coercion Trucks, loudspeakers blaring that it is past curfew and we are all supposed to go inside now, place our noses on the specially designated freedom wall, and think grateful thoughts about how much Uplift Congress will be able to generate next session. When we wake up in the morning, we can all have a breakfast of liberty gruel, designed by the first lady’s personal nutritionist and national sadist.
You know what we need around here? We need a liberty czar.

How many commencement speakers have been uninvited this graduation season? Tolerant liberals are going the way of the dodo, and they really might well be the one genuine victim of climate change. But speaking of commencement speeches, let me share with you the paragraph that got my speaking gig at Oberlin nixed. They had the prudence to ask for a manuscript beforehand, and I was foolish enough to send it to them.

“. . . and now, moving on to your women’s study department, an exercise in what I call petticoat feminism. They have instructed a generation of young women on the art of demanding to be treated like the men are, and then to burst into tears if somebody does, and to contact an attorney shortly afterward so that they can have the security of some fatherly legal protection. This is a mass of . . .”

Third, never forget that discrimination is inescapable. Why are people going along with this ludicrous claim that same sex mirage is marriage? Well, it is because Americans have been taught to hate “discrimination,” as though discrimination is a thing out there all by itself. Discrimination is not a stand alone characteristic. I would discriminate against people who take away liberty; they discriminate against people who exercise it. But everybody discriminates.

But Americans dislike unnecessary coercion, and they have been persuaded that traditional Christians like myself are “coercing” homosexuals by denying them the delights of nuptial bliss. Well, yes, but only in the same sense that I am coercing them by denying them the delights of the hawk’s ability to soar above the clouds, the marlin’s ability to swim the coral reef without scuba gear, and the gazelle’s ability to dash across the savannah. I am coercing them by observing (mildly enough, I thought) that they don’t have a body equipped for such delights, and they don’t have it because God didn’t give it to them. You can’t be born retroactively something else, and as it all came down, you weren’t born a hawk, marlin, gazelle or girl. But you know, things are tough all over.

The one bright spot in this whole rolling debacle is that this kind of big E on the eye chart punditry just encourages them further in their torquemadian tolerance crusade, and this means they start manifesting what actual coercion looks like.

Keep it up, boys, keep it up. I want as many people as possible to see your political theory in action.

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