fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Pinkshirts On The Move

'Eliminate Hate' campaign is really about eliminating dissent
shutterstock_88112557

A reader writes:

The Law of Merited Impossibility strikes again!

The Law of Merited Impossibility, for those who haven’t been reading this blog for a while, is a principle that explains the behavior of gay rights advocates when confronted by opposition. They say that critics are being alarmist, that these things will never happen. And when those things actually happen? Well, the bigots had it coming. So, the Law is: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”

So, remember how back in the day people who backed same-sex marriage said that there were no reasonable grounds to oppose it. “What does my gay neighbor’s marriage have to do with me?” they said. The rest of us tried to argue that it’s not so simple, but we were called fearmongers. Now we know that if a Christian florist or photographer doesn’t wish to be involved with your neighbor’s gay wedding, they will lose their business over it.

And now — this is the story the aforementioned reader sent in — national LGBT activists are moving to have any and all opposition blackballed as pure bigotry. From Reuters:

A liberal coalition on Thursday started a campaign to label social conservative organizations that oppose transgender rights as hate groups, ratcheting up the antagonism between opposing sides on one of America’s most contentious debates.

The Eliminate Hate Campaign seeks to draw attention to groups it sees as extreme and hateful against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, accusing them of hiding behind ostensibly Christian or family values.

Alarmed by a surge in reported hate crimes tied to the 2016 presidential campaign, the campaign will pressure the media to use the hate-group designation for about 50 organizations in the United States.

It also will encourage the public to oppose extremism and seek to diminish the prestige of groups it believes spread fear and lies about LGBT people.

Here’s a link to the Eliminate Hate website. Among the groups they target: the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the most prominent legal organizations doing pro bono defense of Christians under siege for their beliefs, especially when they conflict with gay rights claims. Understand this: for a Christian even to defend herself in court gets her and her defenders labeled a bigot by these people.

Would it be fair for conservative Christian organizations to mount a campaign labeling any pro-LGBT rights organization as “Christian haters”? No, it would not. This Eliminate Hate campaign is really about eliminating dissent. It’s an attempt to no-platform anyone who doesn’t agree with them on gay rights, and/or who has the gall to defend themselves in court. You’d better support ADF; the livelihood they save may be your own.

I have talked to multiple Christian lawyers — not necessarily affiliated with ADF — who have told me stories about fellow lawyers — even prominent ones — losing their jobs at their firms simply for defending Christian clients in court in gay rights cases. Losing their jobs — this, because corporate clients deserted their firms rather than be associated with lawyers who defend Christian conservatives. How would you feel if it were the 1950s, and lawyers who defended clients accused of communist sympathies were informally blackballed, because they took the case of unpopular defendants? We know exactly what it meant when anybody who stood up to Sen. McCarthy’s bullying was called a communist. This is the same kind of thing — this time, coming from powerful people on the cultural left.

Similarly, at besieged Gordon College, the faculty senate has resigned in protest, standing by a professor there who claims she was denied promotion because she openly criticized the Christian college’s conservative stance on gay rights. From the Boston Globe:

The resignations represented the latest rift to emerge between the faculty and the administration at the small evangelical school in Wenham, which forbids professors, students, and staff from engaging in “homosexual practice” on or off campus.

In a complaint to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, Margaret DeWeese-Boyd, an assistant professor of sociology, asserts that the college president and provost denied her a promotion to full professor because she has openly criticized the policy since 2013.

DeWeese-Boyd says she has spoken against the ban at a faculty meeting, signed a petition opposing it, organized trainings and events related to gay rights, and directly addressed Gordon’s president, D. Michael Lindsay, about the school’s stance.

So, a faculty member has been repeatedly outspoken on a policy that means a lot to the school in terms of its faith identity, and indeed a policy on which it has been repeatedly attacked from the outside, and even threatened with the loss of its academic accreditation. She has done all that, and she’s surprised that the school doesn’t promote her? Must be haters, all of them. Only cretins blinded by bigotry could possibly object, right?

I don’t know whether Hosanna-Tabor will protect Gordon in this case if it ends up in court. In the court of public opinion, though, especially in Massachusetts, the verdict is not in much dispute.

UPDATE: A reader writes to say that Facebook will not let him link to this blog post:

This is the message I get when I try to share — URL Not Found: We had trouble using the URL you provided. Please try again later.

I’ve now started two different groups of Evangelical Christian men reading Benedict Option. All, including three college professors beyond myself, are pretty much nodding their heads in agreement.

Any of you others having trouble sharing this post on Facebook?

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now