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@ 2021-04-06 20:43:00

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The Left wants Christianity to kneel before its gods.
"Simply put, the Left wants to dethrone and subordinate traditional Christianity. They wish to prevent it from ruling America’s public culture and force it to obey a public culture, one the Left is busy establishing and enforcing. This is the very definition of revolution: a reversal of power relations.

(..) Thanks to the popular reign of “Christian morality and equity,” Tocqueville observed, “no one in the United States has dared to profess the maxim that everything is allowed in the interests of society, an impious maxim apparently invented in an age of freedom in order to legitimize every future tyrant.”

Seeking to liberate both the individual and the state from the limits imposed by any fixed and transcendent morality, the Left has labored for 70 years to end this favored (but non-coerced and unofficial) status of religion in our public life.

The revolution, however, does not end here. Having succeeded to a considerable extent in their quest to dethrone religion from its influence over the public mind, the left wants to subordinate religion to a new, non-religious morality.

(..) If religion could no longer use the encouragement of government to set the moral tone for the society, it would still be possible for religious believers to influence the moral tone of society, in proportion to their own numbers, by freely living out their convictions as respectable members of the society. Such a settlement would amount to the pluralism that earlier generations of liberals, such as Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls, once defended.

Today’s Left, however, is committed to an extreme form of sexual liberation that requires them to move the goalposts. They hold that individuals have a civil right to create and live out their own sexual identities. This right they understand as a freedom not only from the coercion of the law, but also from any public vestige of traditional Christian morality. Thus they have made clear that they will not be satisfied with pluralism, but that they instead seek to constrain religious practice when it refuses to condone and cooperate with the latest advances of the sexual revolution.

(..) Indeed, the point of the Left’s most recent moves is clearly not so much to protect the rights of some, but to create a public orthodoxy of sexual liberation to which all must conform. This is made clear by the balance of interests: it is much harder for the photographer or baker to pay thousands of dollars in damages or to find another line of work, than for a couple to find a different photographer or baker. The point here, then, is less to protect anyone from any harm than it is to let dissenters know that they will pay a serious cost for acting on their religious convictions.

The Left’s rhetoric in these debates reveals that they regard traditional religious believers as no better than bigots whose consciences deserve no respect. Indeed, while the 2020 platform of the Democratic Party affirms the right to religious liberty, it is careful to add that “[w]e will never use protection of that right as a cover for discrimination.” According to the ACLU, when religious believers do not want to provide services at a same-sex wedding ceremony, or demur at having to pay for their employees’ contraception, they are just using their religion as an “excuse to discriminate against and harm others.”

Where is this all heading? If it is permitted to proceed unchecked, the Left’s project will result in a total reversal of Christianity’s status in American society. Christianity in the 21st century will end up like atheism in the 19th: tolerated, but disreputable. Traditional Christians will be free to think their thoughts, teach their doctrines, and live out their beliefs privately, but not publicly with a view to shaping the culture in any significant way. If they seek to participate prominently in the nation’s social and commercial activities, they will have to leave aside any principles that conflict with the new orthodoxy. Perhaps even their teachings will be deemed “hate speech” and thus “deplatformed.” The country will be unrecognizable to those who founded it and those who preserved it for most of its existence. This is what the Left is seeking and what conservatives must resist."

https://americanmind.org/features/lefts-war-free-speech/the-religious-revolution/


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[info]krishjaanis2
2021-04-07 11:00 (saite)
Nabadziņš. Kādu vēl Eiropā knapi eksistējošā baznīca apspiež. Apbrīnojami.

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