Left Not Right on Matters of Faith

"One of the great strengths of the United States is ... we have a very large Christian population -- we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values." Barack Obama at a press conference in Turkey, April 6, 2009.

We are a nation adrift. As part of the left’s relentless campaign to remove all mention of our nation’s founding Judeo-Christian principals from public life, we are now, as Obama states correctly, a nation devoid of religion. We are instead a nation of citizens bound by a set of flimsy ideals and faux values.

Gone is the American dream, the model of the rugged individualist and the goal of success through hard work. They have been replaced by the ideals of collectivism, entitlement and victim worship. Honor, sacrifice, honesty, personal responsibility and a culture that believes in the sanctity of human life have been replaced with the false morality of diversity, tolerance, environmentalism and a culture of death.
As a lapsed Catholic, for some time I have felt a void in my life where a certain spirituality should be. And by spirituality, I don’t mean some goofy Oprah book on the subject; I mean a set of standards that answers to a higher moral authority.
Twenty-five years later, I find myself revisiting those old Catholic values and wishing the church’s moral authority were still intact and unblemished with the stain of the pedophile priest scandals. I see society crumbling due to a distinct lack of moral clarity and the pillars of our new values and new ideals are far too flimsy to prop it up.

It has gotten to the point that if you dare to live your life according to a code of traditional morality, the left will call you a hypocrite unless you are now and always have been perfect. The more publicly you espouse these values, the more zealously they will hunt you and the more celebrated will be your downfall. This is in hopes that the lesson sinks in to the unconverted: living a life according to a code of traditional morals is futile unless you can do it flawlessly.
And because we are human, that is an all but impossible task.

Charges of hypocrisy are an effective weapon indeed. Indeed, it is the only tool in the left’s arsenal.

Sarah Palin dared to live her life according to a Christian code, so when the left found out about her pregnant teenage daughter it was a perfect example of exposing the hypocrisy that everyone knows is lurking just beneath the surface of every Christian. We watched the left gleefully celebrated the downfall of this girl and ridiculed her for choosing life instead of abortion. It was in fact, such a delicious story of justice in the eyes of the morally bankrupt that it still lives more than six months after Sara Palin herself left the national spotlight.

Yet a far more egregious campaign scandal barely saw the light of day: John Edwards and Rielle Hunter had an affair during Edwards’ run for the presidency while Edwards himself was exploiting his wife’s battle with cancer to gain as much political mileage as possible. When Hunter became pregnant and the father of the child was rumored to be Edwards, the story gained little play in the media. Rielle was quietly paid off and sent out of the public spotlight, while Edwards performed the required Kabuki Theater of asking for the public’s forgiveness on the eve of what looked like his possible appointment as Barack Obama’s running mate. Rumors of a love child, however, were too much for even Barack Obama’s famously low character standards; Edwards instead dropped out of the public eye and was allowed to return to private life.

Because the Palins dared to live according to a code of ethics dictated by traditional religion, they have been labeled hypocrites because of their very human failings. John Edwards and Rielle Hunter however, are not hypocrites because you can’t fall short of your standards if you have none.

This lack of moral clarity infecting our once great nation has thrown us back in time; instead of worshipping a good and just God, we worship the random whims of nature. Gaia is angry; we must ask for forgiveness for the sins of our modern conveniences and we offer penance with our sacrifices of carbon credits.

We look with contempt upon human beings, seeing them not as part of the Earth’s natural ecosystem, but as an intruder into an otherwise perfect world. Humans encroach on the habitat of animals, they create pollution, they invade open spaces, and they suck the Earth dry of resources.

There are no evil-doers, only misunderstood victims. Whether it be 19 radical Islamists bent on returning the Caliphate, or a random lone gunman opening fire on his colleagues, our obsessions with getting to “root causes” inevitably leads to an explanation of the victimization of the perpetrator and a ready availability of weaponry. It’s all just a big circle of violence of which we are all a part and because we have abandoned personal responsibility, the only solution is further curtailment of our freedoms.

You see, it is only ok for the left to tell you how to live your life. It’s ok for them to force their false values on you and make you comply through rule of law and confiscatory taxation. Its ok for them to indoctrinate your children in our public schools with their false religion and it’s your duty to pay for it with your taxes. It’s not only ok to experiment on human embryos but it would be immoral not to since the new gospel says that the potential in destroying an embryo is so much greater that the potential in a fully realized human being.

It’s ok for society to fall into moral decay because we’re none of us perfect and therefore we’re none of us qualified to judge what moral decay is anyway.
To say otherwise would be hypocrisy.

Published in the Norristown Times Herald, April 9, 2009