Bill Muehlenberg doesn't mince words in his column, "A Culture of Bullying and Intolerance."
We now know without the slightest doubt that the homosexual militants are a pack of bullies who thrive on intimidation, stand-over tactics, and thuggery. And they are clearly one of the most intolerant groups on the planet. They have declared war on every single person on earth who refuses to bow down before their agenda.
They have perfected the art of bullying, belligerency and brow-beating, and all opposition will face the wrath of the pink mafia. The examples of these are of course legion, with the most recent battle fought over a few guys who make duck calls for a living and happen to be forthright about their Christian faith.
For having the audacity to actually proclaim in public what the Bible says about the issue of homosexuality, all hell has broken loose, with the A&E network suspending Phil Robertson from his own show a few weeks ago. A storm of protest rightly erupted over this nasty bit of intolerance, and the network was forced to back down.
It all serves as yet another clear illustration of the culture of intolerance and bullying which has sprung up all over the West, primarily at the hands of the militant homosexual lobby. They think they own the world, and can push their agenda with impunity, and smash all dissent along the way.
But the public outrage at the homonazis in general, and the activist groups like GLAAD in particular (which launched this assault on Duck Dynasty), shows that for every action there is a reaction, and most folks in America at least have had a gutful of these bullies trying to coerce everyone else to embrace their perverted agenda.
There has been a mass of commentary on all this in the past few weeks, including my own take on the story: www.billmuehlenberg.com/2013/12/20/pc-ae-and-duck-dynasty/
Now that the network has backed down, another piece summarising things might be in order. And already many good commentators have weighed into all this, so it is worth selecting a few of them and sharing their thoughts. John Hayward discusses how Duck Dynasty has defeated the thought police:
“It might be the biggest push-back in the history of the Culture Wars, a defeat of stunning magnitude for political correctness and pressure groups like GLAAD. It will take a while to judge whether this was the Battle of Midway, a victory that turns the tide in a war, because not many people are in a position to tell the Thought Police to get bent like the Robertson family did. But a precedent has been set, and there will be shockwaves….
“Media accounts of the A&E reversal make it sound like executives slowly learned all of this during nine grueling days of blowback, but anyone in the network boardroom with a room-temperature IQ would have known all of these things before the decision to fire Robertson was made. Reporting over the weekend made it sound like the people who run A&E are only dimly aware of what shows their network carries.
“A more likely explanation is that A&E was rattled by both the number of viewers who convincingly stated they would abandon the network completely – they had to know they would most likely lose the rest of the Robertson family, and the show – combined with the reputation for weak-kneed intolerance they were developing. The blowback wasn’t only coming from the core ‘Duck Dynasty’ audience. It’s a sign of how bad things were going for A&E that they decided looking like a pack of spaghetti-spined nincompoops by eating crow and reinstating Phil was the least damaging course of action at this point. They’re never going to hear the end of this from power players in Hollywood.
“In truth, putting Phil back in the show was a much harder call for the network than dismissing him was, because they know it makes them look intolerant for firing him, cowardly for taking him back, and incompetent as hell for getting blindsided by resistance from the ‘Duck Dynasty’ family and their fans. It’s also a stunning blow for the groups that got him thrown off the show, which no amount of tolerance PSAs or behind-the-scenes donations from the network to GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign can cushion.
“They’re shakedown artists; fear is their only resource. Protection rackets don’t work if the muscle gets beaten up and sent packing. Their other donors aren’t going to be thrilled over how they got their butts handed to them on a plate by a family of Bible-thumping swamp people. Perhaps some of those donors will prove to be unhappy that these pressure groups saw fit to persecute Phil Robertson for his religious beliefs in the first place.
“The thing about pressure groups is that they have to make themselves appear to be indispensable, tireless champions against oppression, which means they have to go looking for fights – they have to make it seem as if the forces of hatred are but one victory away from swarming over the battlements of tolerance and equality. That’s a pretty tough sell when it comes to vigilance against ‘anti-gay’ sentiment from the extremely supportive entertainment industry.
“If Phil Robertson is the worst ogre GLAAD can conjure, they might have a hard time staying in the ogre-slaying business. People of faith, on the other hand, have every reason to celebrate this victory in their ongoing struggle for breathing room in a popular culture that despises them.”
And Mark Steyn rightly speaks about “The Age of Intolerance” in relation to this entire sad saga. He begins with an old joke by Bob Hope “touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill: ‘I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.’
“For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be ‘tolerant’ — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according to taste. The forces of ‘tolerance’ would become intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.”
He continues, “Most Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage; they don’t oppose the right of gays to advocate it. Yet thug groups like GLAAD increasingly oppose the right of Christians even to argue their corner. It’s quicker and more effective to silence them.
“As Christian bakers ordered to provide wedding cakes for gay nuptials and many others well understand, America’s much-vaunted ‘freedom of religion’ is dwindling down to something you can exercise behind closed doors in the privacy of your own abode or at a specialist venue for those of such tastes for an hour or so on Sunday morning, but when you enter the public square you have to leave your faith back home hanging in the closet. Yet even this reductive consolation is not permitted to Robertson: GLAAD spokesgay Wilson Cruz declared that ‘Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe.’
“Robertson was quoting the New Testament, but hey, what do those guys know? In today’s America, land of the Obamacare Pajama Boy, Jesus is basically Nightshirt Boy, a fey non-judgmental dweeb who’s cool with whatever. What GLAAD is attempting would be called, were it applied to any other identity group, ‘cultural appropriation.’ In the broader sense, it’s totalitarian….
“The asphyxiating embrace of ideological conformity was famously captured by Nikolai Krylenko, the People’s Commissar for Justice, in a speech to the Soviet Congress of Chess Players in 1932, at which he attacked the very concept of ‘the neutrality of chess.’ It was necessary for chess to be Sovietized like everything else. ‘We must organize shock brigades of chess players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess,’ he declared. Six years later, the political winds having shifted, Krylenko was executed as an enemy of the people.
“But his spirit lives on among the Commissars of Gay Compliance at GLAAD. It is not enough to have gay marriage for gays. Everything must be gayed. There must be Five-Year Gay Plans for American bakeries, and the Christian church, and reality TV. There must be shock brigades of gay duck-hunters honking out the party line deep in the backwoods of the proletariat. Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily gay, can only be dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate so as to communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor heterosexuality is in contemporary America.”
He concludes, “I’m not interested in living in a world where we have to tiptoe around on ever thinner eggshells. If it’s a choice between having celebrity chefs who admit to having used the N-word in 1977 (or 1965, or 1948, or whenever the hell it was) and reality-show duck-hunters who quote Corinthians and Alec Baldwin bawling out some worthless paparazzo who’s doorstepping his family with a ‘homophobic’ slur, or having all of them banished from public life and thousands upon millions more too cowed and craven to speak lest the same fate befall them, I’ll take the former any day.
“Because the latter culture would be too boring for any self-respecting individual to want to live in, even more bloody boring than the current TV landscape where, aside from occasional eruptions of unerotic twerking by sexless skanks, every other show seems to involve snippy little Pajama Boys sitting around snarking at each other in the antiseptic eunuch pose that now passes for ‘ironic.’ It’s ‘irony’ as the last circle of Dante’s cultural drain; it’s why every show advertised as ‘edgy’ and ‘transgressive’ offers the same pitiful combination of attitude and impotence as a spayed cat humping. Such a pansified culture is going nowhere.”
It seems we are all pansies now – except for a few brave duck hunters who refuse to bow down to political correctness and the homosexual mafia. As for me, I will stand with the Robertsons. I will stand against the pink thought police, and every attempt they make to plant their jackboot on my throat.
Religious freedom is too important to throw away for fear of offending a handful of activists. It is time those who value faith, family and freedom start standing up and resisting these bullies from the ‘tolerance brigade’. If we don’t, things will only get much worse.
www.humanevents.com/2013/12/30/duck-dynasty-defeats-the-thought-police/
www.nationalreview.com/article/366896/age-intolerance-mark-steyn