The Secret Police in Orwell’s dystopian society were employed by the Ministry of Love. In that ironic designation we find the genuine meaning of the insistent refrain that “love” triumphed when the US Supreme Court consummated the long campaign to bring the most intimate human institution fully under the state’s control.
Those presently
celebrating the state’s “affirmation” of same-sex relationships are intoxicated
by the knowledge that they are the “who” rather than the “whom” in Lenin’s
famous formula (which defines the essential political question as “who does
what to whom”). Like countless others they have been beguiled into believing
that “liberation” is achieved by identifying with the exercise of state power,
rather than being protected against it.
The Stonewall Riot occurred
because a minority rebelled against the routine abuses committed by police who used the leverage
provided by liquor licenses to justify harassment of people who privately engaged
consensual behavior.
The movement that coalesced after Stonewall loudly proclaimed the desire to be
left alone, even as it was co-opted by the institutionalized “civil rights”
movement, which seeks
to abolish freedom of association.
That movement is now pursuing that objective
with unprecedented vigor.
As
the New York Times reports, “gay rights leaders have turned their sights to
what they see as the next big battle: obtaining federal, state and local legal
protections in employment, housing, commerce and other arenas” – a crusade that
will mean constricting the exercise of religious liberty and other elements of
property rights.
In 1993, the ACLU
supported the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which the group recently
invoked in a successful defense of the religious liberties of a Sikh serviceman. That case was decided shortly before the U.S.
Supreme Court’s June 26 ruling on same-sex marriage, which made it clear that
the who/whom polarity had shifted. The ACLU is now
demanding modification of the RFRA to allow the federal government to
punish businessmen, clergymen, and other people whose exercise of religious
freedom is deemed “discriminatory” by the state-licensed custodians of correct
sentiments, at least some of whom aren’t content with the piecemeal approach.
Within hours of the
Obergefell ruling, New
York Times contributor Mark Oppenheimer used a Time magazine op-ed column
to demand enactment of a measure that would “abolish, or greatly diminish” the
tax-exempt status “for organizations that dissent from settled public policy on
matters of race or sexuality.” Invoking the standard collectivist fallacy that
the State subsidizes anyone it doesn’t dispossess outright, Oppenheimer groused
that conservative churches are among the “rich organizations [that] horde
plentiful assets in the midst of poverty.”
Only those organizations
offering “an indispensable, and noncontroversial, public good” should be
exempt, decrees Commissar Oppenheimer, who like his comrades is serenely
confident that the present who/whom alignment can be made permanent.
To him and those of
his persuasion, the services of an abortion clinic would likely be regarded as
“indispensable and noncontroversial,” and thus worthy of an exemption. Those provided
by a crisis pregnancy center offering material aid and moral encouragement to
women choosing to give birth would be neither, and thus subject to being
pillaged by the IRS -- and, most likely, regulated out of existence. Similar
outcomes would be imposed on contending activist groups deployed on opposing
sides of every culture war fault line.
The power to tax is the
power to destroy, and withdrawing the exemption would effectively extinguish
religious liberty by replacing it with a revocable state-issued license. The ultimate objective is not co-existence
with conservative or traditionalist religious believers, but their subjugation
– in the name of “love,” naturally. “Hate” is already being defined as
disagreement with “settled public policy,” and it would have no legitimate
place in public discourse – or refuge in private life, once privacy had been
effectively abolished.
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