Progressive boogeymen
Progressives like to pigeonhole their political opponents, usually employing one-, two- or three-word epithets, which they believe identifies their political and/or moral positions, with the understood implication that these positions are wrong, morally, and politically. Take for example the recent attempt by Politico (former NBC) reporter Heidi Przybyla.
Przybyla has taken up the most recent attempt at defining the enemy – Christian Nationalism. This is the most recent boogeyman foisted upon the public by the Left and taken up by the media to isolate those with whom they disagree. Of course, the underlying “problem” is the support that Orange Man Bad Donald Trump is garnering from more conservative Christians – those who wish not to adulterate their religion with the woke pop culture.
In a recent interview on that paragon of journalistic Leftwingery, MSNBC, she defended her piece in Politico, a left-leaning magazine, and what she believed was the defining characteristic of Christian Nationalists; namely, their belief that our human rights are endowed by God, not the state.
This quote during the interview summarized the left’s difficulties with this new boogeyman:
“The one thing that unites all of them because there is many different group orbiting Trump, but the thing that unites them as Christian nationalists, not Christians by the way, because Christian nationalist is very different, is that they believe that our rights as a Americans, as all human beings don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, they come from God.”
The reaction was almost immediate. Did this woman not ever read the Declaration of Independence or the writings of the Founding Fathers? Does she not understand that as one pundit put it, “If our rights are not God-given, we have none.”
To paraphrase the Book of Job, “The State giveth, the State taketh away, Blessed be the Name of the State.”
None other than Bishop Robert Barron, who is best known for his PBS Series, Catholicism, who saw the interview, called it the most “one of the most disturbing and frankly dangerous things I’ve ever seen in a political conversation.” He said, also it was a doorway to totalitarianism. And it is!
The reason the Founders insisted human rights are “unalienable” and “endowed by” the Creator was to oppose the notion of not only the Divine Right of Kings, but to place the position of those who govern as subservient to those who are governed. But Ms. Przybyla, being a product of elite universities and in the bubble of the East Coast media, seems to deny that.
She did attempt an apology later last week, saying the problem was her use of “clumsy words.”
We would like to believe that, but what she said is believed by many on the left. This is a topic about which we discussed in this publication more than two years ago. Left wing idealogues, having given up the idea of religion, dismiss the idea of the Natural Law. Once the idea of objective truths being part of the Natural Law is dismissed, government becomes the arbiter of rights.
This is a pernicious and dangerous idea, and one we are afraid is held by too many in the Progressive Left. Other ideologies held the same ideas, and the results over the last 100-plus years have been disastrous.