Culture war

Same Old: Liberals Then and Now

American Spectator | by Ben Stein | 4/15/2010 (1976)

Back in 1976, when Gerald Ford was President, Ben Stein, then a consultant on Washington and conservatism for the Normal Lear show All’s Fair, sent this memorandum to its creators:

What I don’t like is the way rich liberals, who have made their money through the operations of the capitalist system and who would be miserable bureaucratic cogs in a socialist system, are nevertheless socialists. I suspect that a large part of their motivation is a style of asceticism which has been fashionable among the rich since the time of the Pharisees. Another motivation for the rich liberals to dislike the capitalist system is that they have already gotten theirs and they don’t want to be challenged by other people coming along and getting theirs.

I don’t like the way liberals of any income group assume that they have a monopoly on morality and that the only conscionable position on issues is their position. A sanctimoniousness runs in the liberal mind which is a direct descendant of the Calvinist assuredness of moral superiority. [Read more…]

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Prophet Jim Wallis and the Ecclesia of Economic Ignorance

Jim Wallis
Jim Wallis

Acton Institute | by John Couretas | 4/14/2010

This class of the very poor – those who are just on the borders of pauperism or fairly over the borders – is rapidly growing. Wealth is increasing very fast; poverty, even pauperism, is increasing still more rapidly. – Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity (1886)

For three decades, we have experienced a social engineered inequality that is really a sin – of biblical proportions. We have indeed seen class warfare, but this war has been waged by the wealthy and their political allies against the poor and the middle class. – Jim Wallis, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street (2010)

One of Jim Wallis’ long running aims at Sojourners is to cast himself as a moderate or centrist (God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat). This is howling nonsense to anyone who pays attention to his policy prescriptions or watches the progressive/liberal company he keeps. With his new book, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street (Howard Books, 2010), Wallis drops all pretense to holding the center as he piles on with the horde of religious left activists and others now demonizing Wall Street. [Read more…]

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The Naked Left

American Thinker | by Bruce Walker | 4/9/2010

The left loves to hide. This is why leftists reject the label “liberal” in favor of “progressive” or some other meaningless term. This is also why leftists must describe their opponents as the “hard right” or “right-wing extremists,” rather than simply respond to the serious policy issues their opponents raise.

The establishment media, which has been obviously tilted to the left for fifty years, petulantly denies any leftist bias. This utter denial continues more than forty years after Agnew’s speech against the television elites in 1969 and in spite of polling data, such as a Gallup poll which shows a huge plurality considering the media more liberal than conservative and a Zogby Poll which shows 64% of Americans seeing a liberal bias in the media. [Read more…]

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Why a Town in Iowa Sought to Abolish Good Friday

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager

by Dennis Prager | 4/6/2010

Leftism functions as a secular religion, and its adherents understand that the major obstacle to the dominance of Leftist policies and values is traditional religion, specifically Christianity. With the demise of Christianity in Western Europe, Leftist ideas and values came to dominate that continent. America, the most religious industrialized democracy, remains the great exception. […]

When a town in Iowa seeks to rename Good Friday “Spring Holiday,” you know America has problems.

Those of us who affirm the Judeo-Christian values that have constituted the basis of America’s values since before the founding of the United States expect such things on the two coasts. The West Coast and the East Coast (at least down to Virginia) have largely abandoned the God-based morality of the Declaration of Independence and all the Founders. [Read more…]

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Where Do Jews and Christians on the Left Get Their Values?

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager

Townhall | by Dennis Prager | 3/30/2010

Many Americans find it difficult to understand why Jews on the Left — including many who would call themselves “liberal” rather than “Left” — continued to enthusiastically support President Obama after the revelations about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the religious mentor and close friend of Obama. This confusion is all the greater now that Obama has humiliated the prime minister of Israel and created the most tense moment in American-Israeli relations in memory.

Likewise, many Americans wonder how Democratic congressmen who claim to be faithful Catholics and are pro-life could vote for the health care bill that allows for federal funding of abortions — after opposing it up to the last day. [Read more…]

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Culture is at Risk of Becoming Anti-Culture without the Church

AOI | by Fr. Johannes Jacobse | 3/10/2010

Metropolitan Hilarion
Metropolitan Hilarion

Metropolitan Hilarion’s warning deals with what Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of values” — what his dark prophesy warned would happen in the West because “God is Dead,” by which he meant that Western culture was entering into a period where it functioned within the cultural structures shaped by Christianity but without concrete, existential communion with the Savior — the kind of communion that would lead to martyrdom if required. Those structures would weaken as the historical memory of Christianity grew increasingly dim from one generation to the next.

That is the period we are in today, call it secularism, but understand that secularism is just a layover from one city to the next. We have left the City of God (recalling Augustine) for what — Islamic domination? Perhaps. Man cannot live by bread alone, and that includes the secularist as well as the believer. [Read more…]

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Government, Yes! God and Parents, No!

Townhall.com | by Dennis Prager | Feb. 23, 2010

One of the major differences between the right and the left concerns the question of authority: To whom do we owe obedience and who is the ultimate moral authority?

For the right, the primary moral authority is God (or, for secular conservatives, Judeo-Christian values), followed by parents. Of course, government must also play a role, but it is ultimately accountable to God and it should do nothing to undermine parental authority.

For the left, the state and its government are the supreme authorities, while parental and divine authority are seen as impediments to state authority. [Read more…]

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Forty Years of Feminism Now Bearing Fruit

American Thinker | by Pamela Geller | Jan. 26, 2010

A new documentary, Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss, chronicles America’s moral decay. Sharlene Azam, a Canadian filmmaker, says, “If you talk to teens [about oral sex], they’ll tell you it’s not a big deal. In fact, they don’t consider it sex. They don’t consider a lot of things sex.” In the documentary, teenage girls talk casually about their sexual experiences and even their forays into prostitution.

One girl sums up the new attitudes: “Five minutes and I got $100. If I’m going to sleep with them anyway because they’re good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?” [Read more…]

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The Critics of the Manhattan Declaration

OrthodoxyToday | by Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon | Dec. 20, 2009

Just as interesting as the recent Manhattan Declaration, perhaps, is the variety of responses the document elicited among those conservative Christians who declined to endorse it.

Commenting on this subject not long ago, I was reluctant to ascribe motives to such individuals, beyond the reasons they explicitly offered. I had my suspicions, nonetheless, as I hinted by mentioning their refusal to “associate with the other signers.” That is to say, I suspected that the identity of some of the signers was taken, in certain cases, as a reason for not signing. [Read more…]

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Domestic Disturbances

Touchstone | by Patrick F. Fagan | Jan. 5, 2010

The Rising Polyamorous Culture Is Out to Get Your Children

The culture of the traditional family is now in intense competition with a very different culture. The defining difference between the two is the sexual ideal each embraces. The traditional family of Western civilization is based on lifelong monogamy. The competing culture is “polyamorous,” normally a serial polygamy, but also increasingly polymorphous in its different sexual expressions. [Read more…]

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