Coulter Discriminates!
By Bruce Walker (10/13/07)
The recent flap over Ann Coulter's comments that Christians consider themselves "perfected Jews" demonstrates just how odious political correctness has become. Of course Christians, if they follow the two thousand year old doctrine of Christian theology, consider themselves perfected Jews - that is, Christians consider their faith to be the final stage of Judaism.
Calling this bigotry is itself bigotry. Calling this hate is itself hate. Any Christian who considers serious rabbinical Judaism to be bad is a hateful bigot, but that was not what Ann said at all. Any Christian who considers rabbinical Judaism to be the most perfect way to worship God, and who does not convert to Judaism is a faithless Christian. And any Jew who considers an honest Christian to be a hateful bigot is himself a hateful bigot.
What exists is disagreement about faith. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, Judaism and Christianity have vastly more in common that any two other religions in the world. Martin Buber, the greatest Jewish theologian of the Twentieth Century, thought that Christianity was the next best thing to Judaism. Christians overwhelmingly feel the same way about Judaism. Christians or Jews who hate one another because of their faith, when that faith is seriously held, are fools or worse.
What Ann’s comments reflected was discrimination, something which has come to be considered wrong, but which is actually essential that that great good, human liberty. Recently I visited with a nice and considerate young man who is a passionate disciple of the zealous religion of atheism. The questions he has about God are questions any serious person will have. What disturbed me, though, was that he expressed the idea that holding values of any sort was “discrimination,” by which he meant bigotry.
Everyone, except for people incapable of cognition, discriminates. Channel surfing is a process of discrimination. Shopping at the supermarket is a process of discrimination. Going to church, going to Shul or partying on Sunday morning or Friday night are all acts of discrimination. People who delegate their right to discriminate enslave themselves to those who will discriminate for them. These people who surrender their liberty may be well treated slaves, but they are slaves nonetheless.
It can be fairly said that some acts of discrimination will inevitably be wrong, but it can also be fairly said that the cumulative effect of individuals exercising their independent right to discriminate yields patterns and from these patterns truth. Many tens of millions of people have exercised personal decisions of discrimination by leaving their homelands and coming to America. That reveals that America is the best place in the world to live. Millions of Americans in shopping malls and in auto dealerships discriminate in their choices of clothes, appliances and cars and, as economists like Milton Friedman pointed out, each person who discriminates wins (Coca-Cola drinkers and Pepsi drinkers both win when they select their beverage.)
Discrimination also allows us to make moral choices. The horror called multiculturalism seems to say that we must believe that all moral choices are equal. The goal of this sort of mischief is the destruction of the individual. It is part of that process which George Orwell described in his book within a book, “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” which was part of the dystopian novel, 1984. The Inner Party in this book destroys the power to discriminate by doublethink and other devices to destroy language as a means of thought. So, words like “discrimination” are consciously merged into having the same meaning as “bigotry.”
As Orwell put it “a party member is expected to have no private emotions.” Who are the members of the Inner Party? Orwell tells us that as well: teachers, journalists, professional politicians, bureaucrats, sociologists, union leaders, publicity experts – does this group sound familiar? What Orwell fifty years ago described is what the Left is today. So, if the Inner Party two decades ago warned of an impending Ice Age and today it warns of Global Warming, there is no inconsistency. Both are right. Members of the Inner Party, like everyone in 1984, are not permitted to discriminate.
Orwell also warned that the Inner Party did not destroy the ability to discriminate overnight but rather over many nights, but that once it had done so, then the nightmare would never end. When the Inner Party itself deliberately deprived itself of the power to discriminate, human liberty was collectively lost forever.
That is the direction in which we are headed, if Ann Coulter is persecuted for simply holding Christian beliefs. In the dystopia which may be our future, an Orthodox rabbi will not be permitted to believe that it is wrong for him to eat a bacon cheeseburger on Yom Kippur, a priest will not be permitted to believe that the Gospel is true, and Ayn Rand will not be permitted to believe that Big Brother is not omniscient. The blessing of discrimination will be lost forever.
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