Tolerating Evil Is No Longer Tolerable
By Patrick Rooney (07/07/03)
I went to see a fireworks show on July fourth. No patriotic music or words, just twenty minutes of moderately interesting visual pyrotechnics. No one seemed to mind. Masses of people thought nothing of building their day around the fireworks, bringing barbeque, drink, and children, and enduring major traffic, crowds, and weary legs. For what, exactly?
I pondered fireworks, gutted of their symbolic meaning, as I went to bed. Course I didn’t get to sleep right away. There’s something about the periodic boom of nearby M-80s that has a way of well, waking you up. As I lay awake, I began to reflect on the perversion of July 4th. Fireworks, once meant to celebrate our freedom, are too often just another distraction for the bored, or worse, one more bludgeoning tool for the corrupt. I reflected further, and realized that just about everything good in America has been fashioned into a weapon to beat down our gates.
The law is a perfect example of this. Once it protected good and punished evil.
But in America today, according to the Supreme Court’s thirty-year-old ruling, you can legally kill an unborn child. In fact, you can “make a killing”—ching, ching—by killing children. If I were to defend this “right”, I’d be considered a hero, standing up for “women’s rights”. Now if I were to try to prevent such a killing by attempting to stop an abortion “doctor” or “patient” from killing a baby, I would go to jail. And needless to say, be written off as a right wing fascist.
In America today, according to the recent ruling of the Supreme Court, there is now a right to sodomy. If I were to defend this right, I’d be considered a human rights advocate. And if I refused to hire a sodomite or rent an apartment to a “gay” couple, I could be in big legal trouble. And of course I’d be called a Nazi.
Somewhere along the line contemporary society got this notion that we are more compassionate, more loving than our narrow forefathers. After all, they allowed slavery, killed animals, and smoked cigarettes.
So we became lenient with the guilty. More “humane” with the worst among us. And necessarily we became more harsh with the innocent.
Today we have a Republican President. A Republican majority in the House and Senate. A supposedly “conservative” Supreme Court. A growing army of conservative talk show hosts, authors, and columnists. And we’re losing ground. The federal government continues to grow, and our culture continues to spin out of control. Why?
Because we are too embarrassed to assert our morality. We have removed our morality from the national equation, thinking that it would be the polite thing to do, and we expected the same of our adversaries. But we did not count on the fact that they would act in bad faith, laughing at us as we backpedaled our values, and they gleefully inserted their amorality into the vacuum we left for them.
Evil is not fair. Evil is not just. Evil is not interested in a Mexican standoff. It’s a struggle to the death, and it’s about time we understood the commitment it will take to win. Our president understands this principle in the war on terror. He needs to understand that his attitude must be the same on every front, particularly our domestic security front. The time for politicking is gone. Politicking gets people killed in today’s world.
There is really only one way out. To realize the foolishness of our ways. To recognize the wisdom of our forefathers, that our “compassion” is merely leniency for evil, resulting in the dishonoring and ultimate dismembering of good.
America is a Christian nation. We are tolerant, yes, of the existence of other religions or no religion at all, but we can never be tolerant of evil.
Reclaiming our nation means reasserting our morality in every area of life: legal, medical, political, entertainment, and education. Particularly education. We are losing our young to the corrupt, and until that reverses, we will continue to suffer.
Tolerance for evil is clearly something we can no longer afford to tolerate.
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