A "report" issued May 18 by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and two other leftist groups ramps up the attack on Americans who hold religious beliefs that prohibit directly participating in controversial culture war activities such as abortion, transgenderism, and homosexual adoption. "Freedom of religion is a fundamental American value, so fundamental that it is protected by the First Amendment to our nation's Constitution," the report, titled "Connecting the Dots: Trump Administration Efforts to Create a License to Discriminate Across the Country," concedes. "But that freedom does not give institutions or individuals the right to harm others, including by discriminating and especially with taxpayer dollars," it then concludes.
'Health' Silences Dissent
The report is noteworthy for a couple reasons, the first being that it again illustrates the complete bankruptcy of the civil liberties poseurs at the ACLU. The organization has long tethered itself to the left, but since receiving a massive cash influx in the wake of President Trump's election in 2016, it has veered wildly into the lane of direct partisan activism. The Center for American Progress, one of the two other partners in the report, is an activist group heavily funded by progressive globalist billionaire George Soros and headed by Neera Tanden, a veteran political operative and close associate of Hillary Clinton.
But it is the appeal to the malleable totem of "health" as a way to crush opposition to leftist social change that makes this latest example of overheated ACLU overreach especially disturbing. After all, Americans have experienced far too much of this already over the past two months.
The Movement Advancement Project is the third co-author of the report. This organization heavily pushes transgender rights. A post on its website specifically states that the rise of religious exemptions in the U.S. poses a threat to "the health, wellbeing, and safety of many people in the United States, including LGBTQ people."
The usual pattern of deploying trouble-seeking "victims" is a signature facet of the report. A lesbian couple is turned away by a "government-funded foster care agency" aligned with a Protestant Evangelical Christian group. A woman who believes she is a man sues a Catholic hospital after being refused a hysterectomy as part of her attempts to "transition" into her new gender identity. As has been seen with the case of the litigiously harassed Colorado Christian baker who opposes homosexuality, those who cannot abide others having personal beliefs that clash with their worldview are going out of their way to foment clashes to send a higher message.
Your Moral Values Are a Toxin
The control mechanisms lurking behind that message are currently being driven home on another "health, wellbeing, and safety" plane with the leftist statist hysteria over the Coronavirus lockdowns across America. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has become the national face of harsh Democratic Coronavirus social control engineering. It's extremely telling that while serving as a state senator in 2014 Whitmer co-wrote an op-ed for the Lansing State Journal in which she criticized religious exemptions that she ruefully stated "would put an individual's religious beliefs ahead of the common good." The left's rigid stance on Coronavirus behavioral curbs is indicative of this same mindset that opposes religious exemptions. In both instances fundamental lines are being drawn. Americans are being told they don't have the right to stand athwart of the hallowed knowledge of progressivism as it labors to create the "better society."
This is the sinister agenda behind the seemingly silly nanny state posturing over social distancing policing and mandatory masks for all. Whitmer's heavy-handed executive orders in Michigan are "not a suggestion, they're not optional, they're not helpful hints," the irritated governor bellowed on May 11 as criticism against her mounted. She is not here to convince Michiganders of the rightness of her ways. She is giving orders, and her subjects must obey.
You will bake the cake. You will wear the mask. You will get the vaccine. You will recommend, refer, or provide abortions if you are a publicly licensed doctor. The overall health of an entire society is at stake. There is seemingly no end to the tyrannical measures that progressives convinced they are fighting for the greater good of all are willing to impose on individuals who stubbornly cling to their petty personal beliefs.
The great lie of what the left calls tolerance is being further exposed with each passing day in an American culture that was once Christian but has existed in a materialistic vacuum for some three decades or more. Moral relativism doesn't last forever. Once the old accepted morality is discarded, it's only a matter of time before it is replaced by a new code that the transformed society will enact and enforce. Yesterday's choice becomes tomorrow's sacred right and woe to those who dare oppose the all-powerful "common good." They don't have to call you evil to shut you down. They will diagnose you as a tumor that threatens the body of the New Community.
