Bill Quick, reacting to a story that Ted Cruz served Chick-fil-a at his victory party, lapses into the kind of kneejerk libertarian hysteria that has become all too common among certain materialists on the right over the years. Writes Bill, in a post titled “Big Tent For Bigots”:
I guess the Tea Parties are now all about social conservatism. I mean, after all, when Rick Santelli sounded the first battle cry of the Tea Party in a national venue, kicking off the movement as a national force, he was sounding the trumpets against gay marriage, porn, and abortion.
Oh, wait a minute. No, he wasn’t.
Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m pleased as punch that Cruz, who sounds like a fine fiscal and federalist conservative, was elected and in the process gave the lie to the never-ending claims on the part of the left that the Tea Party Movement is dead. But why do we have to have all the dog whistles to issues that have nothing to do with those that originally galvanized the movement in the first place?
Leaving aside Quick’s embrace of the lefty meme that conservatives are so terrified of progressives and so ashamed of their own hatreds that they must necessarily communicate in frequencies not normally heard by the human ear (and yet, somehow always detected anyway by people like Bill or those like him on the left with so finely tuned an aural sense, begging the question, why don’t the bigots don’t just give up the failed ruse and come right out with their bigoty bigotedness?), he misses the point entirely, it seems to me, by pretending that the TEA Party movement was, at its inception, about something so specific as fiscal sanity.
The truth is, the TEA Party ethos (like a mist, as I’ve characterized it) is based around a set of ideals that redound forcefully to our founding principles. Classical liberals and constitutionalists wish to return control over what has become a federal Leviathan to the people; they wish to limit the scope of government, to rein in our fiscal house, and to return the Constitution to its proper function: restraining government and protecting our liberties, not the inverse; to beat back the forces of tyranny that every day insist that we must all conform, be it in thought or action, to the whims of some ruling class nannystatist or some politicized identity group with an axe to grind.
And among those first principles manifest in our founding documents was a fierce respect for religious freedom and tolerance — even though many of the Founders and Framers were more Deist than Evangelical. In the Bill of Rights, such a respect was built into the very First Amendment.
As longtime readers of this site know, I’m not terribly religious. I’ve described myself as an agnostic largely because, from the limited perspective of logic — which I grant fails the test of a faith-based belief apparatus, but then it’s all I have in lieu of taking a leap of faith either way with respect to acceptance or acknowledgment of a higher power — agnosticism seems to me the most prudent resting place intellectually.
That having been said, I’ve also become (purely by accident) a rather vocal champion of religious freedom and tolerance — and that includes, as distasteful as it may be to some libertarians or leftists / progressives — a recognition that, should one claim to accept religious freedom, then balk when those granted license to freely practice their faith actually believe in the tenets of that faith and run their own lives accordingly — one has only accepted the appearance of religious tolerance while rejecting it in practice. (See, eg., Andrew Sullivan, who is a devout Catholic so long as Catholicism bends to his will and whims.)
My wife and I took our family to Chick-fil-a last night because we believe that a business leader answering a question about his religious beliefs shouldn’t be molested by the government for those beliefs. We believe in free speech, and recognize the very real dangers of trying to suggest that a business that does nothing to turn away gays who want waffle fries and chicken sandwiches (that is, a business that engages in actual tolerance, not the re-imagined “tolerance” of the left that demands we all conform to the State-approved non-HATE SPEECH they determine) can be denied a business license because its President practices his Christianity in a way that is in keeping with the teachings of his strand of that faith — all without breaking any laws, or discriminating against any potential consumer of chicken sandwiches.
If Bill Quick can’t recognize that a defense of the rights of others to practice their faith unmolested by a government is perfectly in keeping with the political beliefs that as self-professed libertarian he supposedly avows, perhaps its time for him to reexamine his own bigotry, not go fishing around for ways to tar others with that brush.
If those who support same-sex marriage as a fundamental “right” decide they don’t want to eat at Chick-fil-a, that’s fine. They can vote with their wallets. And if they want to stand outside the store on Friday evenings making out in an officious show of same-sex PDAs, they can have at it. I can walk around them.
But to watch the former Chief of Staff to a President who at the time publicly avowed the same beliefs as did Chick-fil-a’s President — who, incidentally, did so in an interview with a religious media outlet, not, as Obama did, hoping to shore up votes from the hateful bigots living so close-mindedly in flyover country — pretend outrage, is simply too much to stomach, and too dangerous to allow to go unchallenged. Aggressively so.
And those classical liberals / libertarians who aren’t so violently put off by social conservatism — which, to my mind, has frequently acted legally in the courts like a necessary check on the secularist agenda of the statists, enforcing more often than not the Burkean idea of conservatism (and when the religious right overreaches, I call them on it, as I did in the Schiavo case) — put their own money where their ideals lie.
Ted Cruz among them.
Remember: Cruz won the election, and Chick-fil-a was served at the victory party. Cruz didn’t run his campaign on a bigoted hatred of same-sex marriage. He ran as a constitutionalist. Those who hear “dog whistles” might therefore do well to recalibrate their anti-gaydar antennas.
(thanks to SDN)
He’s really acting the jerk in his comments section.
It’s absolutely fasciating how contagious is the Leftist tactic of telling people what they REALLY mean when they do or say something.
If you fly a Confederate Battle Flag, they decide it’s because you support black folks being slaves. If you have obvious CFA at your political rally, it’s because you approve of stoning gays.
And if you try to tell them otherwise, their response is “Bullshit, and you know it”. You don’t know why you do what you do, they know better.
This is the kind of post that has made me so spectacularly popular on both sides of the blogosphere!
Like I said, this is Bill’s blind spot. The larger point is that just because someone is on the side of the angels on most things, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be aware of when they’ll flip over.
SDN, you should send him a copy of Kipling so he can get up to speed on literary references.
Indeed.
I’ve been seeing this meme quite a bit lately, that the Tea Party can only be interested in fiscal issues. I seem to recall that one of the early Tea Party rallying points was Obamacare.
It’s about liberty. Fiscal lunacy is anathema to liberty, but speech enforcement is even more so. I’m amazed that a Libertarian can’t grok that.
If I’m doing it, it’s just to get the proggies wound up and pissed off.
My (admittedly limited and incomplete) experience with Quick’s blog suggests he’s not acting, leigh.
That’s probably just one opinionated jerk rubbing up against another one, however.
Too, Quick’s strange complaint comes amidst a tremendously widespread (among the larger Christian community in particular) accommodation with and toward homosexuality in general, which peacemaking sets the Menino and Emanuel demonstrations of fascism into a clarifying light.
That’s because a three-way gunfight never ends well for Tucco.
Either Quick is a master of sarcasm, or he’s entirely out of touch.
Umm, remember the 1.333rd amendment?
“Guy on guy ass-play is a right that should not be infringed by any chicken restaurant, in the South or otherwise, because men who suck dick are a protected species because they can’t impregnate each other, have different ideas of what a “chicken” is, and what the hell, religion be damned, if you don’t like it all your opinions on taxes, the government and the economy are wrong.”
I’m pretty sure that’s what’s written on the Jefferson Memorial (George, ret.).
There can be only one master of sarcasm, and I’m pretty sure it’s Quick who lost his head.
Too bad Quick so clearly missed the mail on this, it is clearly the MO of the Axelrod campaign.
It’s not about h8 chicken, it is about the establishment of a State religion – Universodoxy, the new orthodoxy embodying the politically correct thought and behavior one would exhibit in a Faculty Lounge with the diversity coordinator, LGBT facilitator, and Womyn’s Studies Chair within ear-shot.
Survey says: Bill not so Quick after all!
If Chik-fil-A posting record shattering sales isn’t about free speech — about new CFA customers finally sticking a thumb in the progressive eye of a number of big city mayors — then why haven’t Interstate Batteries, Tyson Foods, In-N-Out Burger, Hobby Lobby, Herman Miller, Howard Miller, and innumerable other companies like them also posted record sales?
Quick is doing the same thing the liberal mediacrats have been doing by the way: bracketing out the reaction of left-wing big-city machine politicians so that Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day can be (mis)construed as Chick-Fil-A Bash a Gay Day.
and yet, somehow always detected anyway by people like Bill or those like him on the left with so finely tuned an aural sense,
He can feel the pea under all those mattresses!
[…] takes a special kind of sophistication to understand such priorities. And, similarly, it takes a special kind of sophistication to hear gay hate in the defense of freedom of speech, as Jeff points out while righteously drubbing Bill […]
This morning, Beck and his crew were trying to figure out why there was such a strong showing in defense of the Chick-fil-A CEO.
They were going along the lines of “what he said wasn’t that hard to defend,” because it wasn’t a crude joke in a comedy club or a rant from talk radio.
But that’s not it. It has nothing to do with what he said or in which venue or whether you have to spend 20 minutes explaining the context to the obtuse.
Two factors contributed:
1—Government officials said they were going to deny the franchise building permits for having expressed the wrong opinion. This is a huge step above a mere customer boycott or the usual name-calling.
2—Showing support entailed going to a nearby restaurant and buying a chicken sammich. People didn’t have to assemble on the Mall in D.C. or get retweeted or melt any phone banks.
It. Was. Cheap. And. Easy.
And tasty.
And it was a clear-cut case of bullying. You don’t have to opine on SSM to object to that.
If Bill Quick can’t recognize that a defense of the rights of others to practice their faith unmolested by a government
Because if they can do it to Chick-fil-A, they can do it to you.
The Left is not championing SSM because of Teh Fairness, they’re doing it because it’s a line that many religions simply cannot cross. Any Biblical justification of racial segregation or anti-miscegenation, for example, was pretty shaky to begin with, so it wasn’t hard for religious folks who thought God was racist to be persuaded to abandon racial bigotry
But now the Left has the perfect bludgeon. And I’ll just link to a rant on NRO to save me time.
Wouldn’t a similar turn-out tomorrow at the proposed Chick-fil-a homosexual kiss-ins by these same liberty loving patrons achieve a number of goods?
Namely, in a non-exhaustive list:
1) nation covering documentation of the presence or absence of such kiss-ins [hiss-ins?] (mere demographics tend to suggest the extent of the kiss-ins will be very low, but that number itself would be what is to be determined) since we may reasonably expect the facts to be distorted in media reports on account such coverage is so easy to fake,
2) by joining in the kissing, while distinguishing their ends, show both solidarity with moderate pleasure seeking in general, and approval of a public show of affection for loved ones in particular, as well as
3) continuing to stand up for speech and religious freedoms in numbers palpably vast in contrast to the tiny community of free-speech and religious liberty fascists in the country?
Not to mention, afford these patrons yet another opportunity at good eats, and Chick-fil-a another cash register busting day; the chicken farmers better sales; the chicken feed providers a better outlook, and so on through the chain of commerce.
I was denied commenting access on NRO.
You will be silenced, Jeff. For your own good.
Quick has a serious case of the gay-filia. If you don’t worship on Fulsome Street, he doesn’t think you’re human.
Like I said, this is Bill’s blind spot
I’ve long made the same comment to him, but I decided against responding this time. He simply doesn’t see it as a blind spot.
[…] I Struck A Nerve Or Something Posted on August 2, 2012 9:36 am by Bill Quick Misreading the TEA leaves | protein wisdom If Bill Quick can’t recognize that a defense of the rights of others to practice their faith […]
Struck a nerve, expounded untruth, tomato, tomahtoe
Don’t yank the crank.
Bill Thick writes:
That may be what pisses off the homophobes, Bill, but what pisses off the rest of us is when you insist that we’re all homophobes, and any protestation otherwise on our parts (never mind that it’s offered with a hell of a lot more good faith and evidence than your initial accusation), is written off by you with a glib “Bullshit, and you know it.”
We’re looking at a Tea Party candidate standing with a private business against government tyranny. You’re looking at a Tea Party candidate who wants to imprison all the queers just as soon as he gets the power so to do. Tell us again which side is full of bullshit.
Now, folks, don’t confuse the “libertarian”. The real danger is from private individuals expressing their Bad Thoughts, NOT from government officials imposing their preferences with force of law.
Sometimes libertarians come pre-confused.
But then, don’t we all?
I was denied commenting access on NRO.
Did you log in, then it said “you don’t have access to that page” or some such?
It does that to me, too. Hit the back button on your browser until you get to the original comment section. Maybe refresh after that.
As a long-time self-described libertarian, I have mixed feelings about how so many people now seem to be self-identifying as libertarian as well. But then I ask myself how some of these people can possibly call themselves “libertarian” at all.
It’s like when the Progs took over “liberal” all over again, dammit!
I’m a leavemealoneican, and my wife is a shutupocrat. We’re a regular Carville and Matalin, we are!
The next time we have our lesbian friends over, I’m going to have to ask them whether they support the State shutting down businesses for the crime of not supporting gay marriage. I sure hope they answer correctly, lest I be compelled to turn them over to Bill for religious deprogramming.
Homophobe, is that like “Jumbo Shrimp”, “which witch” or “Quit telling me what to think, I’ll eat what I want, where I want, when I want…
Even, and I want to be perfectly clear about this, if it’s a dick.”?
– This is about none of the above.
– What this is about is two things.
* The Lefts inability to deal with a movement that won’t play into their games.
* Because they can’t get at the Tea party with the usual little red book agitprop approach they are absolutely panicked to “define” the party as they desperately must.
– Opportunists like Quick are trying to do the same exact thing. That its not working is the mother of all frustrations for him and the rest of the fake liberals.
I think it is a conundrum to them (them guys, you know) that the usual tactics are being met with a big “So what?” from us’ns.
– Along with other “little truths of life”, like ‘there is no free lunch”, and ‘the man with the gold makes the rules’. the Left is finding out the slow, miserable hard way, ‘you can’t cheat an honest man’.
– The only two things that can happen for them is slow death, or fast.
We have a winner! Don Pardo, what is she taking home this time?
– Dig out the Waring blender Leigh and we’ll Partaaaaaay like its 1976!
At lunch… “in what world am I a hohophobe, when I own more lesbian porn than an entire orgy of lesbians?”
Blender drinks for everyone!
JD, I hate that stupid made-up word “homophobe”. One of my favorite questions to ask libs is “What does that mean?” They actually try to explain, like I give a damn.
“I think what really pissed off the religious homophobes is when I call them bigots, though.”
Yes, you have us wriggling the grip of your ineluctable logic, Billster.
The problem–what really gets Quick’s boxer shorts in a wad–is cognitive dissonance. It annoys him that he has to associate politically with bitter clingers. It mortifies him, embarrassing him in front of his more enlightened (leftist) friends. With whom he identifies with much more easily (hence the unself-conscious use of “-phobe”).
At the same time, he recognizes at some level that limited government/Tea Party groups are disproportionately so-cons. The overlap is very significant, and he knows it. Which drives him nuts. He’d love to be able to marginalize them, even purge them (a desire he shares with establishment types and wannabes like Frum). That way, the great era of the socially-liberal, fiscally-conservative utopia will be upon them.
The recurring fantasy of a Third Way in certain libertarian precincts.
But the only people who keep showing up at the rallies are the fucking religious types.
His resentment of socons is such that he’s happy to sacrifice free speech to the left in significant battles like this. Which means, deep down, that his problem really isn’t with statism, and his libertarianism is only crotch- or bong-deep.
Which means, deep down, that his problem really isn’t with statism, and his libertarianism is only crotch- or bong-deep.
Exactly, Dale. He’s a like a lot of faux libertarians. He ought to pull those splinters out of his ass and jump off the fence on the dem side and get it over with.
Who, contra the stereotypes, don’t give a rat’s ass what you do with whom, but resent you trying to make them approve it.
Is this shit head really suggesting that free speech issues aren’t really free speech issues when they involve a so-con sacred cow?
So-Cons are SO INCREDIBLY ODIOUS, that they don’t deserve any support and protection of their right to speak ?
It’s FINE for local governments to use so-con speech they don’t like as a reason deny their business permits ? Laws can be ignored on the basis of a difference of opinion and values as long as the target is designated a So-con?
Is that really a libertarian position or just an angry brain-fart from a fake libertarian who really just hates so-cons and cynically uses the libertarian label as cover for that purpose ?
Can we call this the Ace-Tard-ian Wing of Libertarianism or is it more of a Hot Air and Power-Line trait?
Why are these dorks telling the Tea Party what to do anyway? I thought the tea party and the the Sarah Palin cult were icky and stupid and embarrassing and needed to be muzzled?
Look, I am told by pointy headed SCIENTISTS(TM), that homophobia and violent hatred of gays is a 100% correlative symptom of being gay. This is a 100% thing. Thus there can be no hate crimes committed against gays.
All violence against gays is by definition a form of gay on gay violence. Only gay people hurt gay people. This is better than mere science, it is SCIENCE!(TM). It is settled. Like AGW and peak oil, and estimates of the Malthusian carrying capacity of the Earth.
Either that or people who fear, hate, avoid, and attack gays are NOT gay.
Can’t have both.
Unless we get into whether one is authentically gay. For that we’ll have to consult Congressman Jim Moran of VA who is the guy who apparently officially assigns people to their various minority grievance groups.
I supposed that a lot of self identifying gay people aren’t actually really gay because they are doing it wrong and not fighting for the aims of their designated community with proper vigor. Thus are something else and fair game for violence and abuse at the hands of secret and out and proud gay people and their august public sector defender-advocate-providers like Mr. Jim Moran of VA.
I’ve said that I think this is Bill’s blind spot, which he is loathe to admit. But this piling on him as a faux libertarian is a bit much. He’s pretty much been one the strongest opponents of the government boot as long as I’ve read him.
Until now.
He has a serious… problem… when it comes to tolerating views other than his own.
There is no making sense of the crank (longtime PW commenters excepted). Do not yank the crank.
Quick is not a faux-Libertarian; in fact, he is the poster boy for those ideologues.
Scratch a Libertarian and you will inevitably find someone who despises religion. For all ideologues there can only be one god: The Answer.
All ideologies believe they have The Answer – the scheme that will bring about Heaven On Earth. To be an ideologue is to subscribe in a system of ideas developed in the sterile laboratories of the mind, shielded from Reality. They are believers in Scientism, and faith plays no part in their calculations – it cannot play any part – because faith cannot be restrained by systems of logic, it cannot be made to conform to the requirements of the sterile laboratory.
The conservative is the exact opposite. As Russell Kirk put it:
…For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.
The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.
Libertarians like Quick have found their particular version of The Answer, and anyone who deviates from the Party Line, as it were, is insane and stupid and an utter fool and certainly must not be taken seriously or be worth any respect.
Ideologues cannot tolerate deviations from their sterile systems, their gods.
Sad and pathetic they are, really.
I’ll go along with that Bob. TRVE Believers of any stripe are tiresome. Demanding loyalty oaths and litmus tests is just stupid and counter-productive.
I read that ‘rant’ of yours over at NRO, dicentra, that you linked to above [today at 10:29 A.M.] and it is calm and full of Right Reason. Commentator Kevin Moriarty asked you: ‘Where is your proof of a conspiracy for “the destruction of “bourgeois” values’ and you replied:
I grew up during the 1960s. Back then, the folks at the forefront of the sexual revolution stated their aims right out loud, sometimes during a sitcom. And then I went to an Ivy League university and heard the same stuff again, because they were very much in favor of the State being the sole receptacle of morality and the enforcement thereof.
Well put.
You could have also referred him to this by Stanley Kurtz, which is a preview of what he reports in his new book:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312807/burn-down-suburbs-stanley-kurtz
Exactly leigh.
As a conservative in the Burke/Kirk mode, I think the only requirement for membership is that you must reject Ideology.
I should clarify that I make a difference between Libertarians and libertarians.
Russell Kirk put it best:
First, a number of the men and women who accept the label “libertarian!’ are not actually ideological libertarians at all, but simply conservatives under another name. These are people who perceive in the growth of the monolithic state, especially during the past half century, a grim menace to ordered liberty; and of course they are quite right. They wish to emphasize their attachment to personal and civic freedom by employing this 20th century word deriv ed from liberty. With them I have little quarrel – except that by so denominating themselves, they seem to countenance a crowd of political fantastics who “license they mean, when they cry liberty.”
Descendants of Classical Liberals. For if a man believes in an enduring moral order, the Constitution of the United States, established American way of life, and a free economy – why, actually he is a conservative, even if he labors under an imperfect understanding of the general terms of politics. Such Americans are to the conservative movement in the United States much as the Liberal Unionists have been to the Conservative Party in Britain – that is, close practical allies, almost indistinguishable nowadays. Libertarians of this description usually are intellectual descendants of the old “classical liberals”; they make common cause with regular conservatives against the menace of democratic despotism and economic collectivism.
http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/a-dispassionate-assessment-of-libertarians
Dicentra does give good rant, doesn’t she?
Isn’t anti-Ideology an ideology of sorts?
Hey, for those of us suffering from old-slo-‘puter-peter-outter-itis, would some-one kindly paste Dicentra’s NRO rant into the thread. I keep crashing my browser tying to get the comments to load.
At base, these cultural flare-ups aren’t truly about identity politics — though the tactical language of identity politics is certainly helpful to the Left — these flare-ups are about self-indulgence, including not merely the right to do what you want with your body but also the “right” to do so with the full backing of federal, state, and local governments,
Almost.
The purpose of the sexual revolution was and is the destruction of “bourgeois” values such as marriage, monogamy, fidelity, the cosmic complementarity of the sexes, child-bearing, and the nuclear family, because the family (and church and similar morality-based communities) is the primary bulwark against the State.
Families and churches are the most effective institutions for passing down values from one generation to another, so the State can’t get a word in edgewise until it dissolves those institutions and puts itself in their place.
Furthermore, families and churches tend to produce self-sufficient people, who are notoriously difficult to control, and The State Can’t Have That. So the more that nuclear families are unraveled, the easier it is for the State to become the Mother, Father, Family, and God to the unmoored populace.
As far as self-indulgence goes, there’s a certain Brave New World vibe to it, wherein people are encouraged to indulge their every sexual whim, thereby becoming so besotted with endorphins that they don’t care that the State has constrained every other aspect of their existence.
The SSM issue is also ideal for further demonizing the Enemies of Statism, because that’s one Rubicon many churches absolutely cannot cross, and so The Good People will have a nice big group of enemies to bully and exclude to their heart’s content. It was hard to justify cruelty and thuggery against people merely for being Christian or conservative or Republican, but for being h8rs?
Go for it in good conscience, they reckon, on account of those hatey haters deserve it. It all counts towards State dominance of the populace, as does everything else the Left does.
So don’t get distracted by side issues when trying to evaluate what’s going on—it always is and always has been a struggle between those who believe that people ought to be controlled and those who don’t.
“This is the kind of post that has made me so spectacularly popular on both sides of the blogosphere!”
It’s not a sphere anymore. It became a whiffle ball wen it tried to cut out the bad bits. But that wasn’t good enough, it wanted more regularity, so now it has collapsed into a torus, still round in its way, but flattened with the middle part cut out and going round and round and round in a closed loop, and never getting anywhere.
Soon it may be a flat, peeling, faded, vaguely elliptical sticker on a rusty lunchpail, forgotten on a rotten park bench in an intellectual garbage dump.
“He’s pretty much been one the strongest opponents of the government boot as long as I’ve read him.”
I kind of remember stuff like this being said in defense of Christopher Buckley, David Frum, Charles Johnson, and Andrew Sullivan before it became clear that they were a jumpin’ off the past and charting a kooky new course. In fact I THINK I may have heard it about David Brock way back in the day when he was the Whitewater agitator over at the American Spectator.
“Hey Paolo? There’s another radical faggot blocking the drive-thru…”
When ordering your free but silly “protest water” please remember to keep your futile little rant brief. The people in line behind you actually want their chicken and nobody anywhere including youtube really wants to hear your childish snark or preachy pseudo-activist misanthropy.
Thank you.
Scratch a Libertarian and you will inevitably find someone who despises religion. For all ideologues there can only be one god: The Answer.
Oh, that’s bullshit, and you know it [g].
There are plenty of libertarians who personally have religious faith, but we don’t want the government using force to make everyone believe what we believe. Some of us are fond of pointing out Jesus’ words: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.” Some of us believe the absolute worst thing that ever happened to Christianity was when the Roman Catholic Church formed as the official state religion of the Roman Empire, and (arch)bishops were given political power.
I think even some of my Catholic friends agree with that.
What true libertarians believe is that there is no Answer that justifies forcing people to embrace it.
protest water got booted
Vante of Tucson, AZ Regrets Actions of Former CFO
Employee Has Left the Company
TUCSON, AZ–(Marketwire – Aug 2, 2012) – The following is a statement from Vante:
Vante regrets the unfortunate events that transpired yesterday in Tucson between our former CFO/Treasurer Adam Smith and an employee at Chick-fil-A. Effective immediately, Mr. Smith is no longer an employee of our company.
The actions of Mr. Smith do not reflect our corporate values in any manner. Vante is an equal opportunity company with a diverse workforce, which holds diverse opinions. We respect the right of our employees and all Americans to hold and express their personal opinions, however, we also expect our company officers to behave in a manner commensurate with their position and in a respectful fashion that conveys these values of civility with others.
We hope that the general population does not hold Mr. Smith’s actions against Vante and its employees.
dicentra, epic takedown of Mr. Moriarty.
He really tried hard to change the subject, didn’t he?
Funny, it was to Moriarty that I replied, too, when I was shut out.
Monster, please notice that the excerpt to which you took issue referred to Libertarians, not libertarians. Bob went on to reiterate that he distinguishes substantively between the tw0.
I do too — the Libertarian Party is … well, a bunch of cranks.
Cranky-d is going to be pissed at me.
dicentra, epic takedown of Mr. Moriarty.
And yet, my comment has only have five “likes.” What’s up with that, ma peeps?
I also took on this schmuck farther down the thread, but there was no response, so it was MUCH less fun than dissecting the puerile logic that Moriarty presented.
Dicentra does give good rant, doesn’t she?
Much grass.
some-one kindly paste Dicentra’s NRO rant into the thread.
FYI, the first paragraph that newrouter posted ain’t mine: it’s French’s.
I do too — the Libertarian Party is … well, a bunch of cranks.
I claim to be a “minarchist,” a term that’s highly accurate but without the legalized pot and prostitution connotations.
Or Ron Paul.
I’m a Get-Offa-My-Lawn-ist. I’ll try to get along with anyone whom (a) I kind of have to put up with anyway and (b) tries to get along with me.
Calling me a racist at the drop of a hat, don’t qualify.
Minarchists generally believe a laissez faire approach to the economy is most likely to lead to economic prosperity.
Omigod! I’ll bet your minarchisim has religious cooties all over it, too.
Much grass.
so we now know why you cut the tree down
Nah. The word “crank” caught my eye a lot when reading your comments, but that’s to be expected. Besides, when I go off on one of my rants I’m sure someone would classify me as a crank. A cranky crank.
so we now know why you cut the tree down
The only things growing like grass in that vicinity are Ailanthus altissima seedlings, which you can see in the background of this photo.
In the raised bed in the foreground? Zea mays, a type of grass. A highly tasty type of grass.
Since the “dog whistle” is coming from their minds, not the people they’re pointing at in faux outrage.
For some unfathomable reason, people who are not bigots tend to get pissed off at being called that and/or a homophobe for the horrid crime of disagreeing with you, Billy.
*boggle*
I have a phobia of snakes and really big spiders. So I guess if I was phobic towards homosexuals I’d leap up onto a table and scream like a girl* or something.
*=Not that I do that when confronted with a snake or a spider. I tend to scream in a manly war cry of strategic repositioning, of course. ;-)
Heh.
dicentra, that was awesome–one for the books. Bravo!
Dicentra…
Oh! So now I can say I know two of those!
Thank you, McGehee.
The Monster: Like Mr. Kirk I distinguish between the two groups of those who label themselves libertarian.
The Libertarians are the ideologues – slaves to a system of ideas that permits no deviation from said system and, therefore, believes ‘Thou shalt not have any other gods before me’.
The libertarians are those who are really what used to be called Classical Liberals, which is one of the variations of conservative and would, I’m sure agree with Mr. Kirk’s sentiment [emphasis mine]:
…For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.
The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.
In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers….
Some of us believe the absolute worst thing that ever happened to Christianity was when the Roman Catholic Church formed as the official state religion of the Roman Empire, and (arch)bishops were given political power.
Compared to the typhoons which swept away Christians by the millions in the Arab and Mongol invasions, or the slaughter of millions under Communism?
I disagree.
And the historical record is a lot more complicated than archbishops getting political power. Sometimes, sure. Even into the modern era, with Richelieu.
But what you’ll see from the beginning of official recognition of Christianity is clerics calling Caesar to heel for his actions–e.g., Ambrose dressing down Theodosius for his slaughter in Thessalonica, and the latter’s repentence. Ditto a Becket resisting Henry to the former’s martyrdom, and the latter’s repentence, too.
Sure, the Church allying herself with the State is bad, and becoming a department of State arguably even worse. But a strong Church, at least strong enough to push back is a manifestly Good Thing.
I was recently accused in writing on the interwebz (by a lawyer, natch) of being a homophobe after explicitly stating I support equal protection uder the law for all parties. When I reminded him that the definition of the root word “phobia” includes the words “irrational” and “fear”, he said he understood the definition and that it fit me.
I reminded him he was in a public forum and had issued a potentially libelous charge. If he was interested in backing up his claim, I’d welcome the opportunity to defend myself. If he wasn’t he could shut up and avoid further action by me.
Apparently, Harry Reid isn’t the only lefty for whom the “innocent until proven guilty” is an unclear concept.
[…] Quick held that the show of support for Chick-fil-A was animated by homophoblia; Jeff Goldstein rejoined that it was in defense of the First Amendment. Quick responded with a couple of polls showing that Christians are largely hostile towards […]
Compared to the typhoons which swept away Christians by the millions in the Arab and Mongol invasions, or the slaughter of millions under Communism?
Yes, Christianity grows stronger under persecution. The “Christian” Establishment loses power when it lacks connections to the govt. Being the official state church means there are a lot of people in the pews because they have to be, not because they really believe. Also, in order to curry favor with the authorities, the Establishment is under pressure to compromise a little here, a little there, and pretty soon you’re ordaining Lesbian ministers.
No, it hasn’t grown stronger in the Middle East. The East was overwhelmingly Christian, with a significant Jewish minority, in 632. It dwindled to a minority status outside Egypt by the 10th Century, was a minority in Egypt by the 11th Century, and has almost vanished now. Persecution–manifestly state-sanctioned–has not made it stronger.
Communism extirpated Christianity in all but a few enclaves (the Ukrainian and Polish Catholics being exceptions). China currently oscillates between persecution and wink-wink tolerance, and it’s hard to gauge either strength or numbers.
The implosion of the mainline is entirely self-inflicted. It’s not like the Bush Administration pressured the Piskies to ordain V. Gene Robinson in 2003. Currying favor with the zeitgeist has led to the collapse of Christianity in the West, with the state being an onlooker.
I will agree that the state churches of Europe signed their own death warrant via establishment–it made them lazy and dependent. But “moral” innovations came entirely from within.