By Paul Bremmer
Progressives in America need to realize that when they point a finger at conservatives for “judging” various identity groups, there are three other fingers pointing back at them, journalist and author Jack Cashill says.
“The irony is that the left has prided itself historically on being anti-judgmental,” Cashill said in a recent interview on Phyllis Schlafly’s “Eagle Forum Live” radio show. “I mean, they have introduced that word ‘judgmental’ as though it were bad, and yet they are the most judgmental people on the planet.”
The things on which progressives pass judgment change from day to day, Cashill noted. He pointed to the recent controversy over use of the term “anchor baby” to describe the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants.
It was a term used by Senate Minority leader Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., on the Senate floor in 1993. His conclusion was that “no sane country” would allow illegal immigrants to so easily gain a foothold.
But when Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Jeb Bush uttered “anchor babies” last week, ABC reporter Tom Llamas charged the term was offensive. He suggested calling an anchor baby an “American child of undocumented immigrants.” Bush’s use of the term is now being treated as a gaffe by the media.
Cashill, a WND columnist, finds it infuriating that progressives are raising a stink over the term “anchor babies” at a time when several undercover videos have shown Planned Parenthood employees casually discussing the buying and selling of aborted-baby parts.
“These people who are willing to endorse groups that dismember real babies, unborn babies, healthy unborn babies and trafficking their body parts are dictating to us our morality?” Cashill asked. “How did we let them get away with this?”
Americans also have allowed progressives to define public morality, according to Cashill. And conservatives are not without blame.
“We’ve seen our political leaders buckle in the face of the merest insults or name-calling, the fear of being called a racist, the fear of being called a sexist, the fear of being called a xenophobe has led to some very bad policy decisions on the parts of Republicans, always prodded of course by Democrats and their progressive puppeteers,” he said.
“Cashill’s newest book, “Scarlet Letters: The Ever-Increasing Intolerance of the Cult of Liberalism Exposed,” deals with this very topic of leftist name-calling.
In it, Cashill identifies the “seven deadly sins” against intolerant progressives: racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia and climate-change denialism.
Cashill calls self-righteous progressives “neo-Puritans” for their rigid adherence to a secular faith. And he believes this secular faith is actually the world’s second-oldest faith – the faith that humans can be like gods, as the serpent promised Adam in the Garden of Eden.
“For the left, they’ve adopted the idea that man can create his own universe more successfully than God can, and so they’re always tinkering,” he said. “They’re always improving. They’re always refining. And yet, as we know, it’s not like they’re making anything better. They’re simply appealing to their interest groups and calling it progress when in fact it’s regress.”
The “neo-Puritans” don’t tolerate dissent, according to Cashill. They assume anyone who disagrees with them has sinister motivations.
“So if you don’t believe in affirmative action, you’re racist,” he said. “If you don’t believe in illegal immigration, you’re a xenophobe. If you don’t believe that the earth is going to turn into a cinder in the next 10 years, you’re a climate-change denialist, a term they borrowed from the Holocaust. That’s how sinister their use of language is.”
Phyllis Schlafly, the host, jumped in and offered another historical comparison for what progressive are doing.
“It’s kind of like an inquisition, where you’re guilty before you even have a trial,” said Schlafly, a WND columnist and author of “Who Killed the American Family?”
Cashill acknowledged that not every part of the “neo-Puritan” coalition would naturally be in harmony. Most notably, two of the seven deadly sins are Islamophobia and homophobia, but Muslims could be considered “homophobes,” too, considering their religion’s intolerance of “gays.” But Cashill said such considerations don’t matter in the short term, because all parts of the coalition have the same goal.
“Muslim radicals wouldn’t seem to have much in common with gay rights activists, except they have the same enemy,” he said. “And that same enemy is traditional Judeo-Christian America. And their goal at this stage in both cases is to pull down the supports that maintain those traditions and those institutions.
“When that battlefield clears, if they win, they’re obviously going to have some trouble reconciling one group that wants to celebrate homosexuals and the other group that wants to stone them to death. They’re not exactly compatible worldviews.”
In fact, Cashill claimed Muslims used the homosexual lobby as an example of how to become part of the liberal grievance industry.
“Muslim activists saw the success that gay activists were having with the term ‘homophobe,’ so they borrowed the ‘phobe’ from the gays, who they would stone to death on their own terms, and they added it to Islam and then they used that as a weapon,” he said.
The neo-Puritan coalition invents new sins all the time, Cashill argued.
Witness the Bruce/Caitlin Jenner transformation saga. Two months ago, the author said, comedians were joking about Bruce Jenner. Then Jenner became a woman, gave a lengthy interview to ABC’s Diane Sawyer and received ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Courage Award. Now anyone who refers to “Bruce Jenner” is called a hater or “transphobe.”
“One day transitioning from male to female is bizarre, next day it’s sacred,” Cashill noted. “They have so imposed this kind of counterfeit morality on America that it is hard to know where it’s going to pop up next, so you always have to be vigilant.”