-By Warner Todd Huston
The Boston Globe had an interesting piece on January 19 that pretty much proved that the left is never, ever interested in working with others, only in conquering and destroying others. They aren’t interested in the ages old American system of compromise but only in the Marxian concept of destruction, absorption and recreation.
The occasion of this example was a piece on the foolish outreach to the American left made by evangelical leader Rick Warren. In “Effort to surmount polarizing debates backfires on pastor, the Globe unwittingly revealed the depths of the politics of personal destruction in which the left engages when they find opposing views.
Rick Warren has oft times courted criticism with his natural base on the right side of the aisle by engaging the left. But, Warren has been keen to advance beyond the right/left debate to get to the Jesus debate. He would rather see a discussion of the words of Jesus occur than to continue to indulge in the religious tinged right/left political debate of the day. Unfortunately for Warren, the left won’t allow any such outreach.
The left is based solely on litmus test thinking. Any deviation, no matter how small, is proof of unworthiness. No compromise is pursued, no dialog is wanted. If you don’t wholly ascribe to the left agenda, you can get lost as far as the left is concerned.
You see, the left does not believe in principled opposition. In fact, they generally have replaced standard religious ideologies with a zealous observance of the religion of leftism. To the left, any opposition to their agenda is not just wrong, but evil. If you are against gay “marriage.” You are not wrong, you are evil. You cannot, in the left’s view, have a legitimate reason to be against gay marriage. If you stand against abortion, you are not merely wrong, but to a leftist you are akin to Hitler. If you tell a leftist you are pro-gun, anti-welfare, that you are for teaching abstinence, or are pro-faith based charities, you aren’t a person with whom they can debate and maybe even work with on the other things that might be agreed upon, you are an inhuman cretin that needs to be eliminated. You are, to them, an object of hate, not just disagreement.
The Boston Globe gave ample evidence of the left’s zealotry in the January 19 article. As the article detailed the stiff opposition that Warren was meeting with his outreach to leftists, it becomes clear that compromise is not a word with which the left is familiar.
But in the weeks since he was tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to deliver the invocation at tomorrow’s inaugural ceremony, Warren has become a lightning rod for criticism because of his opposition to same-sex marriage. This genial, Hawaiian-shirt wearing preacher, whose website describes him as America’s Pastor and whose utterances have appeared on Starbucks cups, finds himself for the first time being scrutinized and attacked.
The Globe misunderstands the irony it claims to see in the piece, though.
There is considerable irony in the controversy over Warren, who has spent a career trying to distance himself from the polarizing debates that have often pitted liberals against evangelicals.
To the Globe, the irony is that the guy that wanted to reach out to the left is being slapped by that same group, but the real “irony” is in believing that the left can be reached out to in a heartfelt way with honest intentions in the first place. The left has no desire at all for such honesty or integrity. They only want 100% conformity to their quasi-religious left principles.
This should be a lesson to the evangelical community. The left does not want to work with you. They want you to capitulate to them. Any outreach to them that does not include 100% capitulation to their ideals will be met with hatred and rejection.
Now, there is some interesting triangulation, here, being undertaken by Barack Obama. But it is a cynical move that evangelicals should also not be fooled by. Obama picked Warren not because Obama wants to reach out to the right in an honest, open dialog. He wants to reach out to the right as the first step to overtaking and defeating it. Obama sees Warren as his best avenue to that destruction and Warren is his unwitting accomplice in that goal.
Obama’s wooly claim of wanting to “reach across the aisle” is nothing short of an outright lie. He has no history of reaching out to anyone but the most extreme left and his voting record clearly proves that. Obama has never stood up against his party on anything much less doing so for an idea or policy that might lean center right. He doesn’t have the most liberal voting record in the Senate for nothing.
So, any outreach made by Obama to the evangelical community should be viewed as mere window dressing made to fool as many people as possible that he is interested in a centrist presidency. There can be no doubt that Barack Obama is anti-Second Amendment, pro-abortion, anti-faith based charities, and solidly for Planned Parenthood. Despite his late campaign claims that might seem to soften his hard left stance, there is not a thing in his voting record that would lend credence to his campaign rhetoric.
As the Founders of this country said, let us let history be our guide. In OBama’s case, history tells us he is a radical leftist. So, any Christian that imagines that Barack Obama is interested in their opinions is only fooling themselves.
(Photo credit: Christian Science Monitor)
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, Human Events Magazine, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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