Progressive Thought Police Are At It Again

Down south of the border, in Barack Hussein Obama’s America, the anti-racist Stalinists are currently indulging themselves in their favourite pastime, a Two Minutes Hate. The Emmanuel Goldstein over whom they are working themselves up into an orgasmic frenzy of rage, is Donald Tokowitz Sterling, the lawyer and real estate developer who owns the basketball team the Los Angeles Clippers. The NBA has banned him for life and fined him two and a half million dollars for committing crimethink. More specifically, he complained over his phone to his mistress that she had posted a picture of herself with Magic Johnson and told her that he did not like her publicly associating with black people and bringing them to basketball games. He apparently was unaware that she was recording the conversation with the intention of using it against him, possibly in revenge over a lawsuit his wife had initiated against her demanding the return of some expensive gifts Sterling had given her.

From what I have read about Sterling over the last week he strikes me as a rather repulsive person, although I hesitate to express such an opinion lest I be thought to be lending even the smallest amount of support to the racial grievance industry which is busy manufacturing phony outrage and milking this situation for all it can get out of it. As for his remarks, which, having been made privately ought to have remained private and would have remained private had his mistress and the mainstream media been possessed of even a modicum of decency, I am reminded of these remarks of Auberon Waugh from thirty-eight years ago:

I can quite understand people wishing there were fewer blacks around, and am not particularly shocked to hear such sentiments expressed although I might say, 'Tut, tut'. I can quite understand people feeling it wrong that others should be discriminated against on account of their colour, and might even give a feeble clap or two if somebody put this case forcefully enough. (1)

The point Waugh was arguing for, in the article in which he made these remarks, was that racist ideologues and progressives determined to stamp out racist thought or at least the expression of it were both pompous, silly, and bossy and that neither ought to be taken seriously. This was an excellent point for the time in which it was made. Since that time it has become evident that the anti-racists progressives are far more capable of imposing their views on the public and harassing and harming their opponents than the racist ideologues and so, while my own sentiments are similar to those expressed by Waugh in the quoted remarks, I would have to say that my clapping would probably be even more feeble than his.

The self-righteous, progressive crusade to eliminate all racist thought, a carryover in spirit if not in content from progressivism’s roots in Calvinist Puritanism, has created a very toxic culture indeed, if it is now regarded as acceptable and even desirable that a man be punished with a couple of million dollars’ worth of fines, a lifetime ban, and probably the forced sale of his team, over remarks that were supposed to be private. This toxic culture has unfortunately spilled over into other areas that have nothing to do with race.

Up here, for example, in the true north strong and free, the Law Societies of Ontario and Nova Scotia have just voted to ban from the bar any lawyer who has graduated from the law school which Trinity Western University, an evangelical, Protestant university in British Columbia, is working to establish. It is not a question of the competency of TWU law school graduates. Rather, it has to do with the university’s covenant, in which students and faculty agree to live according to the rules of ethics taught by the Christian faith. This includes, of course, the rule against sexual intercourse outside of marriage, and by marriage, the Christian university means marriage as Jesus, quoting the book of Genesis, defined it, i.e., what happens when a man leaves his father and mother, is joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh.

That a Christian school would expect its students to abide by Christian rules is hardly surprising. This sort of policy is exactly what one would expect such a school to have and such policies form part of the appeal Christian schools have to families who do not want to send their children into the hedonism that is the culture on so many secular campuses and, believe it or not, to many students themselves, who may prefer a campus cultural climate in which they are not constantly under pressure to conform to a secular, pleasure worshipping, lifestyle.

So why is that the legal associations of Ontario and Nova Scotia think this is something to ban TWU graduates over?

The policy, we are told by the Law Societies and by those who support them in this ban, discriminates against those who are sexually attracted to members of their own sex. It is therefore, they say, bigoted and against Canadian values and should not be allowed.

Most of TWU’s supporters would argue that their policy is not discriminatory. TWU’s covenant does not single out homosexuals. It requires everybody to abstain from sex outside of marriage. Homosexuals are a small percentage of the general population and one does not really expect that the student body of TWU would be any different. Therefore, the rule affects far more heterosexuals than it does homosexuals. Nor is the traditional Christian definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman discriminatory in that men who are attracted to men are not barred from marrying women and women who are attracted to women are not barred from marrying men.

Indeed, it is tempting to argue that what is truly discriminatory is the policy of the Law Society of Upper Canada and the Nova Scotia Barrister’s Society. (2) This argument, after all, is true. By banning graduates of the TWU law school from practicing law in Ontario and Nova Scotia over a school policy that has nothing to do with their students professional competence and which arises out of the University’s Christian faith, these legal associations are discriminating against TWU graduates because of the Christianity of their alma mater. This is religious discrimination and Jewish attorney, news commentator, and conservative Ezra Levant has superbly argued against it on these very grounds. (3)

I would put forward a different argument, however. I would argue that if we have come so far that two provincial law societies have voted against the accreditation of a law school because it is part of a university that holds to the faith that shaped so many of the traditions and institutions of our country, we have a bigger problem than discrimination to deal with. The problem is that the progressive campaign to stomp out racist thinking has expanded into a crusade against all sorts of other ideas that progressives consider to be bigoted and discriminatory. Just as the real enemy of progressive anti-racism has always been white people rather than a generic concept of racial hatred (black rappers whose lyrics are filled with far more hateful and even violent rhetoric against whites than Sterling’s remarks are not given the same treatment) so the real targets of the progressive campaigns against sexism and homophobia are the traditional family and the religion that shaped Western civilization. The left has declared an all-out war on Western civilization – its peoples, its culture, and its traditional religion. If we truly wish to defend the Christian faith in this war, we must reject the progressive doctrine of anti-racism upon which their successful campaigns have been built and the toxic anti-Western culture it has spawned.

(1) Auberon Waugh, “Unfit for Publication”, The Spectator, July 9, 1976, republished as “Che Guevera of the West Midlands” in Brideshead Benighted ((Little, Brown and Company: Boston and Toronto, 1986) pp. 153-156)
(2) The Law Society of Upper Canada (Ontario) voted to reject the TWU law school’s accreditation on April 24th, The Nova Scotia Barristers Society voted the next day that they would accept the school’s accreditation but only on condition that the school abandon its Christian covenant.
(3) http://www.torontosun.com/2014/04/28/ban-on-christian-values