Social Matter

I don’t rant about Barack Obama too often, at least not compared your average Tennessee conservative. And I try to hold back because, well… at the end of the day he’s just a fruit. (I mean that in the sense of “low hanging,” of course, of being an easy target. I would never cast aspersions against our Commander-In-Chief’s unimpeachable heterosexuality.) That and it’s important not to take DC political theater too seriously. But every once in a while I have to indulge my inner red-stater and upbraid old Obummer for some egregious display of mendacity or another.

His comments at the National Prayer Breakfast are one such occasion. For those of you at home who are out of the aforementioned political-theater loop, the prayer breakfast is an annual event that dates back to the fifties or thereabouts. It’s not something I’m much exercised about one way or another. It’s essentially a bunch of suits and functionaries and a smattering of religious figures who convene every year in February to pay appropriately sanitized and ecumenical lip service to the importance of our “faith traditions” and that sort of thing. And to listen to scripted prayers. Lukewarm stuff.

At any rate, Obama gave the customary presidential address to this august assembly. And he hit on one of his favorite themes, namely that the Muslims who commit (either individually or in a group) various terrorist atrocities across the globe are not real Muslims at all but imposters twisting the Religion of Peace™ for their own nefarious ends. That they have “betrayed” their faith. That the real problem is, of course, the hatred or xenophobia or intolerance that drives these faux-Muslims to such great lengths of deception.

He then crowned his theological speculations with the following:

And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

So you see, not only are Muslims who kill in the name of Allah not actual Muslims, but every religion is guilty of allow itself to be “hijacked” thusly. Just think back to the Crusades or the Inquisition. Practically yesterday. Or think about those Southerners who have been clinging bitterly to their guns and religion and their racism from the word “go” in America. And, as you meditate on how horrible these groups of people were and are, consider getting off your “high horse,” the one that causes you to judge our brothers and sisters who genuflect to God and his one true prophet Mohammed.

This is the passage that has been making the rounds, and, understandably enough I think, stirring up outrage in certain quarters. It certainly stood out to me when I first came across it. It didn’t catch my attention because it’s beyond the pale for Obama (or for any other national politician). On the contrary, it has all the hallmarks of modern communiques from Mordor on the Potomac. It has a nigh-toxic concentration of weasel words, a lazy superciliousness, a barely-veiled contempt for the traditions and beliefs of historical America. In fact it stood out because it’s so perfectly typical. It’s just a fine specimen of its breed. It’s the message of social-justice-progressivism (of which President “If I Had a Son” Obama is a loud proponent) distilled down to its essence. Pure and, as such, worth meditating on.

The most obvious joke of this scene, of course, is that you have the President of the United States of America lecturing listeners on what is and is not morally acceptable to kill over, even though for the past few decades we seem to have been bombing foreigners at the drop of a hat. The joke is that Obama himself is the undisputed champion of the drone strike, a true heavyweight. And that he has racked up quite the non-combatant bodycount in his Middle East misadventures, his Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding. There’s also, hell, the fact that we murder approximately one million of our own unborn per annum in this country, and people like Obama look on that practice approvingly, framing it as a victory for womankind. So here he is, strolling back from the altars of Moloch, drenched to the elbows in the blood of the innocent, just chomping at the bit to morally edify you with his theory on the righteous kill.

(This sort of incongruity is everywhere you look, in part because of the exact sort of virulent progressivism we’re discussing here. When the entire world becomes a morality play featuring the noble struggle of forward-thinking against retrograde opinions, we stop rating people’s virtue based on their behavior. We rate instead on their expressed ideological purity, the extent to which they signal agreement with forward thought. So you end up with Hollywood celebrities putting their cocaine orgies on hold just long enough to attend an awards ceremony and sermonize about global warming in their acceptance speech. You have career academics poaching undergraduate co-eds in between their high-minded lectures on the ethics of sexual consent. You have journalists, whose native tongue is the lie, taking middle America to task for her “hypocrisies.” It really is all a joke, albeit a dark one.)

Above and beyond the farce of Obama’s prayer breakfast speech, though, is the lie of that speech. And that lie is also characteristic of the social justice Left. The lie is that our ancestors were some sort of monsters. That’s the direct comparison here, in fact, which is why this address is like getting a rare peek behind the curtain. The president condemns the brutality, the barbarism, the viciousness of groups like ISIS in no uncertain terms. (They’re devils appropriating the language of the angels.) And then he says, “But not so fast everyone! This isn’t something particular to our time and place. Your ancestors were just the same.”

The Crusaders who saved Christendom from Muslim aggression: evil. The heresy hunters who rooted out, over the course of centuries, the entrenched enemies of the Church: unthinking barbarians. The Southerners who attempted to hammer out a modus vivendi between two groups of people that to this day coexist placidly almost nowhere in the States: practically ISIS. That’s the lie that extends beyond the almost comical hypocrisy of the Left and achieves the status of true blasphemy: your fathers and your grandfathers before them were monsters.

At this point in the game, these sorts of accusations aren’t unfamiliar to anyone who’s been paying attention. But it is instructive to see them made in such a direct manner, from such a high office. This latest bit of Obama outrage porn doesn’t reinvent the wheel of social justice messaging, but it does represent a concentrated burst of it. And as such I hope you’ll excuse my having just ranted about it for a little bit.