Op-Ed: We Show Love, Not Hate, in Standing Against the Left's Depravity and Moral Chaos
A significant factor in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was that inspirational leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. rejected violence and revenge.
Not so with the BLM and antifa movements today.
Woke ideologues are manipulating social unrest, exacerbating and exploiting the anger of mobs.
They have succumbed to the perennial temptation of nearly all revolutions throughout history: urging the oppressed to become the oppressors.
The victims, once empowered, take on much the same vices as those formerly in power. They thirst for violent retaliation, wreak indiscriminate destruction, impose punitive reparations.
Forgiveness, Not Retaliation, Needed
In an age when victimhood has become a badge of honor, we can all see ourselves as victims of one kind or another. We all are tempted to punish our tormentors, to pay them back.
But we can’t right a wrong that way.
In our hearts, we all know that.
Forgiveness — not retaliation — is the way to go.
Christians have lived by that principle for 2000 years.
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…”
Judeo-Christian Values Canceled
Regrettably now, forgiveness is being canceled.
Cancel culture has taken hold. It has canceled God’s commandments, replacing them with bizarre new rules — seductively relaxed rules about sex and stern new rules about language and speech.
Woke dogmas are being taught religiously — in schools and colleges and universities. Through universal education and the internet, rapid indoctrination into a defective morality is too easy. In all history, the tools for imposing ideological correctness have never been so accessible. Superspreading error through viral ideologies is made so convenient. The set-up for coercing people the new woke pseudo-religion is ideal — devilishly so.
Democrats, succumbing to the woke virus, have swallowed all its novelties and inanities as good and wholesome. Virtue-signaling Democrats have decided the new woke morality must be force-fed to all Americans.
The Constitution’s First Amendment religious freedom and conscience rights must be sacrificed so that new constricting speech codes can be mandated.
Essential values of our Judeo-Christian heritage are condemned as promoting illegal discrimination. Biblical moral instruction for children is suddenly reinterpreted as hate speech.
Cancel culture tolerates no mercy for those who reject the ungodly substitute commandments being propagated and enforced today. There is to be no forgiveness, only banishment from Facebook, Twitter and other social media.
As Big Tech facilitates woke demands and gutless corporations cave in to them, traditional believers speaking out on moral issues risk arbitrary eviction from their jobs.
Resistance to revolutionary woke values is not tolerated. Persistence in teaching and upholding traditional moral values will trigger punitive measures both legal and financial.
Congressional Democrats, even now, are flouting the First Amendment directive that Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion. They are constructing the legal framework for establishing wokism as the nation’s obligatory official quasi-religion.
Democrats have already passed in the House the fraudulently titled Equality Act.
The rule of law is already being perverted to accommodate morally deviant behaviors. The intent is to unravel the traditional Judeo-Christian values that prospered the U.S. so providentially from its founding.
We should never forget that the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” They professed profound faith in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
With faith in the Creator, the Founders risked everything: “[W]e mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Our Truest Identity Is One We Have in Common
Accumulated wisdom should warn us to be wary of the current reckless social experimentation in wokism. We must curb our childishly insatiable appetites for novelty and for knocking things down and tearing things up.
No more messing with God’s commandments, no more experimental disordering of the laws of nature and nature’s God, lest we regress to the oldest temptation in the world — to tamper with reality, to refuse to use our intellect and reason with integrity to recognize in reality the profound difference between what is good and what is harmful.
Today’s artificially constructed wokism is harmfully contrary to our best nature and can lead only to tragedy and moral mayhem.
It’s not hatred but love that obliges us to reason with confused and troubled souls, bringing them back from these counterfeit values to our God-given truths.
It’s not misogyny or homophobia or transphobia or racism that leads us to want to rescue our civilization from the brink of self-destruction, depravity and moral chaos that threaten good people who are being lured into reaching for poisonous fruits.
As Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg speech declared rightly, these United States are “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Declaration of Independence affirmed this up front: that we are created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The Founders understood profoundly that this unifying common good, the Creator’s gift of human life, endows each one of us with equal dignity and rights.
We are all privileged with the inimitable gifts of human intellect and free will.
Most fundamentally and without exception, we are all made by God equally, loved into being equally. Our truest identity is as daughters and sons of our Creator.
We Can and Should Learn from Our Mistakes
Paradoxically, the new woke commandments of so-called inclusiveness, diversity and equity are actually fragmenting this truth about who we truly are. Disrupting our human solidarity, they are dividing us into divergent and competing categories according to absurdly variegated new permutations of sex, color, class, ethnicity and race.
Our common humanity is belittled. Our most important identity as equally beloved children of God is being shattered in this politically constrained competitive atmosphere of identity judgmentalism.
In the gush of guilt whipped up by critical race theory, top prizes are to be awarded to those claiming to have achieved the highest echelons of this now greatly sought-after “systemic” victimhood.
The superficiality of woke categorizations should be rejected. All the injustices of the distant past once recognized and regretted should remain in the past.
It is today’s injustices that must focus our attention — injustices we ourselves have committed, injustices committed against us. In humble honesty, where we search out our own guilt, we ask forgiveness: Where we’ve been sinned against, we give forgiveness. We move on.
Each new day is God’s gift, a fresh start. We thank God. We go forward resolving to acknowledge our imperfections, to correct our misunderstandings, to forgive generously, to act justly and, above all, to love one another as God has loved us.
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