Can the “Very Liberal” Celebrate Independence Day?

Gersh Kuntzman of the Daily News is calling for Major League baseball to permanently ban the playing of “God Bless America.”

While conceding some of its virtues, Kuntzman laments that the classic jingle “embodies” some of “our worst things,” vices like “self-righteousness, forced piety,” and “earnest self-reverence.”

Kuntzman approvingly alludes to a 2013 poll conducted by the author of a book on “God Bless America.” The poll found that 61 percent or so of those asked share Kuntzman’s judgment that the song should go the way of the dinosaur. The real story here, though, is to be found in how those numbers break down:

While only 20.5 percent of those who wish to see the song banned from major league baseball self-describe as “very conservative,” a whopping 84 percent who want the same regard themselves as “very liberal.”

The “very liberal” stand side-by-side with “foreigners,” like Kuntzman’s British friend, who find “the self-righteousness” and “patriotism” of the song “exactly what [to] expect from Americans.”

Setting aside that these judgments reflect a profound, indeed, a scandalous, ignorance of the natures of both piety and patriotism, they are telling in another respect. It’s worth asking:

As Americans prepare to celebrate Independence Day, can, logically speaking, the “very liberal”—i.e. the left—join them in doing so?

Paul Gomberg is one leftist, a philosopher, who resoundingly rejects this as a moral and logical possibility. In his essay, “Patriotism is like Racism,” Gomberg argues for his thesis that the former is as big an evil as the latter.

“Racism” is immoral because it violates the requirement of “moral universalism,” namely, the requirement that our “actions are to be governed by principles that give equal consideration to all people who might be affected by an action.” From this perspective, “all count equally and positively in deciding what to do.”

So, in other words, among the most “fundamental rights” that moral universalism bestows upon individuals is the right to be “treated impartially,” i.e. the right to be treated “without regard to race [.]” Since “racism” consists in treating people partially according to race, it is immoral.

However, Gomberg is quick to note, the right to be treated impartially includes as well the right to be treated without regard to “nationality” and “citizenship.”

This being so, because patriotism is a matter of treating one’s co-nationals and/or fellow citizens partially, like “racism,” patriotism, then, is immoral.

In summary: Morality requires impartiality. Racism and patriotism, though, require partiality. Hence, racism and patriotism are both equally immoral.

Gomberg adds that partiality toward one’s friends and the members of one’s community can also exacerbate social and economic “inequalities.” For example, suppose Joe owns his own business and needs to hire more employees. If he were to hire his “old school chums,” say, and/or residents from his old neighborhood, “the degree of residential and school segregation in most big cities in the United States” would all but guarantee that they would be of the same “ethnic group” as Joe himself. And “given the greater initial disadvantage of most black people in access to capital and business opportunities generally,” the hiring of one’s friends and acquaintances “will tend to maintain or exacerbate poverty in intensely impoverished inner-city black ghettos.”

Patriotism, though, does the same thing. “People from other countries immigrate to the United States because of international inequality.” Moreover, “international income gaps are vastly greater than domestic racial inequality.” Therefore, “favoritism toward a more prosperous nationality or discrimination against nationals from poor nations contributes to a morally objectionable inequality” that is “no better” than the inequality that is the essence of “racism.”

Gomberg, quite inconsistently, does not criticize as “objectionable” the inherent “inequality” between the families of some and those of others, an “inequality” resulting from the robust partiality of people toward their own families. Yet the reasoning that he uses to condemn partiality toward one’s co-ethnics and co-nationals holds at least as strongly when it comes to familial partiality.

People tend to be more partial to the interests of their own family members than they are toward those of the members of other families. Yet, overwhelmingly, people of all racial backgrounds continue to date and marry intra-racially. So, this partial treatment toward one’s relatives, inasmuch as it translates into partiality toward the members of one’s own race, inevitably leads to inter-racial inequalities.

And inter-racial “inequality” is, according to Gomberg (and the prevailing wisdom of the Racism-Industrial-Complex), “racism.”

If, then, you’re, say, white and you choose to marry and procreate with another white person, you’re guilty of “racism.”

Gomberg doesn’t go there. Most “very liberal” folks won’t go there (at least not yet). The point here, however, is that neither Independence Day nor any other “patriotic” holiday, institution, or tradition can be a cause for celebration by the lights of the Gombergs of the world.

As for the Jack Kerwicks of the world, here’s wishing you and yours a happy and safe Independence Day!

Liberals just don’t recognize their own complicity in killing the golden goose, and that this will redound to their own suffering as society loses its respect for life and property. But none of us will be comforted at that point by saying “I told you so.” I posted this elsewhere yesterday:

“As a practicing corporate attorney, one of my hobbies is teaching impressionable young minds the basic of business law at a small, Christian college. The following is an abstract of my first lecture on the foundations of American law. I’ll withhold citations and research notes and simply present this portion in the hope that someone here will find it useful in keeping certain recent events in perspective.

Over 200 years ago the founders had a chance to do something unique in all of human history: They took a blank piece of paper to draw up a new country in a place where none had ever existed before, and they purposely founded it on a basis that no one had ever used before: the rights and responsibilities of man found in Natural (moral) Law and its first cousin, the Common Law. It will surprise many people to learn that both laws at their core embody Christian ethics.

The Common Law was a system of principles for human interaction that were laid down over the centuries by English and later American judges. Initially, those judges were virtually all clergymen. They based their case decisions on the examples and ethics they learned from the Scriptures.

Natural Law concepts developed on a parallel course from philosophers as Aristotle, and it became a popular belief in the 18th century Neoclassical Age. The founders of this country were influenced by those philosophers who believed in a universal moral law of life, liberty, and property that could be discovered and observed in the world just like the physical laws of mathematics and physics and chemistry. Theologians would argue that this Natural (moral) Law also came from God as part of creation but apart from His Scriptures, and that it reflects the conscience He gave to all men (Rom. 2). Protestant preachers borrowed the concept of Natural Law to argue that England’s violation of it justified the American Revolution. The first ten constitutional amendments were an attempt by the founders to make sure that several inherent, God-given rights under Natural Law would not be forgotten by our new government.

It should therefore not be surprising to Christians today that this American system of government, intentionally built on the twin pillars of Natural Law and the Common Law, would result in the greatest freedom and respect for life and property that the nations of men have ever known. It should also not be surprising that this form of government would only stand so long as most people accepted the notion of a higher moral law that transcends what any society or ruler desires at the moment.

And no one should be surprised that notable atheists and secular humanists rejected the idea of such a government from the very beginning. The English socialist and Natural Law denier Jeremy Bentham co-wrote England’s semi-official screed against the Declaration of Independence. A century later, Oliver Wendell Holmes, influenced by Social Darwinism and Marxism of that time, would successfully wage a campaign to change the fundamental nature of American law as taught in law schools and applied by judges— to eliminate the notion of Natural Law altogether and replace it with purely political law.

The resulting long descent of American jurisprudence is now reaching its conclusion. We are fast becoming just another country whose laws and legal decisions are based entirely on “the felt necessities of the time” as Holmes put it, or “the prince of the air, the course of this world, and our own lusts and desires” as Paul put it (Eph. 2).

No, this country was never a theocracy, never a “Christian nation,” as some like to point out. But it was certainly based on scriptural principles like no other nation before or after God’s covenant with ancient Israel. America has been a GREAT experiment devised by ingenious but admittedly imperfect men. It is a blessing that it has lasted as long as it has. And I thank God that many of us were able to be a part of it during our brief journeys here on earth.”

” Racism” is immoral because it violates the requirement of “moral universalism,” namely, the requirement that our “actions are to be governed by principles that give equal consideration to all people who might be affected by an action.” From this perspective, “all count equally and positively in deciding what to do.””

This is pure BS. People are not the same. Specifically, relative to a particular person, the worth of other people is not the same. You treat someone that is close to you, i.e. valuable to you, better than a stranger.

This is another case where leftists choose to ignore reality, human nature, and want to force on us their made up delusions .

It is exactly this type of premises that have to be debunked. Unfortunately this author seem to have bought it.

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