“men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil”
That sounds like Someone is making a “judgement” there, right?
I ALWAYS complete the Biblical quote whenever I hear a lib say “judge not...”
“lest you be judged by the same measure”. I usually get a blank stare.
Liberals make judgments all the time, they just call them something else.
The idea of never being judgmental is ludicrous on its face, and an impossibility in an actual, functioning society. However, a lot of people don’t wish to hear that. They like to feel “free” and “liberated”, and don’t like thinking they’re expected to conform to someone else’s values.
The fact is, every society on earth has value systems which people are expected, and even required, to follow. The only issue is which value system we’ll ascribe to. If it’s presented to people that way, it puts liberalism at a disadvantage because no positive case can be made for most of the things liberals support. Try to make a merit-based case for permitting homosexual bathhouses, for example. It ain’t gonna work.
So liberals have created the phony storyline that conservatives want to “impose their values on others” while liberals do not. This gets the debate off of the actual merits of any particular liberal idea, and onto an abstraction, namely whether or not we should “legislate morality”. This is why we get Orwellian newspeak terms such as “pro-choice” as an accepted part of our political lexicon.
Just using common sense one can see that liberals legislate their morality all the time. Every liberal economic initiative does this. Such proposals force people to give a portion of their own income to a cause they may not wish to support. That may be good or bad, depending on one’s OPINION, but it can’t be denied that it imposes the morality of some on others via the force of law.
Libertarians sometimes assert that liberals are for imposing their morality on others when it comes to economic matters, but not social matters. Conservatives are seen as the opposite, supporting economic freedom but not “social liberation”. That’s not true, either. Liberals DO NOT favor social liberty.
Take abortion as an example. Abortion isn’t a liberty as it would properly have been understood by, say, our Founding Fathers. It’s an ideological claim made against the life of someone else for reasons of personal gain. Again, one may be able to argue that it’s justified (though I don’t agree that it is), but one can’t deny that that’s what we’re dealing with. In addition, liberals have no problem forcing people who oppose abortion from being required to fund it via their tax dollars. They have no problem censoring photos or films of actual abortions taking place.
Homosexuality is another area where the left legislates its morality all the time. They’re for forcing landlords to rent to homosexuals even if the landlord considers such conduct a sin. They’re for “hate speech” laws to stifle public discourse on homosexual issues. They’re for using raw judicial power to crush public opinion and force an alteration of the multi-thousand year old institution of marriage. They even tried to force the Boy Scouts, a private organization, to send little boys on camping trips with homosexuals.
We live in a society where Politically Correct double standards are so commonplace that we hardly even notice them anymore. Conservatives, particularly Christian ones, are expected to achieve a near universal consensus on an issue before legislation can be enacted, but such rules are not required of liberals or secularists.
Why is it okay to ban theft? Isn’t that imposing morality? After all, the Bible says “thou shalt not steal”. Liberals will “explain” that it’s okay to ban (for example) bank robbery since nearly everyone agrees that it’s wrong. But we can’t ban abortion because not everyone agrees that it’s wrong, so we must respect “pluralism”. But do those same standards apply to secular liberals? Do secular liberals only seek to legislate their beliefs when there is near-universal agreement with them? Not at all. They feel perfectly justified in legislating their morality whether the people want it or not.
Can you imagine a liberal asserting that we can’t give state sanction to same-sex “marriage” unless and until there is near-universal demand for it? We can’t sanction such “marriages” unless, oh, ninety-seven percent or so of the public wants it to be sanctioned? Quite the contrary. The moment they decided that they wanted same-sex “marriage” to be legally sanctioned, they demanded that it be done immediately, public opinion be damned. If the people won’t sanction it, then damn it we’ll get judges to force it on them. And then we’ll haul any landlord who doesn’t want to rent to a homosexual couple into court. Our support for homosexuality trumps the landlord’s freedom of choice, his religious beliefs & liberties, and his property rights. And if the dating service E-HARMONY won’t provide same-sex match-ups, we’ll drag them into court and force them to do it. And if someone says homosexuality is a sin, or is unnatural, we’ll shut him down by threatening his job, or sending him off the rehab where he’ll be instructed in our way of thinking, or we’ll fine or imprison him for “hate speech”.
So much for liberalism being liberal, in the classic sense of the word.