The bathroom wars highlight the difference between morality and victimization

Stupid Liberals PayPal North CarolinaThe Washington Times published an excellent article pointing out the hypocrisy of Apple, PayPal, and other corporations boycotting North Carolina because the state said biological males and females should use separate restrooms in public places:

PayPal drew a line in the sand when North Carolina enacted a law prohibiting people from using the restrooms of the opposite sex, but critics say that line got washed away on the shores of Malaysia, a nation that consistently ranks among the least LGBT-friendly in the world.

The company canceled its plan to build a global operations center in Charlotte after the passage of HB2, which CEO Daniel Schulman called discrimination against the transgendered. He noted that the move would cost North Carolina 400 well-paying jobs.

But Malaysia’s Penal Code 187 — which punishes homosexual conduct with whippings and up to 20 years in prison — did not stop PayPal from opening in 2011 a global operations center there that it estimated would employ 500 workers by 2013.

[snip]

Whether it’s Apple opening stores in Saudi Arabia or American Airlines looking to dominate the Cuban travel market, many of the companies that have threatened to cut business ties to North Carolina over its bathroom bill are eager to do business in countries with regimes far more repressive of gays (and everyone else).

Read the rest here. It’s well worth your time.

I posted the article on Facebook and, as I expected, my Leftist Facebook friends went on the defensive. One comment acknowledged the hypocrisy but said that North Carolinians were no better because they don’t follow all the rules in Leviticus (such as refraining from wearing clothes made of two fabrics).

A bit of Biblical exegesis established two things: First, that the two-fabric proscription was to ensure that vendors didn’t sell false goods, such as wool that failed to keep out the cold because it had linen or cotton mixed in. Second, one of the things Jesus did when he preached and offered himself as a sacrifice was to relieve believers of the burden of following all those meticulous prescriptions for conduct in the Old Testament — so there’s nothing hypocritical about a Christian who eats pork and shellfish while wearing a cotton/polyester blend shirt.

Another person chimed in that with the self-righteous statement that we expect better of our fellow Americans than we do of uncivilized people in Saudi Arabia or the Philippines (although he phrased it in much more politically correct terms). I read that to mean that, as is always the case with Leftists, he believes that non-Judeo-Christian, brown-skinned people are incapable of better behavior. Also, it reminded me that, while Leftists are always willing to castigate the American government for making common cause with loathsome nations (e.g., Saudis) for fairly sound geopolitical security reasons, there’s nothing wrong with corporations getting into bed with those same loathsome nations for profit.

Because my goal on Facebook is to get people to read articles they’d otherwise ignore, rather than to get into heated political debates, I’ve held back on responding to these two comments. Both of them came from men hostile to Christianity, and I don’t see a good outcome to a skirmish with them. They won’t change their minds and, worse, any lukewarm Lefties monitoring the post won’t like the fight and won’t change their minds.  Still, I certainly started thinking hard about how I would respond to them if I weren’t imposing limitations on the way I use Facebook to advance ideas outside of the Leftie bubble in which most of my friends live.

Also, to be quite honest, I wasn’t quite sure how to go about arguing with them.  Facts are easy to argue; values less so.

I eventually realized that the reason I was struggling was because my Leftist friends don’t have moral standards; instead, they have victim standards. This isn’t to say that they’re not good people.  It’s just that they don’t have a sense of abstract morality.  In its place is an up/down sense of victim status (something I’ve written about at length before, at American Thinker).  This viewpoint comes straight from Marx himself:

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

This Marxist view says that, if you ally yourself with the oppressed, you’re always in the right. You’re not necessarily moral, but you’re definitely taking the correct side in every debate.  That arc of history will eventually bend your way.  (Incidentally, isn’t there an Orwellian beauty to the fact that the Left acts oppressively and justifies its conduct by characterizing itself as the oppressed?)  This distinction, between the Judeo-Christian abstract morality and the Leftist habit of saying you’re right because you’ve designated yourself as one of the good guys, makes it very difficult for people committed to morality to argue with people committed to Leftism.

All of which brings me to something Matt Walsh wrote when he was heckled during, and for days after, a speech he gave at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. One of the topics he covered was his religious- and liberty-based objection to using government power to force religious people to provide their services to gay marriages. Social Justice Warriors subjected him to the usual abuse — including being told by people completely ignorant of the Bible that he wasn’t a Christian because Jesus himself would have approved of gay marriage.

It was in this context that Walsh made a very interesting point about people who believe in sin — and struggle with occasional sinful conduct — and people who, like Obama himself, essentially say sin is when they’re out of alignment with their own values (although they’re invariably incapable of explaining the source of those values with which they need to align themselves):

In light of all of this, for the benefit of the offended students at Catholic University, and any “Christians” who fling words like “hatred” and “bigotry” at people who espouse Christian teaching on important cultural matters, I think we should review and reestablish one harsh but essential truth: If you do not accept God’s authority on these hot topic issues, you are not actually a Christian.

Yes, all Christians are sinners. Exhibit A: yours truly. I fail to live by my beliefs all the time. I am weak. I am selfish. Lord, I am truly a pathetic sight. I am not saying that Christians who fail to perfectly follow Christian teaching are not Christians. If I were saying that, I’d be excommunicating myself, and the entire rest of the world.

But it’s one thing to fail in your pursuit of holiness, and it’s another to call holiness ”hateful.” It’s one thing to sin, it’s another to say that sinning is not sinful. It’s one thing to disobey the Commandments, it’s another to categorically reject the authority of the Commandments. It’s one thing to crawl back to God and beg for forgiveness, it’s another to stand there and say you don’t need forgiveness because God was wrong when he called your sin a sin. It’s one thing to follow Christian teachings imperfectly, it’s another to loudly denounce them. It’s one thing to fall short of the faith, it’s another to change the faith to suit you.

In all of these cases, you can do the former while still retaining your Christian identity. But to do the latter is to reject your Christian identity. And you are free to do that, by the way. There is no law saying you must be Christian (the laws are trending very much in the other direction). You are not compelled or required to profess a faith in Jesus Christ. Many people are not Christian. I have friends who are not Christian. I think you should be Christian, I believe your salvation depends on your acceptance of Jesus Christ, but that is your decision to make. I just want you to be honest about it.

What you cannot do — what no Christian school or church or household should allow you to do without being rebuked – is testify a Christianity that does not include whatever bits and pieces you find distasteful to your modern palate. What you cannot do — what I will not sit by and allow you to do without forcibly challenging you — is claim a Christianity that makes room for our culture’s favorite sins. What you cannot do is say you are a Christian whose faith condones, supports, permits, or otherwise accepts the homosexual lifestyle, abortion, pornography, or whatever else. That is a heresy. You are creating a religion for yourself and of yourself and by yourself. You are proclaiming that God is Lord on one hand, but calling him fallible and foolish on the other. You cannot keep hold of the name “Christian” while you speak such blasphemies.

You cannot be a Christian who fundamentally rejects Scripture’s moral dictates — that is, a Christian who openly calls those dictates illegitimate or outdated or unbinding — any more than you can be a Christian who rejects Christ’s divinity or His Resurrection. These are defining features of our faith. How can you accept something while rejecting its defining features? That’s like saying you love the forest but you hate trees. You’re allowed to hate trees, but if you do, I think I have not overstepped my bounds if I suggest that, in fact, you don’t love the forest at all.

It’s not about good or evil, right or wrong, victim or oppressor, pork or matzoh balls. It is, instead, about core moral principles. You either have them or you don’t. And if you have them, you cannot abandon them because the Social Justice Warriors have suddenly decided that the rights of the minute population of transgender people in America means that your little girl has to share a public bathroom with a big naked man who claims that, today at least, he’s a woman.

This hierarchy of victimhood is why, in Europe, Leftists have jettisoned women’s rights in favor of rapist’s rights — the rapists are Muslim refugees, so they occupy a more significant “victim space” in the panoply than women do — never mind that women have long been the backbone of Leftism and that it’s the women getting raped.  The same holds true here:  Transgender folk, all 100,000 or so of them, are the victim de jour, and the rights of women and girls to safety and privacy have to give way.  There are no absolute values, only relative ones.

What’s sad is that Leftist women in Europe and America, having spent their lives immersed in this Leftist thinking, go willingly to their own assaults, rapes, and executions.  After all, who can forget this German woman:

German woman for rapists

(European men are no better, since we’ve all heard by now about the guilt-ridden Norwegian who can’t bear the thought that his decision to report a violent homosexual rape resulted in his rapist being deported.)

As always, I feel no pity for the Leftist women and men who suffer as a result of their morality-free world.  I am horrified, however, at the thought of the women and girls, myself included, as well as the men, who find themselves flashed, assaulted, raped, or killed thanks to the Leftists’ misbegotten culture of victimhood.