The Silencing Read online

  But such freedom to practice the organization’s Christian beliefs, while being a government contractor, is in jeopardy. William J. Blacquiere, president and CEO of Bethany, said in an interview, “From the perspective of Bethany, we see the government as a partner. We’ve had contracts with state governments since the 1960s. During that time we had respect for the state’s laws and they respected us. It definitely feels like that respect is disappearing.”

  While the illiberal left seems to hold a special animosity to Christianity, it is strangely protective of Islam, despite the fact that orthodox Muslims also oppose same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, the illiberal left labels the religion’s critics as “Islamophobes” suggesting some sort of mental illness or “phobia” is behind any difference of opinion. Liberal firebrand Bill Maher learned this the hard way. In 2014, the host of HBO’s Politically Incorrect got into a heated agreement with actor Ben Affleck about Islam. After atheist writer Sam Harris called Islam, “the motherlode of bad ideas,” Maher added that Islam is “the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f*cking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.” Affleck was furious. He pushed back, arguing that Islam was being painted with too broad a brush. Maher cited a Pew poll finding that a large majority of Egyptians felt that if you leave Islam, death was the appropriate retaliation. Maher asked, “If 90 percent of Catholics in Brazil felt the appropriate response to leaving Catholicism was death, wouldn’t that be a slightly bigger story?”

  Affleck’s rebuttal to these claims amounted to this: Maher and Harris were “gross” and “racist,” which was enough to make Affleck a hero among the illiberal left. On the View, Rosie O’Donnell wanted “Affleck for President!”49 Over at MSNBC, Chris Matthews declared, “I’m with Affleck because knocking someone’s religion is the way to start or escalate a fight. It’s no way to cool one.”50 MSNBC host Krystal Ball said, “I have such a liberal crush now on Ben Affleck. I thought he was so amazing throughout that show, and so strong there.”51 MSNBC host Chris Hayes echoed Affleck’s claims that Maher and Harris were saying things that were “gross and racist” because their conversation didn’t include any actual Muslims.52 Michael Eric Dyson, guest-hosting the Ed Show on MSNBC, called Maher a “patron saint of liberals,” but said his argument against Islamic illiberalism reinforced bigotry.53

  Maher’s contempt for Christianity is well known, yet it has barely elicited a peep from the illiberal left. Maher has called the God of the Bible a “d-ck,” a “psychotic mass murderer,” and a “tyrant,”54 and said, “If we were a dog and God owned us, the cops would come and take us away.” The illiberal left is fine with such anti-Christian broadsides, because it accepts, and even promotes, the idea that Christianity is bigoted, but it condemns as off-limits and racist any discussion of Islamic illiberalism.

  Maher’s comments led a student at the University of California-Berkeley—the birthplace of the “Free Speech Movement”—to start a Change.org petition55 demanding the school cancel Maher’s scheduled commencement speech. The petition claimed the school had a “responsibility . . . to protect all students. . . .” It called Maher’s comments “racist” and “bigoted” and characterized his comments about Islam and religion as “hate speech.” The petition garnered nearly six thousand signatures. The student committee responsible for selecting commencement speakers reconvened without inviting Berkeley administrators and decided to rescind the invitation.56 The students’ attempt to punish Maher as a liberal apostate failed after the chancellor stepped in, citing the university’s support for Maher’s right to free speech.

  Maher’s treatment demonstrated how little tolerance the illiberal left has for critics of Islam. This includes people who were raised in the faith, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who should be a hero to liberals. Hirsi Ali is a survivor of genital mutilation who escaped a forced marriage to become a member of the Netherlands parliament. She’s an advocate for women and a courageous proponent of free speech, with a price on her head for speaking out about the illiberalism of Islam. Now a naturalized U.S. citizen, Hirsi Ali is a fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and in 2005 was named by Time magazine as one of the “100 most influential people in the world.” Given this impressive list of accomplishments, one might assume that liberals would be heralding her as the ultimate success story—a woman overcoming insurmountable odds and challenging the patriarchal religion she says oppressed her and other women. Instead, many of the illiberal left have demeaned her, dismissed her, and attempted to silence her for the heresy of having a negative opinion about Islam, the religion of her upbringing.

  “It may be naive, stupid, irrational, but I’m [speaking out against Islam] because I think that if I do, there’ll be less honor killings, fewer little girls undergoing female genital mutilation like I did,”57 Hirsi Ali told the Washington Post. Yet Jessica Mack on her blog Gender Across Borders: A Global Feminist Blog, was of the opinion that it would be better for Hirsi Ali to work within the system of Islam. She criticized her for “speaking out against Islam . . . and enduring constant death threats (and consequent 24-hour security). This isolates her in a way, cuts her off in her activism. She is not a woman of the people.”58 So, it’s Hirsi Ali’s fault a bunch of male Muslim fanatics want to kill her. “Above all else, Hirsi Ali’s story is one of an individual’s dogged pursuit of personal freedom. This individual happens to be a woman, and so some of the hardships she endures are unique in that way. But somehow she doesn’t connect these intense personal experiences to the larger feminist project,”59 Mack wrote.

  The illiberal left’s protectiveness of a patriarchal religion may seem confusing to an impartial observer, but Hirsi Ali thinks she understands. She explained in an interview with the Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow. “Liberals, she said, protect Islamic extremists partly because the Left has no idea what really goes on in Muslim countries,” Schow wrote. “‘I think if I adopt the position in good faith to multiculturalists and leftists, I would say [they take the position they do] because they see [Muslims] as victims. They see them as victims of the white man and so they think: ‘Let’s protect them from the white man. Let’s protect them from capitalism.’ . . . That is misguided at best and malicious at worst,’”60 Hirsi Ali said.

  In their effort to delegitimize Hirsi Ali as a valid critic, she is portrayed as a pathological provocateur, not a women’s advocate fighting to lift the oppression of Muslim women. The liberal Guardian columnist Emma Brockes complained in an article about Hirsi Ali that “when she writes that ‘violence is an integral part’ of Islamic social discipline, or says in our interview that ‘Muhammad’s example is terrible, don’t follow it’, it is deliberately, almost narcissistically provocative. . . . To Hirsi Ali, the act of speaking out, of saying what no one else will say, seems at this stage to be almost a pathology. . . .”61

  Hirsi Ali picked the wrong religion about which to have a negative opinion. Contrast the character assassination of Hirsi Ali as a pathological narcissist to Brockes’s glowing profile of author Anne Rice after Rice wrote on her Facebook page that she was quitting “Christianity and being a Christian” because she refused to be “anti-feminist. . . anti-artificial birth control. . . anti-Democrat. . . anti-secular humanism. . . anti-science and anti-life.” Brockes asked rhetorically, “Given the unchanging nature of the Catholic church, the obvious question is, what took [Rice] so long?” Brockes criticized Hirsi Ali because the “phrasing she uses [in discussing Islam] is startlingly direct.” Yet Brockes praises Rice for her direct criticism of Catholicism: “[I] began to really study [Catholicism] and I found that it was not an honorable religion, that it was not honest.” Brockes’s title blared: “Anne Rice: I thought the church was flat-out immoral. I had to leave.”62 So, the Catholic Church is condemned, broad brush. But to say, “Muhammad’s example is terrible” crosses the line.

  Maher and Hirsi Ali could fairly be characterized as anti-Islam. This doesn’t mean they a
re in the grip of an irrational “phobia.” Some of their comments are blisteringly critical, and yes, offensive to adherents of Islam. So what? There is a chasm of difference between critiquing a religious system and harboring bigotry against millions of that religion’s adherents. To set one of the world’s largest and most influential religions as out of bounds for discussion and criticism—including harsh criticism—is inherently illiberal. I’m a Christian, but I would never suggest that people should not be allowed to harshly criticize Christianity. Religion is a powerful force in society that can be misused to oppress. All religions should be put under the microscope and picked apart. The proper response to religious criticism is not to silence it; it is to disprove it through debate and example.

  The writer and atheist evangelist Christopher Hitchens held Christianity—and all religions—in complete contempt. “Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience,” he wrote in his book God Is Not Great. He once called Mother Teresa “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.”63 That didn’t stop me from reading his work, nor would I have ever suggested he be kept from receiving an award or speaking at a university. In fact, I, along with hundreds of other Christians, attended debates where he harshly and derisively blasted Christianity. Bill Maher and Hirsi Ali are also critics of Christianity but the illiberal left doesn’t characterize that as a “phobia,” nor should they. To the illiberal left Islam cannot be criticized without recourse to bigotry; on the other hand, the illiberal left seems to regard Christianity as the very definition of bigotry.

  EXCLUSIONARY DIVERSITY

  The intensity of illiberal intolerance of orthodox Christianity is escalating and it’s scary to project where it might end up. Michael Wear had a front row seat to the Obama administration’s evolving views of religious tolerance. Wear worked on Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, promoted Obama to evangelical Christians, and served in the Obama White House office on faith-based initiatives. “In the 2008 campaign and during the president’s first year or so, it was all about aspiration and all about open doors. There was not a constituency that the president did not want to reach or a vote we wanted to concede,” Wear told me.

  There were efforts designed to build bridges with conservative Christian leaders and groups who normally vote mostly Republican. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama and John McCain participated in the “Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency” hosted by pastor Rick Warren.64 During his first term, Obama met privately with about thirty high-profile evangelical leaders in Chicago,65 and with Billy Graham at the evangelist’s home in North Carolina. He also decided to expand the faith-based initiatives office that President George W. Bush had created. During his first year as president, President Obama delivered a commencement speech at University of Notre Dame vowing to work with “pro-life” Catholics to “reduce the number of women seeking abortions.”66 Many of these actions inflamed members of his liberal base, like the American Civil Liberties Union67 and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who renounced his efforts.68 The New York Times ran an op-ed blasting Obama’s continuance of an office of faith-based initiatives in the White House as “institutionaliz[ing] a bad idea.”69

  In 2008, president-elect Obama invited evangelical leader Rick Warren, who some were calling “America’s pastor,” to offer the benediction at the inaugural ceremony. This was especially significant because Warren had been a vocal supporter of California’s Proposition 8, an anti–same-sex marriage initiative. Many liberals and LGBT activist groups protested the decision, but the president-elect defended the invitation. At a December 2008 press conference, Obama reiterated his support for “equality for gay and lesbian Americans.” But he also said that he would not revoke Warren’s invitation because of his desire “to create an atmosphere. . . where we can disagree without being disagreeable and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans.”70

  With a level of grace often absent in political spaces, Obama said, “During the course of the entire inaugural festivities, there are going to be a wide range of viewpoints that are presented. And that’s how it should be, because that’s what America’s about. . . . And that’s, hopefully, going to be a spirit that carries over into my administration.”71

  But that spirit was not to last. By the conclusion of President Obama’s first term, it was clear to many White House advisors that working with political opponents wasn’t a winning strategy. The events leading up to President Obama’s second inaugural address proved that change had indeed taken place. This time, another evangelical pastor, Louie Giglio, was invited to give the benediction. Again liberals and LGBT groups protested the president’s choice. The liberal political blog ThinkProgress published a sermon preached by Giglio in the mid-1990s condemning the “homosexual lifestyle” as sinful.72 This time President Obama did not stand behind his invitation. Giglio bowed out, saying in a statement that his participation would “be dwarfed by those seeking to make their agenda the focal point of the inauguration.”73 Giglio had been chosen in the first place to bring awareness to fighting sex trafficking, an area where he has played a leadership role. But saving women and children from being sold into sex slavery didn’t rank in the illiberal left’s list of concerns. The Presidential Inaugural Committee released an official statement saying, “We were not aware of Pastor Giglio’s past comments at the time of his selection and they don’t reflect our desire to celebrate the strength and diversity of our country at this Inaugural. . . . As we now work to select someone to deliver the benediction, we will ensure their beliefs reflect this administration’s vision of inclusion and acceptance for all Americans.”74

  Wear characterizes the second inaugural experience as “one of the saddest times of my political life.” He noted that between the first and second inaugurals, “We went from diversity being the reason for inclusion to diversity being the reason for exclusion.”

  That is where the illiberal left’s silencing of opponents is taking us: to the end of freedom of speech, thought, and debate, to uniformity—all in the in the name of diversity.

  FOUR

  INTOLERANCE 101

  SHUTTING DOWN DEBATE

  If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

  —GEORGE ORWELL

  In March 2014, a feminist studies associate professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara physically attacked a sixteen-year-old girl who had been handing out anti-abortion literature in a public space on campus. The professor, Dr. Mireille Miller-Young, later told a police officer that she was justified in her attack because the literature and graphic abortion signs displayed by the anti–abortion rights group were “disturbing” and “offensive.” She was particularly offended, she said, because she was pregnant and teaches reproductive rights.1

  The police officer who interviewed Miller-Young asked what crimes she felt the anti–abortion rights group had committed.2 Miller-Young told the officer that coming to campus and showing “graphic imagery” was insensitive to the community and claimed the “pro-life” group may have violated university policy. In fact, the group staged their demonstration in the campus “free speech area” as university policy dictated. Had they actually violated university policy, that still would not have made their actions criminal, or inviting of physical attack.

  Nonetheless, throughout the police report, Miller-Young is unrepentant. The police report continues, “Miller-Young said that her actions today were in defense of her students and her own safety . . . Miller-Young also suggested that the group had violated her rights.” The officer asked Miller-Young what right the group had violated, and she responded, “My personal right to go to work and not be in harm.” But there was no harm done to Miller-Young. She just couldn’t tolerate the expression of views with whic
h she disagreed. So she attacked a teenage girl.

  Miller-Young’s behavior, while indefensible, is easily understood if one considers the ideological confines of the illiberal left. Seen through this intolerant and narrow lens, disagreement is violence. Offending them is akin to physical assault. They are so isolated from the marketplace of ideas, that when confronted with a view they don’t like, they feel justified in doing whatever they can to silence that speech.

  Campuses across the United States have become ground zero for silencing free speech. Universities founded to encourage diversity of thought and debate have become incubators of intolerance where non-sanctioned views are silenced through bullying, speech codes, “free speech zones,” and other illiberal means.

  Professor Miller-Young’s assault is the headline of the incident, but what led up to the attack is equally alarming. According to Mairead McArdle, then a twenty-year-old student at nearby Thomas Aquinas College, the incident started when she approached Miller-Young and handed her an anti-abortion pamphlet. “As soon as she [saw it] she raised her voice and said, ‘Oh so you are the people who use fear tactics to scare women. And is that your sign? Well let’s go talk about that,’” McArdle recounted to me. “We then walked over to the sign [that depicted an aborted fetus]. From that point on she did not stop yelling at us. With her it never went back to a reasonable discussion. She was just mad. She said, ‘You don’t have the right to be here, you don’t belong here, you don’t go here.’”