Liberals and diversity

Ages ago, I asked a liberal woman in a discussion of federalism about letting the states handle abortion each in their own way.

Likewise marriage laws, laws concerning sex, laws concerning censorship of expression and culture, and lots of other things, more or less as would be consistent with a pre-Civil War view of state and federal authorities, advocated at the time by conservatives of the likes of William Buckley and many others.

Sure, they were never such great federalists as all that.

Look what happened to the Mormons and their polygamy.

But still, some conservatives at the time were perfectly serious about letting most of the culture war issues rest with the states, where they more or less had been before the Supremes began to federalize them.

She opposed it.

Asked why, she raised her voice.

Puzzled, I pursued.

Did everyone in the world have to live the same way, their laws aligned according to the same beliefs about such things as religion, morality, and human rights?

So long as the laws and the culture were more or less a good fit with her own views where she lived, did she mind that other people elsewhere had laws suited to their very different beliefs and customs?

Yes, she did.

Pressed, she became angrier and more peremptory.

I let it drop.

I don't think her penchant for nationalist uniformity on these matters was a mere side effect of liberal reliance in those years on a runaway Supreme Court to force its cultural revolution on a country that was at the time opposed to it from sea to shining sea.

And anyway that could not explain her evident intent to foist her political values on the entire heedless globe.

Islamists, Kiplingesque partisans of the white man's civilizing mission, Wilsonian exporters of the blessings of democracy and liberty, and these folks all have much in common.

Fundamentally, it's the Will to Power wrapped in self-righteous justifying fantasies of religion, morality, and political and social justice.

Liberals think the world government they want the UN to be will be their tool for imposing their political and cultural values globally rather than, say, a tool for the Islamists or (worse yet?) Vatican traditionalists.

So far, very little goes on at the UN to contradict that view.

Things will be different when the movement to give states power in the UN according to population starts to make real headway.

And a local note about diversity in the US and the utter hypocrisy about liberals in connection with the First Amendment, free speech, free association, freedom of expression, free thought, and freedom of religion, as illustrated by this.

Christians must be made to bow

Frank Bruni of the Times in Bigotry, the Bible and the Lessons of Indiana quotes a gay philanthropist (and a Jew?) with approval,

"Church leaders must be made to take homosexuality off the sin list."

A remark I find both chilling and depressing.

Now, as a matter of historic fact, the Abrahamic religions in general and Christianity in particular are to fag-hating much as Christianity has been and Islam still is to Jew-hating.

Dropping the doctrines that only Christians can be saved and, in particular, that unconverted Jews cannot be saved, would help remove theological incitements to Jew-hating but is not actually necessary for that and, so far as I know, no liberal has been quite daring enough to insist that the Christian churches must be compelled to accept Universalism.

Similarly, dropping homosexuality per se from the sin list, possibly an even more drastic departure from genuine, traditional, orthodox Christianity than Universalism (or even Unitarianism!), would be a good thing in many ways.

But it is not essential for ending actual persecution or prosecution of gays, as the current state of things in the US must make obvious.

And does actual freedom no longer count for anything in the face of liberal demands that all bend the knee?

My God, we are so very, very far from Voltaire!