The Silencing (9 page)

              
—GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER

I
n the summer of 2012, Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy told an interviewer for a religious magazine that he supported the traditional family. The illiberal left swiftly launched a vicious smear campaign against Cathy and the popular fifty-five-year-old fast food restaurant.
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Protesters descended on Chick-fil-A restaurants across the country to condemn the chain’s alleged “bigotry” and “intolerance.” To the illiberal left, any opposition to same-sex marriage translates into hatred of gay people. At
Salon.com
, Cathy was called an “unapologetic homophobe”
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and the
Village Voice
deemed him a “homophobic chicken peddler.”
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At the feminist website Jezebel, readers were warned, “Don’t eat at Chick-fil-A. Not only are the owners bigoted jerks, if you get sexually assaulted in the parking lot, you’ll have to marry the guy. It’s the biblical way.”
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At
Slate
Cathy’s position opposing same-sex marriage was characterized as the equivalent of racism: “Racism persists, but at least racists have been formally politically defanged. Homophobes, meanwhile, have not,” complained the writer.
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One protestor, Adam Smith—a senior executive at a medical supplies manufacturing company—set out to do some defanging. Video recording himself as he waited in a Tucson, Arizona, Chick-fil-A drive-through, Smith explained that he was there for a free water and to “say a few things.” As he waited, Smith noted that the people in cars ahead of him, “have to have their Chick-fil-A anti-gay breakfast sandwich. It always tastes better when it’s full of hate.” When Smith finally reached the drive-through window he began berating a young woman named Rachel as though she was employed by the Ku Klux Klan. He accused her of working for a “hateful corporation” and said, “I don’t know how you live with yourself and work here. I don’t understand it. This is a horrible corporation with horrible values.” Throughout the abuse, the fast food worker calmly murmured, “I disagree,” and assured him, “We don’t treat any of our customers differently.” She tried to deflect his attempts to start an argument and explained she preferred to keep her personal views out of the workplace.

As Smith nastily condescended to Rachel, she was kind. “It’s my pleasure to serve you always,” she said. Rachel told Smith she was uncomfortable with being taped, but he didn’t stop. Despite his disrespect, she remained respectful, saying “It’s my pleasure to serve you always.” As Smith departed she said, “I hope you have a really nice day.” Mr. Tolerance was so pleased with himself that he posted a video of a woman saying she didn’t want to be recorded on YouTube.
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In this story, we are expected to believe the woman working the drive-through is the intolerant one.

After Smith’s company fired him from his CFO position for verbally accosting a young woman, he posted a YouTube apology.
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In an interview, Rachel said she forgave him and felt it was unfair for him to be dragged through the mud any more. “I’m Christian and God tells us to love thy neighbor,” she said.
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Chick-fil-A was considered so evil that college students started petitions to have the restaurant kicked off their campuses.
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Emory University ejected the restaurant from its on-campus food court
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after the administration
felt it necessary to release a public statement censuring the company,
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and Davidson College announced it would no longer serve the chain’s food at student activities.
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Duke University announced that Chick-fil-A was not going to be readmitted to their student union when they finished renovations. Larry Moneta, Duke’s vice president of Student Affairs said, in explanation, “Duke University seeks to eliminate discrimination and promote equality for the LGBT and all our communities in all our endeavors.”
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To be clear, Chick-fil-A had not been accused of discriminating against gay customers or employees. The company was targeted because its Christian owner reiterated an orthodox, and until recently unremarkable, Christian belief in an interview. It’s the same view held by Pope Francis.
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Think about that for a minute, and think about what it says for the tolerance of the illiberal left and its commitment to freedom of thought and speech.

Debate and persuasion should be the default response when someone encounters a person who does not share their view, not demands that the other person change their position or be pushed to the margins of polite society. Still, illiberal left mayors across the country threatened to discriminate against a company for not sharing their beliefs about marriage. Boston mayor Tom Menino said of Chick-fil-A, “If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult.”
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In other words, cities have a right to discriminate against Christian-owned businesses if their owners have opinions that don’t jibe with the illiberal left. Chicago mayor and former White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel joined the crusade, discouraging any expansion by the restaurant in Chicago because, “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values.”
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Interestingly, Emanuel’s former boss, President Barack Obama, had publicly professed the same “values” as Cathy on marriage until barely two months before, when the president announced he had “evolved” into supporting same-sex marriage.
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No matter. Following Emanuel’s statement, Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno quickly announced, “Because of [Cathy’s]
ignorance, I will now be denying Chick-fil-A’s permit to open a restaurant in the 1st Ward.”
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San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee tweeted, “Very disappointed #ChickFilA doesn’t share San Francisco’s values & strong commitment to equality for everyone” and then added, “Closest #Chick-FilA to San Francisco is 40 miles away & I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer.”
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How would the illiberal left react if companies led by people who supported same-sex marriage were told by conservative Christian mayors that they would be denied permits to operate due to their beliefs not being in sync with local values? There would be justified screams of “bigotry” and “homophobia” within seconds.

The illiberal left reserves a special strain of strident wrath for manifestations or protections of Christian belief in America. Resistance to same-sex marriage is arguably the belief the illiberal left finds most offensive. It’s certainly one of the primary battlefields on which the war on free speech is being waged. The illiberal left has worked hard to convince Americans that opposing same-sex marriage is so inherently immoral that the opposition must be brutally suppressed.

Demonizing is their favorite tactic for silencing disagreement with their position. The illiberal left justifies this demonizing by comparing people who oppose same-sex marriage to segregationists. But dehumanizing and hating black people went hand in hand with segregation. This is not true of opposing same-sex marriage. As we’ve seen with Pope Francis, it is more than possible to hold an orthodox view of homosexuality and respect and love gay people. If the illiberal left spent more time with orthodox Christians they would understand that Pope Francis is not an outlier. It’s easier for the illiberal left to demonize their opponents and sanctify themselves as higher moral beings than treat differences of opinion respectfully. The goal is to make their opponents’ view illegitimate. It’s a tried-and-true debate-ending tactic.

In discussing same-sex marriage, Mark Joseph Stern at
Slate
asked, “Can a person oppose equal rights for gay people and not be, in some
fundamental way, a homophobe? The answer seems to me to be a pretty obvious no.”
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John Shore of the Not All Like That Christians Project wrote at the Huffington Post, “If you vote against gay marriage or gay rights you are a bigot, as surely as anyone who voted against civil rights in the ’60s was a bigot. If you preach against gay rights, you are a bigot. . . . If, in private, you intimate to your dearest friend that you don’t think gay people should be allowed to get married, you are a bigot.”
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If that is true, then hundreds of millions, if not a billion, of the world’s 2.2 billion Christians are bigots. It means that Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were public bigots for most of their lives, as was virtually every Democrat holding elected office until a few years ago. As late as 2008, Barack Obama told Rick Warren that “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian. . . it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”
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But the illiberal left didn’t call him a homophobe or a bigot; he was their savior.

I am a longtime vocal supporter of same-sex marriage. At no point in my life have I not supported it. I readily acknowledge that some people oppose same-sex marriage for the wrong reasons—they are, indeed, prejudiced against gay people. But in my experience, most people who don’t share my opinion—which included, until recently, scores of Democrats—are not bigots but people with sincere and respectable beliefs, often based in a Christian worldview that I otherwise largely share. In either case, authoritarian demands for intellectual conformity and the relentless demonizing of people who don’t support same-sex marriage are inherently illiberal and wrong.

Matthew Vines, the author of
God and the Gay Christian
is gay and a strong advocate for gay and lesbian rights in the Christian Church. He told me in an interview, “I strongly disagree with those who think same-sex relationships are wrong, but I don’t think the vast majority of them are hateful. I always start by finding what beliefs and values I have in common with someone and affirming those things. That typically helps to create a climate of mutual respect when we discuss the things we don’t agree about.”

The illiberal thought police view it differently. The executive editor of the Huffington Post’s Religion section, Paul Raushenbush, has asserted, “Let’s just be very clear here—if you are against marriage equality you are anti-gay. Done.”
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Camille Beredjick wrote at Patheos, “Stop sugar-coating it. If you’re against marriage equality, you’re. . . against LGBT people.”
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Salon.com
ran a story under the headline, “The Bigots Finally Go Down: How Anti-Gay Haters Officially Lost the Marriage Fight.”
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At the
Think-Progress
blog hosted by the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank founded by former Obama advisor and President Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta, Zach Ford explained that it was right to call those who oppose marriage equality anti-gay and bigots. These are “accurate terms [that] can reinforce that positions against LGBT equality should be treated as taboo, rather than as understandable or defensible.”
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Liberal writer Lindsay Beyerstein has written that “Opposing gay marriage is the moral equivalent of supporting anti-miscegenation laws” and explained that, “By definition, bigots are people with unshakable
baseless
prejudices. There is absolutely no reason, besides blind prejudice, to deny same sex couples the right to civil marriage.”
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Examples of this sort of illiberal left “logic” are innumerable.
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The relentless stereotyping and demonizing of people who oppose same-sex marriage has paid enormous dividends for the illiberal left. Their views have seeped into the culture to the point that many people think that denying same-sex marriage opponents the right to speak about their views is acceptable. In 2014, an instructor in a philosophy class at Marquette University, a Catholic school, let it be known that opposition to same-sex marriage was unworthy of discussion.
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In a conversation recorded by a student following the class, instructor Cheryl Abbate explained “there are some opinions that are not appropriate, that are harmful” and compared questioning same-sex marriage to sexism and racism. Abbate went on to say that no one should express views that might be “offensive” to any gay student. Abbate told the student, who opposed same-sex marriage, “You don’t have a right in this class . . . to make homophobic comments” and said
the student could drop the class. The student complained, but the university took no action against the instructor.
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Marquette political science associate professor John McAdams wrote a blog post criticizing Abbate for refusing to allow criticism of same-sex marriage in class discussions and quoted the conversation Abbate had with the student.
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He then found himself the object of illiberal scrutiny. Inside Higher Ed’s Colleen Flaherty wrote that University of South Carolina associate professor Justin Weinberg argued that McAdams had made Abbate the “target of a political attack,”
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likely stemming from “sexism.”
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Louisiana State University French studies professor John Protevi posted an open letter of support
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of Abbate on his blog blasting McAdams’s “one-sided public attack.”
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Abbate characterized McAdams’s post as “cyberbullying and harassment” and noted, “It is astounding to me that the university has not created some sort of policy that would prohibit this behavior which undoubtedly leads to a toxic environment for both students and faculty.”
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Just to be clear here: the illiberal left considers the victim in this story to be the professor who preemptively silenced a student and compared his views to racism and sexism. Disagreement expressed by McAdams, in an academic environment where rigorous debate should be encouraged, was cast as a bullying attack. Rather than his motivation being reasonably interpreted as wanting to expose illiberal silencing on a campus, McAdams was accused of being motivated by sexism. This is all standard fare for the illiberal left. Why make a substantive argument when it’s just as easy to smear dissenters as sexist bullies?