Once again, we encounter the craziness of the right-wing Christian mindset that vilifies liberals as the root of all evil and insists that only their interpretation of Christianity (which usually flies in the face of all things for which Jesus actually stood) is correct and mischaracterizes liberal positions on certain issues (notably only the positions for which the right has any coherent argument at all, conveniently failing to address the point the bumper sticker she rails against was making).
Below the fold is the full text of the nutty article for which I offer my critiques...
Linky-link to article
Why Liberals Loathe Christmas
By KATHARINE DEBRECHT
I came across a bumper sticker the other day while Christmas shopping that proudly proclaimed "Jesus was a liberal." Of course, this gave me great pause. If Jesus was a liberal, you might as well forget Joseph. Jesus would have had two mommies.
Wow! That’s some quick ju-jitsu there. Down go liberals! So apparently every liberal household is headed by a gay couple. Katharine should actually be happy about this. If gays head up every liberal household, then that puts a serious damper on our ability to procreate and keep our numbers high. I’d also like to point out to Katharine that if the Immaculate Conception story is actually true, then Joseph really was pretty superfluous there. Josephine could have handled the job fine.
He certainly would not have advocated teaching a man to fish to eat for life, rather to give a man a fish each day because the man would never amount to anything anyway. According to liberals, Mary should have had the right to choose.
This is probably the most egregious misrepresentation of liberal policies. Access to education is a liberal value, not a conservative one. Conservatives want access to education only for those who can afford to pay for it. They despise the public school system and their policies have only made access to higher education much more difficult for the average person to obtain, including allowing the Pell Grant system to basically wither. And yes, if the man cannot fish because he has not yet been taught how and has no other means of obtaining food, then he should be given a fish. Katharine evidently would allow that man to starve. As for the abortion argument, yes, Mary should have the right to choose. Mary should also have had access to health care so that she could give birth in a clean, safe environment like a hospital, rather than a manger, where she and her newborn baby were susceptible to any number of infections that could have killed them both.
Why would liberals invoke the name of Jesus when they strive to take every reference to God, the Son and Holy Spirit out of the public eye, especially at Christmastime? Why seek to squelch, via the ACLU among others, one of the most significant Christian traditions in America, Christmas, and yet proclaim liberals are pro-values?
Here is another gross mischaracterization of liberal policies. Liberals do not seek to remove reference to God from the public eye, they seek to remove reference to God from the public square. This is an important distinction that Katharine has not grasped. The idea is not that people cannot and should not make public displays of their religious faith; the idea is that the public should not be funding these displays. You can make whatever display of your faith on your own private property. If you want to light up your house so that the words "Merry Christmas" can be seen from space, then go ahead, but don’t force me or my Jewish neighbor, or my Muslim friend, or my atheist brother to pay for such a display on the G-d city hall or the state university.
The answer lies, as always with the far left, in politics. Secular liberals abhor Christianity, and its biggest holiday which is on display for over 2 months, precisely because it reminds them of what they are not — pro-values, pro-morals. They realize that 95 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas and that 90 percent recognize it as the birth of Jesus Christ, yet that pesky moral code that comes with Christmas and Christianity interferes with their liberal agenda.
The only value that seems to be on display during Christmas these days is consumerism. But I forgot that this is the #1 value of the Republican Party these days—buy shit and shut up. And evidently, Ms. DeBrecht believes that the moral code only comes with Christmas (and the "2 months" it is on display, WTF?) so for the other 10 months of the year, people can just ignore what Jesus stood for because we don’t have lights or trees up or something. Katharine also conveniently ignores the 5 percent of people that she admits here don’t celebrate Christmas—these people apparently either need to convert, or their G-d heathen asses can just deal with it.
Christmas represents a religion with a moral code. There are no exceptions for the "if it feels good, do it" liberal crowd. Self-absorption and instant gratification have no room when one centers his/her life around God, and not self. Nor does it give exception for the excuse that Hollywood continually pushes that "everyone is doing it, so it must be OK and normal" (i.e. adultery, out-of-wedlock births, promiscuity, etc). No one committing immoral behavior wants to be reminded that they are doing just that. Instead they seek to belittle the religion that requires a moral code, and elevate their own self-engineered code. How dare anyone define my morality, I define it the way I want to!
Okay, Katharine, lets look at which group endorses self-absorption. Is it group A, that feels that everyone deserves an equal opportunity at an education and supports a social safety net for individuals who through no fault of their own suffer hardship that puts them below an adequate standard of living. Or is it group B, that favors tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country at the expense of funding education programs and universal health insurance. I’m waiting for your answer. And liberals don’t believe that people shouldn’t live by a moral code, they believe that you, Katharine should not be the judge of what moral code people should live by (nor should George Bush nor Tom Delay nor Bob Ney nor Mark Foley) and that, therefore, many moral issues should not be legislated by our government.
That pesky moral code also makes its way into other major tenets of liberal philosophy. Conservative Christians look to a higher authority, while liberals bow to government authority. According to Christians, with God all things are possible, but according to liberals, with bureaucrats all things are possible. Instead of advocating accountability and self-responsibility, liberals decry these very things inherent to human dignity as mean-spirited. The free lunch trumps free will.
Up is down; black is white. That’s the only way I can describe this nonsense. How accountable and responsible is George Bush? Oh, I forgot, he hasn’t made any mistakes during his presidency...
Christians are also pro-life and adamantly against abortion, the battle cry of the left. While Christians view life as sacred and a gift from God, liberals believe it inconvenient when they are too busy to take care of it, and convenient when they want to experiment with it in a petri dish. That pesky commandment Thou Shall Not Kill so embitters them, they rush to rid any public display of it and the other 9 commandments.
Thou Shall Not Kill is such an important commandment to Katharine that the deaths of over 2,800 U.S. servicemen and 600,000 civilians in Iraq are no concern for her. The argument that liberals believe life too inconvenient when they are too busy to take care of it is more properly attributed to conservatives who evidently have no interest in addressing the issue of poverty. Thou Shall Not Kill also clearly didn’t have any meaning for that conservative champion George W. Bush who broke records for the number of people executed in Texas while he was governor.
Christmas trees, or "Holiday trees" as the PC left are now demanding everyone call them, do not offend liberals near as much as the nativity scene. The first Holy Family goes against everything the left is pushing these days, especially gay marriage. Whereas the traditional family, consisting of the irreplaceable mother and father, is sacred among Christians, it is deemed unnecessary and trivial by the far left. Today’s liberal feminists deplore the role of men and fathers; Hollywood promotes marriage as nothing more than an annoying piece of paper and fathers as bumbling idiots.
Atta-girl Katharine! Lets suggest that support for gay marriage is also opposition to heterosexual marriage, because that’s obviously the case. Let’s not imagine the possibility that the two could both exist, that would be too difficult. And as far a fathers being bumbling idiots, as a father, I’ll admit it—many of us are.
I particularly enjoy your argument that marriage is promoted by Hollywood (that liberal bastion and bullhorn) as nothing more than an annoying piece of paper. If this is the case, then one wonders why liberals would engage so stubbornly in the uphill battle to legalize gay marriage. Hey, it’s just a piece of paper, so we really shouldn’t give a shit, should we? And how sacred do you think marriage is to "conservative Christians" like Newt Gingrich (married three times) and Rush Limbaugh (twice).
Liberals can’t have it both ways. They can’t say that they possess Christian values, while voting for candidates who support same sex marriage and abortion. Straight and simple:
• God is for life: Liberals are for the culture of death through euthanasia and abortion.
[GTPinNJ-Conservatives are for the culture of death through war and the death penalty.]
• God is for marriage between one man and one woman: Liberals are for same sex marriage.
[GTPinNJ-Liberals are also for marriage between one man and one woman; the two are not mutually exclusive.]
• God is for faith, liberty, and values: Liberals are for government control and handouts.
[GTPinNJ-liberals are for the social safety net which does sometimes result in a handout; conservatives believe in everyone for himself. Liberals believe in government assistance when necessary, not government control, while conservatives believe in government control of your personal moral decisions.]
• God wants us to put Him first: Liberals are for putting themselves first.
[GTPinNJ-Conservatives believe that open displays of piety equal putting God first. I refer them to the words of Matthew, 6:5-6:6 "5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." Liberals believe in putting people first and support policies that seek to provide the greatest good to the greatest number of people. Liberal Christians also believe that such were the teachings of Jesus Christ.]
• God sent his son, Jesus Christ, to earth wrapped in human flesh and we celebrate this on Christmas: Liberals don’t want to admit that there is a God because if it were true that God does exist, they would have to change their lives and this would be highly disruptive to the way they want to live.
[GTPinNJ-I have no words for the asshattery in this point. According to Ms. DeBrecht, there is no such thing as a liberal Christian.]
It is no wonder the far left in this country single out Christians, especially evangelicals, as a group to be reckoned with. Not only because of their strength as a powerful voting bloc, but because their mere adherence to a moral code leaves the left uncomfortable with their own moral shortcomings. They are not offended by Christianity and its moral code, they are exposed by it. Christmas just reinforces this.
Here it is—all liberals are evil. She could have just said this in the beginning and saved me the time of reading and refuting this tripe...
About the author:
Katharine DeBrecht is an author of conservative children’s books and a mother of three. Her first book Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! Hit #1 on the Barnes & Noble website in September 2005 and was profiled by the Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. A graduate of Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, DeBrecht served as co-captain of "Security Moms for Bush" for South Carolina, where she resides with her husband and children. Her latest book is titled Help! Mom! The Ninth Circuit Nabbed the Nativity!
I can’t imagine how insane these books must be.