“You could either be a Christian, or you could be successful.” The preceding, a Hungarian tour guide explained early last year, is how her nation’s former communists dealt with Christians. And while it may seem those days are long gone, we today are increasingly being presented with a similar choice: “You can be Christian/conservative, or you can be successful.”
Oh, it’s happening (somewhat) slowly, gradually, with a policy here, a lawsuit there, a government intrusion here and there, and a lot of unofficial discrimination. Just consider one of the latest efforts: Imagine you spend the better part of a quarter-million dollars on higher education and earn a law degree. Then, just as you’re cutting your teeth in your profession and looking forward to paying down your student-loan debt, your law license gets revoked. Why?
Because you expressed pro-life views.
That marriage is between a man and a woman.
Proclaimed that adopting a “gender identity” doesn’t actually change you from one into the other.
Or any other crimethink.
At issue is a “gag order against lawyers now being touted as an ethics rule,” as Breitbart puts it. The site continues:
The American Bar Association’s (ABA’s) rule would make it professional poison for lawyers to freely express conservative viewpoints on a wide range of political issues — but especially on Christian issues like abortion, marriage, and gender.
ABA Model Rule 8.4(g) makes it a violation of legal ethics — meaning the lawyer could lose [his] professional license — if [he] manifests “bias” on issues of sexual orientation, gender identity, and socioeconomic status, among other issues like race and sex. Lawyers could thus be punished for criticizing illegal aliens, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, or other liberal sacred cows.
In other words, it isn’t just avowed Christians in the crosshairs; any attorney expressing a view we today would consider “conservative” could be deemed ethically incorrect by the ABA and be subject to law-license revocation.
And how content the ABA is to dispense with reason and fact in favor of the latest left-wing ideological curiosity is illustrated well by its statements on “gender.” As The Federalist Society (TFS) reported August 2, the ABA has stated, “‘Gender identity’ [is] a new societal awareness of the individuality of gender [that] has changed the traditional binary concept of sexuality [Dec. 22, 2015 Memo].” Furthermore, TFS tells us, the ABA “wondered if it did not act now [whether] their proposal would be upended by ‘outdated’ norms[.]”
Striking. The ABA correctly calls “gender identity” “new”; what it doesn’t say is that the theory behind it is untested, unproven, and unscientific. To wit: A recent study found no scientific (biological) basis whatsoever for “transgenderism,” further vindicating a position I’ve explained here and here and here and here (and elsewhere). Yet the ABA barged ahead nonetheless. Moreover, in wondering if looking before they leap could cause their proposal to be upended by “outdated” norms, they appear to be saying: Don’t worry about being correct — just politically correct.
Interestingly, Justice Samuel Alito spoke of this phenomenon six months before the ABA proposal, writing in his Obergefell v. Hodges (faux marriage) dissent, “I assume that those who cling to the old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employees, and schools…. We will soon see whether this proves to be true.”
Yet we didn’t have to wait and see because it was already happening. In 2014, co-founder of the Mozilla Corporation Brendan Eich was forced to resign from its CEO position because six years before he had donated $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8 (which protected marriage). Moreover, by the time of Obergefell, the governmental persecution of bakers, wedding planners, florists, and other businessmen for declining to participate in faux weddings was already evident. Note that not only did this break new ground for breaking freedoms — punishing businessmen not for refusing to serve a type of people, but for refusing to service a type of event — it also sent an ominous message: Don’t think you’re safe from the Eich treatment just because you have your own business. When social pressure can’t enforce the current fashions (and state ideology), government’s iron fist will.
Even more shockingly, the California Supreme Court voted early last year to prohibit judges from being affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), claiming the organization discriminated unjustly against homosexuals. This was later reversed after the BSA capitulated and allowed openly homosexual scoutmasters in its ranks. But consider: “He’s a ‘boy scout’” has long been a descriptive denoting goodness. Yet California jurists had no problem lumping the BSA in with Nazis and the KKK simply for taking a position with which most of the world agrees. (Note: California judges are nonetheless allowed to be members of La Raza {“the Race}.)
And the Machiavellian millstones of tyranny grind on. This brings us to the man who related the opening story about the Hungarian tour guide, Jonathon van Maren. Writing last year about the faith-or-success choice in his native Canada — which is relevant as that nation is on our cultural trajectory, only the secularism and socialism are further advanced — he related that “Ontario’s College of Physicians and Surgeons recently tabled a proposal that would force doctors to provide abortions and contraceptives in certain circumstances, and coerce them to refer for them in virtually all.”
And if the efforts to impose these standards succeed, faithful Christians will be deterred from entering medicine. Then the message will be, van Maren points out, “You can be a Christian, or you can be a successful doctor.” He continues:
The same goes for the legal profession in Canada, with the attack on Christians in the legal community being most publicly manifested in the actions taken against the proposed law school at Trinity Western University. Trinity Western University is, of course, a Christian university, and like many other Christian schools, asks that its students sign a covenant pledging obedience to the biblical view of morality, including on sexuality. Because of this traditional Christian view, the Law Society of British Columbia, the Nova Scotia Barrister’s Society, and the Law Society of Upper Canada declared that they would bar any graduates of Trinity Western’s proposed law school from practicing law — ironically, because they felt that Trinity Western was not appropriately “inclusive.”
While the Nova Scotia Barrister’s Society’s decision was ultimately overturned by a judge, the efforts to “purify” the Canadian legal profession continue. And as van Maren warns, “If Legal Leaders for Diversity have their way, you can be Christian, or you can be a successful lawyer.”
It’s the same in Canada’s New Democrat Party and Liberal Party, with Christian views being a disqualifier for running for office. Consequently, for Christians/conservatives “seeking to represent their fellow citizens, the options for political office have become slim indeed,” van Maren observes. He then states:
It’s a clever tactic, and a dangerous one, as it gives Christians less and less control over their own futures. If fewer Christians enter politics, our voice in the House of Commons grows quieter. If fewer Christians enter the field of medicine, the entire field suffers. And if organizations like Legal Leaders for Diversity have their way, there will be far fewer Christian lawyers — which means that as Christians increasingly need legal assistance to defend their dwindling religious freedoms, they will have fewer lawyers to rely on.
And since judges are pulled from lawyers, this means fewer judges to rely on for sane rulings. What will our courts look like if only judges who embrace the militant-secular agenda need apply?
What’s occurring here is reminiscent of the stage of socialist revolution called “normalization.” Smelling blood after many decades of culture-war victories and with the United States at a seeming “tipping point,” American leftists are now trying to wipe out every last vestige of opposition. This could be halted, but it would require seizing back the culture from the Gramscian foot soldiers whose long march through the institutions has been so successful. For politics is downstream of culture — and we cannot lose the culture and keep the republic.
