The liberal cause célèbre of the month has been transgender bathrooms. Before that it was gay marriage. I imagine as a gay man one would have felt very good about that; people coming out to big rallies and the liberal media saying all sorts of nice things about homosexuals. At a college I know of, a gay man was hired by the philosophy department and appointed chief diversity officer. It would be a tremendous scandal if he turned out not to be gay after all! If he were caught embracing a woman in a sexual manner, quelle horreur.
We have seen that feminists throw women under the bus when it comes to Islam’s treatment of women. Cultural relativism trumps any despicable thing one might do to women. Pointing to Sweden’s distinction as having the second-highest number of rapes per 100,000 in the world due to Muslim immigration makes one a racist. Being a Muslim trumps being a woman for most favored status. Being a Muslim trumps our instinct to protect women, at least for liberals/feminists. It even trumps our desire to protect children. Mohammad married a six year old and had sex with her when she was nine. This has not been renounced as far as I know. Pedophilia is to be tolerated if it is practiced by Muslims or at least by Mohammad.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, most of my students think that the greater horror they can “tolerate” the better people they are – up to and including the Holocaust. I used to tell my students that this was not the intention of their misguided teachers who taught them to be moral and cultural relativists. Now, I wonder if perhaps it was the intention of their teachers. But whether it was or not, it is now the intention of liberals to tolerate any behavior of those with most favored status.
Jesus said those who are last shall be first. Liberals have clearly taken this to heart in their own manner. By analyzing their rhetoric, one can discover that liberals have a hierarchy, though ever-changing, even though they claim to hate hierarchies and love “equality.” The ethnic origin and religious affiliation of the Orlando murderer is quickly erased from discussion. Even his actions are not being criticized – for to do so would be a “distraction” some liberals claim. A distraction from what, for goodness sake? Gun control. Since this happened in the San Bernardino terrorist case, I should have seen it coming. I didn’t. I can’t seem to get cynical enough.
Gay men have just discovered that they do not remotely have most favored status, although they must have noticed somewhat uneasily that transgenderism was the flavor of the month. Gay men have been thrown under the bus by liberals too. The fact that the attack was explicitly against gay men; they were actual victims in the most visceral possible way – has just been negated by gun control. Homophobia suddenly disappears as a topic and the sexual orientation of the victims is minimized. Why? Because the murderer was a Muslim. (Sorry to state the obvious). At the moment, this trumps everything. If, as has been pointed out, the killer had been a Christian, then the illusion that liberals care about gays would be maintained and the killer and his religion would be roundly criticized.
After the claims in the 1980s that all men are rapists and then in the 1990s that all men were potential pedophiles, I suppose there could be a certain schadenfreude in women and gays finding out what it means to have one’s sex and race and sexual orientation be used against you. I don’t feel it though. Instead I feel sorry for the Orlando victims and the gay community. The feeling of disillusionment must be intense, if they can even bring themselves to admit to themselves what is going on.
It has been reported that some gay leaders have blamed the Orlando murders on Christians. This seems to indicate some kind of emotional pain. They know that liberals have abandoned them in favor of being pro-Islam. Gays can’t attack Islam because they are liberals themselves and they also know that this would just make their situation even worse. So, they attack those who they can safely attack: Christians. This is the nature of scapegoating. One attacks who it is safe to attack. At one time it would have been the lame, the poor, the disenfranchised, the POW, those without families, foreigners. Gays know they have been doubly victimized. First as targets of the attack and then having their sexual orientation, the reason for the attack, be regarded as something one ought not to mention. They know that any attempt to draw attention to this will be subject to vociferous condemnation. They have been scapegoated. They have been thrown under the bus. They know the liberal mob is ready to silence any mutiny. They try to find another target for the hostility of the crowd. Only one presents itself. Christians.
One can try to avoid being the scapegoat victim by offering another to take one’s place. Also, if you can’t safely criticize your boss or your spouse then you might perhaps kick the dog. You attack whom it is safe to attack. It’s called displacement.
If there were a game called scapegoat poker, then the cards would reveal a hierarchy of value. White Christians and conservatives would be the least valuable. Muslims would be of the highest value at the moment. The more atrocities ISIS commits, the more Muslims must be protected. The more we prove what nice people we are by overlooking anything they do. It’s a bit difficult to place all the in-betweens. White atheists would perhaps be next lowest. Then white women, then “people of color” (they must be wondering how they became so neglected), then gays and lesbians, the handicapped (currently not part of the cultural discussion), the transgendered, then children perhaps. If you happen to be a black, handicapped, lesbian, transgendered, feminist Muslim child, then the sky’s the limit.
I mentioned Jesus saying those who are last shall be first. That’s how it works in scapegoat poker. Being of high value in this game actually indicates something of what people really think about you and it’s not good.
I just received an institutional message concerning the Orlando shootings. The identity, religion, ethnicity and motives of the killer were not mentioned. They did mention that it had something to do with gays. That indicates the demotion of gays versus Muslims. In the old days, it was being gay that one avoided mentioning in polite company.
The Orthosphere 
It appears to me that most gay men are all in on scapegoating white flyover Christians for Orlando. They don’t really believe anybody’s going to shoot up a gay club in their own town. They do believe (rightly) that they can use this to hurt their own neighbors whom they already hated and feared. And all the horror and fear they feel about gays finally REALLY being targeted, they can channel that against an enemy that makes some sense to them.
When you’re a believer, the Devil is behind everything bad that happens. You don’t focus on which particular tool the Devil happened to use this time. That’s a distraction. You focus on the Devil.
It’s much easier to do that than to accept that their “allies” in the left-wing freak show coalition actually want them dead, and their “protectors” leading the coalition don’t mind a bit if they get gunned down. In fact, 50 dead rump-rangers is political pennies from heaven.
Re: Matthew Walker – that sounds about right.
I spent the morning reading The St. Petersburg Dialogues by De Maistre. (The motto of The Orthosphere comes from the Second Dialogue.) The author of those dialogues would know how to assess the Orlando incident. The West is in a degenerate phase so Providence has sent Islam, which is also degenerate, more radically even than the West, to punish the West. Islam punishes itself every minute of every hour of every day. It belongs to the degeneracy of the West that it invites every non-Western degeneracy to come and dwell with it, including Islam, while encouraging every Western degeneracy to prosper and multiply. Providence has likely invented drone-strikes to strengthen the punishment of Islam, not least for its chattel-treatment of women and its obsession with boys. (The always-elided conclusion of the oft-half-quoted Koranic promise is: “…and forty boys.”) As Pat Condell said a year or so ago, the Arab nations are probably the most anti-gay, and at the same time, the gayest, places on earth, not least Saudi Arabia.
Both Liberalism and Islam believe that they have superseded the Gospel. In deluding themselves, they both fall back into the atavism of primitive Pre-Christianity and even Pre-Paganism: They imitate the Aztec Pyramid-Cult, much beloved of hip, postmodern people, and certain federally-appointed judges in the American Southwest, in their voracity. The perpetrators of holocausts should not be surprised when perpetrators of holocausts assail them. That they are surprised is another item of evidence in the proof of their degeneracy.
Cortes, landing in Mexico, had an army of about 200 men. He defeated the Aztec with an army of tens of thousands because the vassals of the Aztec were sick and tired of being constantly culled for the Pyramid Cult. It matters not a wit that Cortes was, himself, degenerate in many ways: Providence sent him to punish the Pyramid Cult.
This is not blaming the victims. It is to affirm that the moral law is hard-wired in the cosmos.
When Richard writes of scapegoating, he necessarily writes of sacrifice. Liberalism and Islam are two massively sacrificial ethoi.
Pingback: What’s Wrong with a Little Political Correctness? – The Orthosphere
Pingback: Babies and Morality: Death to the Blank Slate – The Orthosphere