Targets of hate

How crazy have some of our media leaders become? With federal workers back in their offices, we can now pay even more attention to supposed scandals like the one revealed in this headline: “Vice-president’s wife Karen Pence to teach at anti-LGBT school.”

CNN commentator Clay Cane on Jan. 20 was outraged: “Like a real-life setting for The Handmaid’s Tale, Immanuel Christian School insists applicants initial a pledge to ‘live a personal life of moral purity’” complete with the understanding that marriage means “the uniting of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive covenant union as delineated in Scripture.”

Cane snarled on: Immanuel “identifies ‘moral misconduct’ that would disqualify employees as premarital sex, cohabitation, extramarital sex, homosexual or lesbian sexual activity, polygamy, transgender identity, any other violation of the unique roles of male and female. This language is disgusting.” And so we label as unmentionable 4,000 years of Jewish and Christian teaching.

Also disgusting to some scribes was the 46th annual March for Life in Washington on Jan. 18—and leading newspapers protected us from knowing how many Americans showed up. USA Today reported that “more than a thousand anti-abortion activists” marched. That’s like saying more than a thousand Allied soldiers landed at Normandy on D-Day: The actual D-Day number was 156,000. The March for Life typically draws 100,000-plus. Last year a study of digital images led to a crowd estimate of more than 200,000.

Kristoffer Tripplaar/Sipa USA via AP

Astoundingly, the big news of Jan. 18 was not the execution of 3,000 unborn children that day (the average daily total in America) but the Lincoln Memorial standoff between an elderly Native American and a Catholic high-school student from Covington, Ky., wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap. The first wave of coverage, based on a 15-second video, slammed the student and his classmates. The second wave, based on longer videos, reported the chaotic complications and criticized the critics.

Since WORLD readers should not imitate much of the left by living only in our own bubble, I’m glad when they ask for names of secular journalists to follow. In this situation, one thoughtful analysis came from Megan McArdle, who redeems the editorial page of The Washington Post: She reported that chagrined defamers of the student, Nick Sandmann, have now downgraded their charge to “not knowing the proper response when a Native American activist bangs a drum in your face. And how many teenagers can be expected to have mastered that particular point of etiquette?”

McArdle added that the drummer, Nathan Phillips, did not “explain why he thought it would have a calming effect to bang a drum in the faces of the boys. This does not seem to be a technique generally recognized by experts in conflict resolution.” Another reasonable sojourner in a liberal publication, Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan, wrote, “The full video reveals that these kids had wandered into a Tom Wolfe novel and had no idea how to get out of it.”

Nathan Phillips beats his drum in the face of Catholic high schooler Nick Sandmann. Image from YouTube

Wolfe died last year and the four novels he wrote from 1987 to 2012—The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and Back to Blood—are great guides to the hysteria summarized by sports broadcaster Dan McLaughlin: “In any given week, at least one major news controversy is likely to revolve around how much we are supposed to hate a person we’d never heard of the previous week.”

The actual anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision came on Jan. 22 and offered a lesson in how far we’ve sunk. An Iowa judge struck down protections for unborn babies with detectable heartbeats, but the most remarkable example of degradation came in New York. In 1977 its state Senate voted 35-22 for a resolution asking Congress to call a constitutional convention for the purpose of adopting a pro-life amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This year the state Senate cemented its flip, voting 38-24 for a bill going even further than the Supreme Court: zero protection for babies up to the moment of birth.

WORLD European correspondent Jenny Lind Schmitt observed, “Europeans tend to think we Americans get too carried away in the fight over abortion. But when they understand what our laws actually are, they begin to understand why it’s a big deal. They think we’re barbarians.” Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the bill without the slightest expression of the regret that his dad, former Gov. Mario Cuomo, sometimes suggested. Some defenders of abortion are still pro-choice, but it’s clear that Cuomo and Company are militantly pro-abortion.

Participants in the Jan. 18 March for Life Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

What’s the solution? Trillia Newbell, director of community outreach for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, tweeted, “Many moons ago, before the Lord captured my heart by his grace, I interned at the New York State Assembly and I imagine I would have been among those cheering on new abortion bill. But God. God changed my heart, transformed my mind, gave me a love for the unborn. It took God.”

Amen. For, as Ephesians 6:12 states, “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”