August 20, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Time to Cut Off Fox News?

Friends,

Congress-Womyn Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are not nice people. Their views and stands on any number of issues are inimical to the historic interests and traditions of the United States: they are in many ways outright Marxists who combine their Marxist variants in an uncomfortable mix with their zealous Islamism.

There is certainly enough in their ideology to critique and condemn.

More, it is also certain the Representative Tlaib made political use of the recent refusal by the State of Israel to allow her to enter for thinly veiled political purposes.

But this morning that narrative is not what caught my attention, although a discussion of it was the source of these comments.

Increasingly I think watching the early morning “Fox & Friends” program on Fox News is dangerous to both my mental and moral health...and probably to yours, as well, if you think seriously about it.  I’ve just about reached the decision to stop watching the trio of Brian Kilmeade, Ainsley Earhardt, and Pete Hegseth. I cannot abide their on-parade ignorance (the destruction of the English language!) and their constant utilization of an increasingly Leftist cultural narrative that they consistently spout.

Let me explain using this morning’s newscast: in discussing Representative Tlaib’s decision not to go to the Palestine Authority area (West Bank) to visit her grandmother, and after a series of attacks on Islamic violence and terrorism against Israel, and a defense of Israel’s right to prevent Tlaib’s entry (all legitimate points), Kilmeade and Earhardt offered what they obviously considered the “coup de grace” in their assault on those horrible Palestinians. Not only are those people all potential terrorists who hate Jews, but they—and I quote—“oppose and violate human rights.”  You see the Palestine Authority has banned a march by LGBT demonstrators demanding their rights in the occupied areas, as threats to the traditional family and the historic religious beliefs of the inhabitants of the West Bank (a portion of whom, by the way, are Christian).

This is what the Fox trio used as their final nail in the coffin, their final and supposedly undebatable closing argument: those nasty Palestinians refuse to grant equal rights to same sex and LGBT demonstrators! Why, they’re probably as bad as that other religious reactionary, you know, Vladimir Putin, who actually favors and actively pursues a return to traditional Christianity in Russia and whose gendarmes equally deny “human rights” to LGBT demonstrators in the streets of Moscow. And Putin won’t allow LGBT proselytization in Russian schools. What a baddie and violator of human rights is he!

What do you want to bet that in those schools of the West Bank LGBT proselytization is also forbidden?

In other words, as Kilmeade and Earhardt thundered, the “human rights” to free expression, to marry whomever you please (or just shack up, if that greases your wheels), to instruct our kiddies in all the finer aspects of same sex marriage, transgenderism, and other new “normative” standards that our Fox newsies now accept, if not always explicitly, at the very least implicitly—all were being violated!

Oh, but you might protest: how can you say that? Doesn’t Fox also feature a plethora of Christian leaders, from Mike Huckabee to Southern Baptist Pastor Robert Jeffress to former Catholic priest and theologian Jonathan Morris? Doesn’t the network talk a lot about Christianity?

True, but each of these “faith leaders” can be balanced out prominently by the likes of Shepard Smith, Tammy Bruce, Guy Benson, Ambassador Richard Grenell, and others who are openly in same sex relationships of some sort. And then, there is the long list of Fox pundits who have written or spoken in favor of such mesalliances…beginning with Jonah Goldberg and most of the guests from the National Review, Wall Street Journal, or the justly-defunct Weekly Standard.

In May 2012 the citizens of North Carolina voted in a popular referendum by a 61% to 39% margin to approve an amendment to the State Constitution essentially outlawing same sex marriage. The amendment added to Section XIV of the Constitution: “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.”

The Supreme Court decision in April 2017, Obergefell v. Hodges, overturned the dozens of state constitutional articles prohibiting same sex marriage, including North Carolina’s.

And what has happened since then (and even before then)? Following the now-established legal template, Fox News and much, if not most of the Establishment Conservative Movement, Inc. has simply caved, accepted and gone along with that decision, and same sex marriage (and, yes, transgenderism) has become for the “movement” more or less normative, or, as Kilmeade and the twice-divorced Earhardt declared piously, “human rights.”

So much for “conservative principles”—so much for the moral beliefs and traditions of our culture. So much for those vaunted "conservative" defenders who lead us down the Primrose Path to the ignominious end of 2,000 years of Christian civilization.

Which brings me once again to the superb observation that the great Southern philosopher Robert Lewis Dabney made 130 or so years ago about the so-called “conservatives” of his day who surrendered to the early stages of feminist agitation and women’s suffrage.

His quote bears repeating, as what he beheld then is happening again:

This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.

American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it he salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious, for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its ‘bark is worse than its bite,’ and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle of resistance.

The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it ‘in wind,’ and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women's suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

[From his essay, “Womens’ Rights Women,” Discussions, vol. IV, Secular Discussions.]