Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Ann Coulter

  Toward the goal of divorcing sex from reproduction, liberals will lie about anything. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court discovered a constitutional right for married couples to buy contraceptives, premised on the Court’s assertion that marriage is a “sacred” institution, protected by “a Right to Privacy older than the Bill of Rights itself.” Within a decade, Justice William Brennan would dump the married stuff and extend the right to contraceptives to unmarried people. In a classic boneheaded, factless, legislative pronunciamento, in Eisenstadt v. Baird (March 22, 1972), Brennan wrote, “It is inconceivable that the need for health controls varies with the purpose for which the contraceptive is to be used when the physical act in all cases is one and the same.” Ten years later, the New York Times named AIDS in a May 11, 1982, article headlined “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials.”

  A year after Eisenstadt, the malleable “right to privacy” metastasized from a right to contraception for married couples to a right to destroy human life in Roe v. Wade. What about the poor little tyke’s privacy? The question misses the point. “Constitutional right” means “Whatever Liberals Want.” Society cannot legislate what goes on “in the bedroom.” But if we can’t legislate what goes on in the bedroom, why can’t I hide money from the IRS under my mattress?

  The cult of liberalism is preposterously fixated on youth—all the while devaluing life at the end, by demanding a “right to die.” Richard Lamm, the Democratic governor of Colorado, famously said in 1984, “We’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.” How about you first, Dick?

  Instead of seeking wisdom, liberals desire to be seen as clever by being counterintuitive, crazy, and outre. They have an irreducible fascination with barbarism and will defend anything hateful—Tookie, Mumia, Saddam Hussein, Hedda Nussbaum, abortion, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, New York Times columnist Frank Rich. If Hitler hadn’t turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would have stuck by him, too. Liberals defend unreason against reason and then call themselves rationalists. They are too important to be bothered by the things that frighten middle-class people worried about the equity in their homes. The truly pathetic liberals are the ones who aren’t rich but ape the belief structure of fabulously wealthy Hollywood leftists anyway. Like the bums who stood outside restaurants during the Depression with toothpicks in their mouths, they seem not to realize that the crucial part of being rich is that you have money, not attitudes.

  The whole panoply of nutty things liberals believe flows from their belief that man is just another animal. (And not just Kanye West—they’re talking about all men.) Only their core rejection of God can explain the bewildering array of liberal positions: We must save Tookie Williams, while slaughtering the unborn. We must eat natural foods, but the right to acquire disease in casual hookups is a holy ritual. We must halt human development so that the Furbish lousewort can be fruitful and multiply, but humans are multiplying too much and threatening the biosphere of the Furbish lousewort. Women are no different from men, but we need a library of laws and codes to protect women from sexual harassment. As Chesterson said, where we once had a few big rules, now we need an encyclopedia of little rules.

  Usually zealots can’t make money doing insane things. But liberals have the entire taxpayer-funded “education” apparatus to support them. Public schools are what columnist Joe Sobran calls “liberalism’s reproductive system.” In lieu of teaching Biblical truth, which—are you sitting down?—used to be the purpose of education, the government schools teach an “amalgam of liberalism, feminism, Darwinism, and the Playboy philosophy.” No longer content to ruin their own children, liberals insist on being subsidized by the taxpayer to ruin everyone else’s children, too. (Remember the good old days when bums and malcontents would ruin your children for free?)

  Among the things the Supreme Court has held “unconstitutional” are prayer in public schools, moments of silence in public schools (which the Court cleverly recognized as an invidious invitation to en-gage in “silent prayer”), and displays of the Ten Commandments in public schools. In 1992, the Court ruled it “unconstitutional” for a Reform rabbi to give a nonsectarian invocation at a high school graduation ceremony on the perfectly plausible grounds that Rhode Island was trying to establish Reform Judaism as the official state religion. (Opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy.) Yes, those scheming Jews have had their eyes on the Ocean State as long as I can remember. Let one Reform rabbi say a prayer in a school there, you might just as well change the state’s name to “Jewland.”

  Even the rare sane rulings from the Supreme Court face massive resistance from the lower courts. Liberal judges feel free to disregard the Supreme Court to achieve the overriding objective of keeping real religion out of government schools. All-important “precedent” matters only when we’re talking about Roe v. Wade, not rulings on religion.

  In a 2001 opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court upheld the right of religious groups to participate in after-school activities along with other clubs. It was the second time the High Court had instructed the schools to stop specifically singling out religious groups for discrimination. (One imagines the sound of a rooster crowing if that same court denied the church groups a third time.) In-deed, the case Good News Club v. Milford Central School was nearly identical to another case in which the Supreme Court had reversed the exact same court a few years earlier. In his majority opinion, justice Thomas remarked on the oddity of having to reverse the same court twice on the same issue. Thomas said that while the appellate courts aren’t required to cite all the Supreme Court’s precedents, they might want to take note of the last time they were reversed on the exact same facts.

  Concerned that someone might be reading Leviticus during school hours, Justice David Souter dissented from Thomas’s opinion in a hairsplitting exegesis about the precise time classes let out (2:56 P.M.) versus the time the organizers would enter school property (2:30 P.M.). Then again, I suppose arguments about the precise moment something begins have never been liberals’ strong suit. At least the 6-3 decision gave us an accurate count of the atheists on the Court, probably as accurate as my dream of giving them all polygraph tests someday. (Do you believe in a Higher Being? … No, seriously.)

  Public schools are forbidden from mentioning religion not because of the Constitution, but because public schools are the Left’s madrassas. According to Cornell law professor Gary Simson, sex education courses that teach abstinence until marriage are unconstitutional because they violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Simson says recommending sexual abstinence to teenagers is wrong because it “teaches that this one belief is the only proper one.” Liberals used to tell us they were teaching fisting to fourth-graders because “kids are going to have sex anyway!” (Yes, “fisting” is exactly what it sounds like; have a nice day!) Now they’ve dispensed with that and openly concede that they believe virtue is just one of many equally valid points of view that must be counterbalanced with the argument for promiscuity, group sex, fisting, and other lifestyle choices. At least the crazy Muslims get funding from Saudi Arabia for their madrassas. Liberals force normal Americans to pay for their religious schools.

  While any reference to Moses in the schools is strictly prohibited, school authorities can force minors to attend sexually explicit presentations on anal sex and condom use. In 1992, Chelmsford (Massachusetts) High School hired Suzi Landolphi to give a mandatory ÀIDS Awareness presentation” to the entire school, apparently designed to reach the one or two human beings on Planet Earth who hadn’t heardabout AIDS. By her own account, Landolphi is the product of a broken family. She says her mother was an alcoholic who committed suicide, her father physically abused her, and she herself was a chronic bed wetter until age ten. Landolphi was a five-time loser at marriage. So she is definitely the sort of person most par
ents would want talking to their children about sex. Naturally, the Chelmsford High School administrators realized they had found an Aristotle in their midst.

  In her presentation, “Hot, Sexy, and Safer,” Landolphi began by telling the teenagers—who were forced by school authorities to be there—”I can’t believe how many people came here to listen to someone talk about sex, instead of staying home and having it yourself.” In the dry legal language of the complaint later filed by parents of some of the students, Landolphi also “used profane, lewd, and lascivious language to describe body parts and excretory functions,” including “eighteen references to orgasms, six references to male genitals, and eight references to female genitals.” (And that was just while thanking the school principal for inviting her.) She asked students to show their “orgasm faces” in front of a camera—which would certainly come in handy for any future on-camera careers in the adult film industry. She invited a male student on stage to lick a condom with her. After discussing anal sex, Landolphi remarked that one would be “in deep sh—.” She told one male student he “had a nice butt” and another that his baggy pants were “erection wear.” This did not constitute sexual harassment under the law, because, like Bill Clinton, Landolphi supports abortion rights, one may assume. She concluded ninety minutes of this relentless vulgarity by asking a female student to place an oversized condom on the head of a male student and blow it up.

  Like most people who enjoy talking to strangers about sex, Miss Landolphi, to put it as charitably as possible, is physically repulsive in appearance. With a presentation that was about as erotic as phone sex with Andrea Dworkin—or actual sex with Andrea Dworkin, come to think of it—Landolphi may have inadvertently promoted abstinence among the student body by generating widespread aversion to the various activities she described. It’s no wonder Bible Belt, rightwing Christians get the greatest enjoyment out of sex (another scientific study hated by liberals)—they never have to endure listening to liberals talk about sex.

  Parents of Chelmsford students immediately brought suit alleging that by forcing their children to attend Landolphi’s presentation without prior notice, the school had violated their privacy right to direct the upbringing of their children. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit could find no such right in the “living Constitution.” The “right to privacy” refers to the right of unmarried couples to obtain contraception. It encompasses the right to kill an unborn baby. It means the right of men to sodomize one another. Where these parents got the idea that “privacy” included their right to keep their children from being forced to make “orgasm faces” in school was anybody’s guess.

  Tellingly, the federal appeals court also rejected the parents’ Free Exercise claim, questioning “whether the Free Exercise Clause even applies to public education.” Thus, the court declared a clearly visible Constitutional clause—not buried in the penumbras—officially inapplicable to government schools. (Perhaps what threw them off was the fact that the free exercise of religion—unlike abortion, gay marriage, and sodomy—is specifically mentioned in the Constitution. You can see how that would be confusing.) Allowing parents to interfere with their children’s education might impair the state’s efforts to indoctrinate children into the official state religion of promiscuity, recycling, and freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal.

  Colleges pick up where the public schools leave off, inculcating students in the religion of hating America and hating God. While college professors like the University of Colorado’s Ward Churchill act like on-the-edge radicals for calling American bond traders “little Eichmanns,” professors are the most cosseted, pussified, subsidized group of people in the U.S. workforce. They have concocted a system to preemptively protect themselves for not doing their jobs, known as “tenure.” They make a lot of money, have health plans that would make New York City municipal workers’ jaws drop, and work—at most—fifteen hours a week. In theory, the only job requirement of a college professor is to be intelligent, provocative, and open-minded, but their reigning attribute is that they are ignorant, boring, and narrow-minded. These zealous pagans teach the official state religion of liberalism as axiomatic truth.

  The stupidest of their students become journalists, churning out illiterate attacks on dissidents from the liberal religion. Within a few weeks of each other in early 2006, both Rolling Stone and Newsweek magazines displayed their ignorance of Biblical passages cited during interviews. In a Rolling Stone interview, Republican senator Sam Brownback criticized countries like Sweden that had legalized gay marriage, quoting the line from Matthew “you shall know them by their fruits.” The interviewer, Jeff Sharlet, interpreted Brownback’s scriptural quotation as a homophobic slur. Soon gay groups were demanding an apology from the senator. (All I can say to that is: how niggardly of them.)

  Meanwhile, Newsweek ran an article about the looming danger of evangelicals learning to debate, noting that Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University had the number-one debate club in the country. The reporter quoted Falwell saying, “We are training debaters who can perform assault ministry.” These evangelicals are scary! Newsweek later ran a correction stating: “Newsweek misquoted Falwell as referring to àssault ministry.’ In fact, Falwell was referring to à salt ministry’—a reference to Matthew 5:13, where Jesus says, `Ye are the salt of the earth.’ We regret the error.”

  When Al Gore tried to suck up to Christians during the second presidential debate in the 2000 campaign, he utterly mangled Scripture—and not one mainstream media reporter noticed. By way of explaining his nutty environmental beliefs, Gore said, “In my faith tradition, it is written in the book of Matthew, `Where your heart is, there’s your treasure also.’ And I believe that we ought to recognize the value to our children and grandchildren of taking steps that preserve the environment in a way that’s good for them.”

  Gore had not merely transformed a core Christian belief into a Confucian fortune cookie, he had reversed Christian doctrine. The actual Bible—Matthew 6:21—says precisely the opposite of what Gore said, admonishing us to make heaven our only treasure—”For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

  Not only were Bible illiterates in the media unaware of Gore’s faux pas, they actually praised Gore for his brilliant use of Scripture to appeal to the God voters. Writing in Slate, William Saletan said Gore scored points in the second debate when he “answered a question about the environment by quoting from the scripture of my `faith tradition.’ The quote—Where your heart is, there is your treasure also’—had nothing to do with the environment but everything to do with projecting heart and faith.” It also had nothing to do with Scripture.

  Father Richard John Neuhaus describes being interviewed by a reporter about the pope and referring to the pope by one of his formal titles, “the Bishop of Rome.” The reporter responded, “That raises an interesting point. Is it unusual that this pope is also the bishop of Rome?” In another interview, Neuhaus told a reporter that political corruption had “been around ever since that unfortunate afternoon in the garden.” This time, the reporter mulled it over before asking, “What garden was that?” In defense of the American educational system, every single one of these reporters knew how to put on a condom.

  In 2003, reporters hounded British prime minister Tony Blair about whether he had prayed with George Bush—as if they were asking whether the world leaders had shot heroin together or shared a hooker. There was so much negative publicity over Blair praying with Bush that Blair’s handlers forbade him to attend church with Bush later that year. It’s hard to imagine an activity Bush and Blair could have shared that would have been more scandalous, short of taking an SUV to an all-men’s club that allowed cigar smoking.

  In the book Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, Jon Krakauer writes of the Bush administration, “This, after all, is a country led by a born-again Christian … who characterizes international relations as a biblical clash between forces of good and evil. The highest law office
r in the land, Attorney General John Ashcroft, is a dyed-in-the-wool follower of a fundamentalist Christian sect—the Pentecostal Assemblies of God of America … and subscribes to a vividly apocalyptic worldview that has much in common with key millenarian beliefs held by the Lafferty brothers and the residents of Colorado City.” Yes, it’s really those devout Christians we have to keep our eyes on. Who can ever forget all the rioting and bloodshed around the world after hip-hop impresario Kanye West appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine as the crucified Jesus?

  Krakauer—my guess, not a Christian—is worried about a theocracy based on one born-again Christian in the cabinet of a Christian president and compares Ashcroft to psychopath murderer Dan Lafferty, a member of a radical Mormon sect who brutally murdered a twenty-four-year-old woman and her child. Comparing the attorney general to Lafferty is roughly the equivalent of saying, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who belongs to the same religious sect as the Son of Sam …”

  If liberals are on Red Alert with one born-again Christian in the cabinet of a Christian president, imagine how they would react if there were five. Between 25 and 45 percent of the population calls it-self “born-again” or “evangelical” Christian. Jews make up less than 2 percent of the nation’s population, and yet Clinton had five in his cabinet. He appointed two to the Supreme Court. Now guess which administration is called a neoconservative conspiracy? Whether Jews or Christians, liberals are always on a witch hunt against people who appear to believe in God.

  Incidentally, the country was also allegedly led by an evangelical Christian when Jimmy Carter was president—you know, the kind of evangelical Christian who appears prominently in pornographic magazines while running for president. I guess that 1976 interview with Playboy was enough to do penance with liberals for believing in God.