Perez Hilton even told the press, “Yes, I do expect Miss USA to be politically correct.” Technically speaking, Perez could have been a bit more politically correct himself, considering Vermont’s legislature—not its citizens—legalized same-sex marriage. His question never seemed to take that into account. Those of us in favor of traditional marriage might be in the majority, but it’s an embattled majority; and the venom spat at us by the minority seems to be excused by the mainstream media in ways that would normally seem shocking. During the Proposition 8 campaign, proponents of gay marriage ran an ad that specifically targeted a religious denomination for abuse. The ad opened with two Mormon missionaries knocking on the door of an attractive lesbian couple and saying, “Hi, we’re from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” Then, “We’re here to take away your rights.” After they take the women’s wedding rings and rip up their marriage license, the two Mormon men say: “That was too easy.” “Yeah, what should we ban next?” Whoever thought we’d live to see the day when it was acceptable to target an ad against a religious group: Mormons this time, but maybe next time Jews or Catholics or Evangelical Protestants. Political correctness seems to trump religious freedom.
The liberal media seems to encourage this alarming trend by finding it so unremarkable, or even by encouraging it. On a similar note, the media targets conservative women and makes them the focus of particularly harsh criticism. There seems to be something about conservative women that inflames the left and calls out the attack machine. I can only imagine it’s because “women” are all, in the liberal media’s eyes, supposed to be liberal feminists. And if they’re not, then they are fair game to be demonized and attacked.
Think about Sarah Palin, a governor, a former vice presidential candidate, a woman who is beautiful, intelligent, a wonderful mother, and was relentlessly torn down by the liberal media. One extremely prominent gay columnist even fanned despicable gossip that Sarah Palin’s Down Syndrome baby was not her own but was the baby of one of her daughters! The sort of catty, personal insults the liberal media hurled at Sarah Palin would rightly have sparked a firestorm of media criticism if they’d been hurled at someone like Sonia Sotomayor or Michelle Obama.
Palin became such a lightning rod that she’s apparently going to enter the dictionary as a new word. The new word would be “Palinized”—which is what happens when conservative women enter public debate. They can expect to get Palinized by the liberal media. Michele Bachmann, an attractive, conservative congresswoman from Minnesota, has been getting just that treatment; she even sent out a letter to her supporters asking them not to let liberals “Palinize me.” As Congresswoman Bachmann said, “With Governor Palin taking a well-deserved step out of the spotlight, it appears that I may be absorbing even more of the liberals’ scorn.” I know what that feels like.
On one particularly bad day, I got a surprising phone call that cheered me up no end: it was from Sarah Palin.
We talked for a good fifteen minutes. She told me that she was extremely proud of me and told me to stay strong.
“You tell it like you see it, Carrie. People are sick of politically correct answers. You’re doing awesome.”
I told her how brutal and vicious I thought the media attacks on me had been, and she said she completely understood, given her own experience.
There are few women I respect more than Sarah Palin, and I have to say this is probably the first time I have ever been star struck. She also was an amazing comfort to me. There are some things in life I’ve learned already, that no one can really understand unless they’ve been through it themselves. Well, Sarah Palin had been through the media shredder as I had been, and that made all the difference in how we understood each other. She was sympathetic and reassuring and told me that everything was going to work out. She gave me hope and courage to keep fighting the good fight. She told me her daughter Bristol was a big fan of mine, and would love for me to call her. We have been keeping in touch ever since.
I won’t try to draw out lessons from Sarah Palin’s experience (an experience shared by many other conservative women, such as Michele Bachmann, Elizabeth Hasselbeck—re-named “Elizab***h” by Perez Hilton in a post on his website—and Ann Coulter), but I can say that in my own case, I think my whole ordeal reveals just how the culture of political correctness uses shaming, blackmail, and other forms of emotional abuse to force people and organizations to either stick to our beliefs and suffer the consequences, or throw away our beliefs just to be left alone.
Not every form of coercion is social. Sometimes, it is legal.
When I was threatened with an “injunction” to keep me from speaking at Liberty University, I didn’t know enough about the law to realize that Keith couldn’t find any judge in America who would issue such a gag order. I now know that this kind of “prior restraint” is almost unheard of in America. But that didn’t keep Keith’s threat from sending a chill down my spine.
The real importance of what happened to me is what it shows about free speech in America. At the press conference with Donald Trump, I spoke of being punished for exercising my right to freedom of speech.
I said: “On April 19th on that stage I exercised my freedom of speech, and I was punished for doing so. This should not happen in America. It undermines the constitutional rights which my grandfather fought for.”
Keith Olbermann and other liberals saw my statement as an opportunity to teach a thing or two about the U.S. Constitution to the dumb, blonde beauty contestant.
In one segment, Olbermann brought the First Amendment to a big screen. He read it aloud. It states that, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Olbermann took me to task for not knowing that the First Amendment only protects my speech from the government. It doesn’t, he said, protect my speech from opposition from others, or even from termination by my employers.
He’s right about a lot here. The Miss California Organization had every right under the Constitution to make their opposing statement, even if it was against their own beauty queen. And even in America, we can be punished by others for our speech and associations. After all, employers have their right to free association. They can hire and fire at will.
I get that.
But Olbermann still misses the point.
I never said that my constitutional rights were violated. What I did say is that I was “punished” for my beliefs—which I clearly was—and that this “shouldn’t happen in America” because it “undermines” the constitutional rights my grandfather fought to protect.
Of course, I always knew that I would be in front of the cameras and that I might be asked a controversial question. But if you ask me how I’d vote on a ballot issue, surely it is contrary to the American spirit—and as I said undermines my constitutional rights—to smoke out an ordinary political view and then punish me for it.
The Miss California and MSNBC organizations have a constitutional right to be as liberal as they want. But Keith Olbermann can’t ask his cameraman on live TV how he votes, and then fire him for voting Republican, or fire him for voting from a Christian perspective. Isn’t that why we have curtains at the ballot booth?
And another thing Olbermann should know. The constitutional rights of Christians are being violated. I didn’t have to look very far to find a case in which a Christian is being defended by none other than one of Keith Olbermann’s favorite organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union. In fact, I only had to look across the nearest freeway.
Poway is a San Diego suburb about a ten-minute drive from my aunt’s house, where my mother and I are staying while I write this.
A young Christian, Tyler Chase Harper attended his local high school when the Poway Unified School District decided to stage a “Day of Silence” in Ap
ril 2004. The idea was that students could voluntarily wear tape over their mouths and speak in class only through a designated teacher. This was supposed to demonstrate the “silencing effect” of intolerance of homosexuals in our society.
Tyler Harper is not the kind of guy to let anyone slap tape over his mouth. So in protest, he wore a hand-written T-shirt to school. On it he wrote, “Be ashamed, our school embraced what God has condemned.” On the back of his shirt he wrote, “Romans 1:27”—referring to the passage the apostle Paul had written in which he condemned homosexual behavior.
Now, Mr. Olbermann, you may not like this. You may not believe it. But doesn’t Tyler have a right to express his opinion?
Tyler’s second-period teacher told him that his shirt was “inflammatory.” (Somehow it was not “inflammatory” for a taxpayer-funded school to promote an agenda on homosexuality.) Tyler refused to remove the shirt and was sent to the school’s office. An assistant principal told Tyler he could return to class, but only if he got another shirt or turned the one he was wearing inside out. Tyler refused.
Next, the Poway principal asked him to change his shirt. They told him his shirt would incite hate and psychologically damage other students.
Tyler refused.
So they called in the Sheriff.
Tyler was interrogated by a deputy sheriff to find out if he was a “dangerous” student. So while a few students paraded around wearing tape over their mouths—and the vast majority was cowed into silent submission—Tyler Harper was in the principal’s office being treated like a terrorist.
Tyler’s rights had been violated. And so he sued. When he filed a suit to protect his speech rights, who came to his defense? The ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties, which filed a friend of the court brief on his behalf.
The ACLU’s David Blair-Loy told The San Diego Union-Tribune that this case marked a “novel and extreme expansion of a school’s rights to limit speech.”
What about the danger that Tyler’s t-shirt would be psychologically damaging? Blair-Loy said: “And let’s face it: what about high school is not psychologically damaging? This student wore a t-shirt that expressed an idea. It’s an idea we don’t agree with at the ACLU, but that is the essence of free speech. It’s not just for ideas you like.”
Robert Tyler, one of Harper’s lawyers with the Alliance Defense Fund, said he saw a “double-standard” at work. He asked: “Why is it acceptable to tell a student of faith their views are not as valuable as the view of any person opposing them?” One appellate judge, Alex Kozinski, made a common-sense observation: “Harper’s t-shirt was not an out-of-the-blue affront to fellow students who were minding their own business. Rather, Harper wore his t-shirt in response to the Day of Silence, a political activity that was sponsored or at the very least tolerated by school authorities.”
As the lawsuit made its way through the courts, Tyler graduated and his sister, Kelsie, took his place as a plaintiff.
After a lot of legal wrangling, U.S. District Judge John Houston came down to a firm decision—on the side of the school. In early 2008, Judge Houston wrote that the school had an “interest in protecting homosexual students from harassment” and that this “is a legitimate pedagogical concern that allows a school to restrict speech expressing damaging statements about sexual orientation and limiting students to expressing their views in a positive manner.”
What about protecting Christian students from legal harassment?
Non-believers are free to reject Romans 1:27. Liberal Christians can explain away Paul’s denunciation of homosexuality. But Evangelical Christians will always take our guidance from Scripture, and t raditional Catholics will always take their guidance from the teachings of the Church. And that view is, and forever will be, the one expressed by Tyler Harper. You may not like it. But are we really in a place now in America where we are ready to persecute tens of millions of Christians for expressing traditional beliefs?
There is talk that the case will go to the U.S. Supreme Court. It should, because the practice of persecuting traditional Christians for holding traditional beliefs is only spreading; you only have to read the newspaper with open eyes to see that. And you have to wonder, too, how it is that public schools, supported by taxpayer dollars, have taken it upon themselves to teach our children what to think about homosexuality. Isn’t there another word for that: isn’t it “indoctrination”? If it isn’t right for the public schools to teach a single faith perspective, how can it be right for them to teach an anti-faith perspective, to teach that homosexuality is a normal lifestyle, when to faithful Catholics and Evangelicals and others who support traditional morality, it isn’t? This sort of double-standard in our public life is dangerous, but it’s what political correctness is doing to us: it is putting not just our freedom of speech, but our freedom of conscience at risk. How far are we from laws that would outlaw quoting certain passages of the Bible as hate speech? That’s already happened in other countries, including our next door neighbor Canada. It’s not hard to imagine it coming here.
In 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed SB 777 into law. This new law prohibits any form of bias against homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, cross-dressers, or any other alternative lifestyle choice in California public schools. So thanks to 777 the way is now open to freely persecute the Tyler Harpers of California. Any student who rejects the idea that it is okay for a boy to go to school in a dress, that it is okay for a boy to go the girl’s bathroom, that it is okay for the homecoming queen to be male, could quickly find himself in legal hot water. There is only one word for this: insanity. The voters passed Prop 8, and would likely oppose SB 777 if it were put to a statewide popular vote, but the liberal legislators in Sacramento and the liberal judges throughout the state put themselves above the will of the voters. These liberals for some reason see it as their mission to completely undo traditional morality in California through political action and legal coercion.
The only way to undo such laws would be for conservatives to make issues involving sexuality the focal point of their political campaigns—and liberals know that we’re not likely to do that. Most conservatives are tolerant people—despite what the liberal media would have you believe—and conservatives are extremely reluctant to define their relationships with other people in terms of sexual orientation. For example, even though I do not consider homosexuality a morally acceptable lifestyle, I have never had any problem working with or befriending people who are homosexual. That seems to me to be the Christian way. But it is one thing to tolerate and accept, and quite another to have an agenda forced on us by political activists. So while liberals keep advancing their agenda by law, using all the power of the state, conservatives only react to the big picture, as in Prop 8, not to each incremental, and apparently endless, legal chipping away at the Christian morality that used to define American culture.
For a long time, I tried to imagine how these liberals think; why are they so fixated on overturning traditional morality and even our idea of what is normal?
Maggie Gallagher understands them. She writes, “If you really believe that [sexual] orientation is like race, then faithful Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons, Jews, and Muslims are like racists, and they should be treated by law the same way we treat racists.”
And thanks to the Gubernator, that is exactly how the State of California is preparing to treat millions of Christian believers who do not equate race with sexual choice, or interracial marriage with same-sex marriage.
You might think that no one would press the issue to its most extreme conclusions. But this is California. Everything gets pressed to the extremes here. And what happens here happens soon enough in the rest of America.
I confess up front, I’m no expert on politics. I never meant to make myself a political campaigner or an expert on gay marriage or anything remotely similar to that. But when you get put in a box labeled “homophobic” and the media and liberals start throwing rotten vegetables at you, you
begin to take an interest in finding out why, in investigating the issues, and in taking a stand in favor of religious freedom and freedom of speech. I was forced to take a stand. I didn’t seek out a platform to talk about gay marriage or any other political issues. To this day, I can’t say that politics is my primary interest, or even close to it. I don’t want to be a political figure. But just as I did my homework when I prepared for pageant interviews, so I’ve done it now on the issue that’s been shackled to me like a ball and chain; and with the help of the internet, it isn’t hard to research.
What did I find? Political correctness and freedom of religion are on a collision course; I was just one roadside accident in a much bigger crash. And it didn’t start with Prop 8. In fact, I can’t tell you when it started. But I can tell you that the pressure has been building for decades in California. In 1997, for instance, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to require companies that receive city contracts to offer the same benefits to their employees’ domestic partners, heterosexual and homosexual, as they do their spouses. In other words, the city demanded that companies downgrade marriage to being no more important than any two people living together who could claim to be domestic partners.
Many firms, from Apple to Charles Schwab, actually already provided these benefits. Many, however, did not. If they had moral objections to doing this, well, apparently that was too bad, the city of San Francisco had decided otherwise. If doing this put a huge financial burden on a company, well that was too bad, too. The only alternative was not to bid for or accept San Francisco city contracts.
Still Standing: The Untold Story of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate, and Political Attacks Page 14
