George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 2 September 2011.  Podcast here.]

Please accept my apologies for the extended respite you have enjoyed over the last weeks from hearing the outrageous thoughts of KVMR’s lonesome conservetarian commentator.  August got unexpectedly busy with all kinds of matters involving travel and grandkids.  So let me try to make up for it here and now with some thoughts on God’s hand and free speech.

On Rebane’s Ruminations a regular reader, who also happens to be Nevada County’s beloved cartoonist of Village Idiot fame, pointed out that Michelle Bachmann had joined the hand of God to the hurricane Irene.  The point being that here we saw exposed a possible primitive superstition in a candidate who wants to be President of the United States.  And the imparted conclusion being, what modern civilized American would ever accept someone as the nation’s leader, someone who thinks God can and does mess with weather.

Let me quickly qualify that this is not a secular humanist observation held only by locals, but is a longstanding assessment of the national left.  ‘We can’t have those bible-thumpers anywhere near the Oval Office.’

The inconvenient truth here is that God messing in the affairs of this universe and Man is a robust and fundamental tenet in all the world’s religions.  And this includes the belief systems of over 200M Americans who claim residence in the Judeo-Christian, Islamic, and Native American faiths.  Modern history overflows with national leaders publicly beseeching the Lord to intervene in their personal and their country’s behalf when faced with portents of manmade and natural disasters.  In recent times we didn’t sacrifice virgins; but then again, if that would have helped … I don’t know.

My own view is that attempting to characterize faith-revealing candidates as belonging to the lunatic fringe will backfire, and therefore be beneficial in the national dialogue.  For that reason I heartily welcome future faith-based barbs from our progressive brethren.  But this debate may also reveal the next layer in what Canadian commentator Mark Steyn calls ‘gagging us softly’.

Given the unceasing expansion of politically proscribed speech, it would not be a stretch to hear of some in Congress begin to concern themselves about candidates for public office infusing their speeches with notions of God – after all, don’t we have separation of church and state?

Steyn’s commentary on the “tolerant assault on free speech” details the alarming (at least to people like me) incidence of advanced western countries banning and prosecuting not only wrong speech, but ‘regular speech’ that will be considered wrong given who might be listening to it.  He cites numerous commentators, politicians, and even private citizens who have been prosecuted in Great Britain, Germany, Austria, France, Holland, Australia, and Denmark for speech considered to have racist or various phobic content, or even for such deemed but unexpressed thought behind what someone says.

As Steyn points out, in England the same words coming from different mouths can be taken to task for different reasons.  “If a Muslim says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, Scotland Yard will investigate him for homophobia; but if a gay says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, Scotland Yard will investigate him for Islamophobia.”  Go figger.

In these advanced countries they are now beyond calls for regulating speech in their media, and prosecuting people for saying what the government considers wrong is already old hat.  Here in America the progressive portion, judging from their media commentaries, feels that we are being left behind in the rush to shaping the perfect environmentally sensitive, politically collectivist, racially neutral, culturally inclusive, economically passive, and behaviorally compliant citizen.

Dear listener, we are not far in the lee of our European cousins, and attempts to silence certain types of speech in the name of ‘tolerance’ can be heard both across the land, and all the way into these Sierra foothills.  In 1644 John Milton wrote, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”   And one of our Canadian neighbors said it even better, “Give me the right to free speech, and I will use it to claim all my other rights.”

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, and on georgerebane.com where this transcript appears.  These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.