Hugh Hewitt: Deepak Chopra’s hate speech
By: Hugh Hewitt
Examiner Columnist
November 1, 2009
President Obama signed “hate crimes” legislation last week, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a statement praising the new law, saying that in “this country, no one should suffer persecution, discrimination or violence because of who they are, how they look or what they believe.”
Amen to that thought, and amen especially to the idea of protecting belief, including beliefs unpopular within liberal opinion elites. Perhaps the president and the speaker can find some time to let their left-wing supporters know that the accusation of hate is itself hateful, and that slanders against Christians for holding to their beliefs and the beliefs of hundreds of generations of Christians before them are as repugnant to them as the verbal attacks by bigots on people of color.
Spiritualist Deepak Chopra comes to mind as one of the Left’s loudest purveyors of hate speech. Chopra has a problem with the beliefs of mainstream Christianity and its place in America and American history, but his deep prejudice goes unrebuked by champions of tolerance like Pelosi.
Chopra’s first salvo against mainstream Christianity was fired in the Huffington Post after last fall’s presidential forum hosted by Pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback Valley Community Church.
“For me,” Chopra wrote, “the God quiz that Barack Obama endured with barely concealed sweaty palms and that John McCain breezed through with seasoned casualness has no place in American politics.”
Chopra then served up a classic bit of “leftist tolerance”: “The reason that any contemporary presidential candidate is forced to suffer the indignity of confessing his religious beliefs in public goes back to the Reagan revolution. ... Reagan, after all, was the president who, if left to his own devices, would have let thousands more AIDS victims die through neglect and lack of funding for basic medical research.
“The implicit reason, well understood by the right and endorsed by fundamentalists, was that gays deserve what they get if they pursue a lifestyle that doesn’t match right-wing Christian ideology. Minorities, women, immigrants, and progressivism in general were given the same back hand.”
The demonization of political opponents is routine on the Left, but Chopra’s poisonous rewrite of history has few parallels within the mainstream.
Chopra resurfaced with another screed when Obama’s inauguration featured the same Warren. More thunder from the New Age guru: “The right wing may posture as if Christianity deserves special privilege and pride of place. Their posturing has convinced a lot of people for the past 20 years, but it’s high time we threw the whole charade out the window.” (Emphasis added.)
Still more Chopra invective surfaced in The Washington Post this September, again targeting Warren and reflecting the charm of the Left. “The abuse delivered by right-wing Christians is such an old story that we are long past irony,” Chopra wrote, before moving on to his favorite target.
“The Rev. Rick Warren has a record for trying to smooth the waters, but he also flirts with intolerance — toward gay marriage, for instance — and since his rationale is that a ‘loving’ God shares the same prejudices, what’s to stop others with worse tempers from following the same logic? When your God hates, you have permission to hate,” Chopra wrote.
When your guru hates, I guess that gives you permission to hate as well?
Chopra’s rage against mainstream Christianity may have its roots in nothing more complicated than a simple though vast jealousy at Warren’s enormous success, and not just success in selling books but in attracting tens of thousands of pastors and their congregations to a revitalized Christian faith in the new millennium.
Warren’s call, heeded by millions of American Christians, to lead faith-filled lives, to give sacrificially and to work for the alleviation of suffering across the planet has been the focus of astonished applause by intelligent observers across the political spectrum.
Warren’s church and the millions of American Christians who hold similar beliefs and practice similar disciplines model authentic and traditional Christian belief. There isn’t much to hate there, but Chopra and others on the Left want to try to transform mainstream Christian belief in traditional marriage into a postmodern scarlet letter, and they will use the tactics of extremist hate if they have to.
We are not “long past irony” here, just face to face with the unpleasant reality of the Left’s genuine agenda of silencing its opponents.
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