People of faith who want the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution affirmed ought, at a minimum, to uphold their faith in the process of conducting the public debate. For me that means having to try and argue as a Christian.
I fall short of that mark all the time. We all do, and when we do we need to give the appropriate apology and get back to the debate, as I have done before and as Rush did this past weekend.
Part of that debate now entails asking where were all these pitchfork people when, to use just one example, the misogynist Bill Maher called Gov. Sarah Palin the worst of all terms a year ago? Let me check on the boycott of HBO sponsors from March 2011.
CNN’s Piers Morgan was ripping Rush on Friday and taking many bows on Twitter for it.
But Morgan had Maher on this week — one of the age’s most vulgar, profane and silly windbags and poseurs was right in front of him.
Even as Christians are being slaughtered in Egypt, Nigeria and around the world, Morgan allowed Maher his 10,000th grab for attention by defaming Christ.
Fine by the First Amendment or at least that portion of it the Left likes, and wickedly smart and funny in the ears of Christian-haters, but as Maher went unrebuked, Morgan’s passivity in the face of bigotry renders his selective outrage more than merely convenient.
There is one standard for all commentary, and it ought to apply to Palin and Ms. Fluke, to President Obama and President Bush, to Justice Thomas and to Justice Kagan.
So credit nothing of a condemnation from anyone who has not first articulated his or her standard, preferably backed up with a reference to the rebukes they have handed out to themselves and their own team, and only if that standard condemns all of the profane, the vulgar and the bigoted.
More than 10 years with a national radio show means that I have had too many occasions to spend a day commemorating the life of a frequent guest: Michael Kelly, Dean Barnett, Tony Snow, Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Breitbart this past Thursday after interviewing him 23 hours earlier.
All were controversialists by profession, though none reached anything near Mr. Hitchens’ ability to attack and destroy a target in print, including and perhaps even especially Mother Teresa. Andrew was as fiercely provocative as Hitchens, the others far less so, but they all could draw virtual blood.
Everyone can, who is any good. Boxers hit hard, but not below the belt, though sometimes a shot goes awry.
Which is why I try and remind myself at least occasionally of the injunction of C.S. Lewis in his essay “The Weight of Glory,” to recall that “[t]here are no ordinary people,” and that we “have never met a mere mortal.”
“Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal,” Lewis continued, “and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.”
“[I]t is immortals,” Lewis concluded, “whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”
This admonition should inform the limits for a Christian pundit, and perhaps we can see in the fading of the nation’s historical attachment to the Judeo-Christian understanding of the rules that ought to govern the public square the lowering of the walls against unrestrained commentary.
Pardon the cliche, but it is hard to be shocked by anything when nothing is sacred.
If the country abandons the right of religious people to keep their own creeds, it can hardly complain when no creed at all exists to restrain conduct or prompt apologies when they are indeed deserved.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
