Jack Cashill - Scarlet Letters: The Ever-Increasing Intolerance of the Cult of Liberalism

THE EVER-INCREASING INTOLERANCE OF THE CULT OF LIBERALISM EXPOSED

JACK CASHILL

SCARLET LETTERS

SCARLET LETTERS

Copyright 2015 by Jack Cashill

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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-935071-92-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-935071-93-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
Cashill, Jack.
Scarlet letters : the ever-increasing intolerance of the cult of liberalism / Jack Cashill.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-938067-73-0 (hardcover)
1. LiberalismUnited States. 2. FanaticismUnited States. 3. United StatesSocial conditions. I.
Title.
JC574.2.U6C37 2015
320.5130973dc 3

2015009445

For Phoebe

Many thanks to those at WND Books who made Scarlet Letters possible, notably Joseph and Elizabeth Farah, editor Geoff Stone, copy editor Renee Chavez, and designer Mark Karis.

Thanks, too, to those who shared their often difficult stories with me including Emil Tonkovich, John Rocker, Stephen Jimenez, Darren Wilson, Robert Zimmerman, Melissa and Aaron Klein, and Nicolle Martin.

Kudos to those many good people who stared down our Torquemadas and survived. We need more of you.

And special thanks to my wife, Joan, for understanding my mission.

Jess Dooley had had enough. A coach at Concord Community High School in Elkhart, Indiana, Dooley watched the evening news out of nearby South Bend with dismay. She knew that she would have to do something.

Earlier that late March day, young ABC 57 reporter Alyssa Marino went in search of a Christian who supported Indianas controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act. To find one she drove twenty miles south to Walkerton, Indiana, and started knocking on doors. There, on Roosevelt Road, in this humble town of two thousand souls, she stopped at a family-owned business called Memories Pizza. I just walked into their shop and asked how they feel. Theyve never been asked to cater a same-sex wedding, Marino would later admit.

The unsuspecting young woman who managed the restaurant, Crystal OConnor, greeted her warmly and answered her hypothetical question artlessly. If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no, said Crystal. The idea that a gay couple anywhere would request pizzas for a wedding let alone in Walkerton, Indiana seemed a bit of a stretch, but Marino got what she came for. She rushed her footage back to the studio.

ABC 57 anchor Brian Dorman led the broadcast: We went into small towns tonight for reaction to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. We found one business just twenty miles away from a welcoming South Bend with a much different view. Then came Marinos fateful interview with OConnor. It ran over the chyron, Restaurant denies some services to same-sex couples. Deep in the report, Marino conceded, The OConnor family told ABC 57 news that if a gay couple or a couple belonging to another religion came in to the restaurant to eat, they would never deny them service, but if Jess Dooley or her fellow progressives heard this, it was too little, too late.

The firestorm began immediately as ABC 57 hoped it would. Left-leaning journals like Buzzfeed and Politico picked up the feed and zeroed in on the Indiana pizzeria. Thousands across the nation expressed their outrage in tweets and through trolling attacks on the pizzerias Facebook and Yelp pages. Others posted obscenities and gay pornography. Some made death threats, causing the OConnors to shut down the business and seek help from the local police.

Amidst the furor, it was Jess Dooley who best captured the essence of the moment. At 9:08 p.m. on the evening of the broadcast, she tweeted to her followers, many of them students at Concord High, Whos going to Walkerton, IN to burn down #memoriespizza with me? So righteous was Dooleys calling she used her own name. So convinced was she of the OConnors evil, she proposed to burn their business down. So confident was she of the national zeitgeist, she expected a mob a mob she was prepared to lead.

America was finally beginning to notice. The spirit of Salem lives on.

In those heady first years after the Russian Revolution, tremors from the east tripped the internal Richter scales of sensitive souls from Mitte to Montmarte to Greenwich Village. One Villager who felt the shock was crusading birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. Although she did not think Marxism the solution to her issue the sexual and racial chaos then vexing liberal America she knew many an aspiring bohemian who bought the whole package.

The heaven of the traditional theology had been shattered by Darwinian science, she wrote in her 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization, and here, dressed up in all the authority of the new science, appeared a new theology, the promise of a new heaven, an earthly paradise, with an impressive scale of rewards for the faithful and ignominious punishments for the capitalists.

Sanger was hardly alone in sensing a shift in the spiritual landscape. At about this time, a young Whittaker Chambers was coming to terms with what he would later call mans second-oldest faith, the faith Adam embraced when he yielded to the serpents plea, Ye shall be as gods. To this point in history, no human cohort had committed itself to this faith more passionately than the Communist Party, and it was this passion that attracted Chambers. Communists, however, had no monopoly on the vision. As Chambers saw it, leftists of various stripes socialists, liberals, fellow travelers, unclassified progressives and men of good will shared the conviction that human reason would displace God as the creative intelligence of the world.

Given Americas cultural and political dominance in the years after World War II, many thought Chambers unduly pessimistic. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was not among them. Of all the college commencement speakers in 1978, Solzhenitsyn was perhaps the only one to sense that in the near future no major university would dare ask a person like him to speak. If he had shared this concern before his address, few would have believed him. At the time, after all, he was arguably the most sought-after commencement speaker in America. The fact that Harvard recruited him was testament to that.

In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the 20th century,