Left Fears Ashcroft's Integrity
During the course of the John Ashcroft confirmation hearings, numerous conservative
pundits and columnists have defended the former senator as a man of honor, morality,
integrity, conviction and deeply held religious beliefs in the face of the usual goofy
charges being hurled at him.
They don't get it. It is precisely these qualities in Ashcroft that the Left most
fears. This is precisely why the Left wants to trash him.
The champion of the Left is the Comeback Kid who won't go away: Bill Clinton. The man to
whom a feminist writer told the Washington Post she would gladly give oral sex in thanks
for keeping abortion 'safe and legal.' That one 'virtue' of Clinton's gave him a free pass
on all sorts of abuses against women in the eyes of many high profile feminists.
Conservatives are not perfect, but they still think moral uprightness and personal
integrity are the name of the game, and once established, one is home free. Conservatives
are naive. They don't know this is not your grandfather's liberalism, but a very dangerous
ideology threatening American freedoms in profound ways. Today's conservatives still
haven't learned how to counter the have-you-stopped-beating-your- wife-yet rhetoric of
accusation used so effectively by the Left.
Conservatives still think it's about rational debate toward truth, justice and the
American way. They still think words are for clarifying meaning rather than obscuring it.
They do not realize that those on the Left despise religion unless it can be bent
to suit their agenda. Today it seems impossible to be a liberal and not be a moral
relativist. Therefore, orthodox religion, which holds that truth is objective and is the
standard that measures us instead of vice versa, must be rejected.
Those who hold that they must conform to the truth instead of making the truth conform to
their behavior are mocked as 'fundamentalists' -- one of the worst slurs in the liberal
lexicon, regardless of any theological applicability. The other verbal arrow in the quiver
is 'racist.' It does not matter if the accused is entirely innocent of the evil of racism,
if one disagrees with a liberal, one must be a racist. It suits the agenda. Never mind
that there is a clear little-boy-who-cried- wolf-effect here, and that if this practice
continues, it runs the danger of real racism not being taken seriously, placing
African-Americans and others in real danger.
There is, I surmise, in the bowels of the vast and tedious bureaucracy of hell a
Department of Slogans which belches up all manner of reasonable sounding claptrap. An
example of this is the unfinished but lofty sounding phrase 'a woman's right to choose'
which makes a grisly, cruel, evil act sound 'acceptable' in 'polite society.' Someone no
doubt won an award for that one, and there is a nice plaque over the Euphemism Desk. (Were
they very jealous, across the hall at the Jargon Office?)
Make no mistake, the bitter, divided situation in our country can be traced directly to
abortion and the tension created by an unquiet conscience, because, euphemisms aside,
everyone knows what abortion really is.
In short, no one should adopt the dishonest tactics of the Left, but rather recognize them
for what they are. The entire 'Borking' process is one of fear-driven desperation, and
those who see putting children to death as the only way out of a difficult situation or of
establishing freedom and equality are living in a loveless world rife with despair, not
knowing there are life-giving answers.
John Mallon is contributing editor for Inside
the Vatican magazine and a member of The Daily Oklahoman's Opinion Board of
Contributors. This article originally appeared in The Daily Oklahoman
on January 26, 2001 and is reprinted with permission. Send an e-mail to John Mallon
