Comments at the Illinois Family Institute

Last night I had the privilege of saying a few words to the IFI. My notes are below. Regular readers may recognize a few paragraphs, but the talk was for the occasion.

I
want to thank the Illinois Family Institute for the very kind invitation to speak to you all tonight. In fact, in these times of high speed Internet and Google searches, it is kind of amazing that I get invited to speak anywhere at all. When I do get invited, I try to go just to find out what kind
of people they are. The answer is generally the same — very nice people.

There is one other thing I should probably tell you about. I don’t usually deliver talks from my iPad. This is because I was born in 1953, which was as close to the second year of Benjamin Harrison’s administration as it was to the seventh year of Obama’s. I am not a born techie. This means that if there is an awkward pause up here, you can assume that I am trying to figure out how the Drudge Report popped up on my screen. Another tell would be if I slow down and my sentences acquire lots of unnecessary adjectives. And paper outlines never have battery issues, but here we go.I want to speak to you as a company of adventurers. You have been away from America for quite some time, had some glorious adventures, and have now returned home to enjoy the fruits of your courage and industry. But upon your return, what you have discovered, in the immortal words of Sam Gamgee, is:”No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and a lot of rules and orc-talk instead. I hoped to have a rest, but I can see there’s work and trouble ahead.”
What is the nature of that work?
We must first understand what has happened. Second, we must understand what their central tactic will be in fighting back against anything we might decide to do. And third we must fight like hobbits who have seen the world. Here is what I mean.
The secularists are bent, not in fostering a spirit of cosmopolitan cooperation, but rather they are demanding an utter absence of disapproval for any of their currently approved victim-pets, and they are demanding this in the form of required obeisance before their designated altars of lust, blood, and mammon.
This is why the religious liberty battles are revolving around believers who are in the glorifying professions. There are no battles at — because such battles are unnecessary — with believers who are in the shared space professions.
If I owned a hardware store, there would be no difficulty for me whatever in selling a hammer to a homosexual. I might try to sell him two hammers.
So what is happening?
The professions in question, then, the current battleground professions, are the glorifying professions. They are the professions that say on their business card that “we make your event look good.” These are the photographers, the florists, the bakers, the caterers, the videographers, the graphic designers. Our job is to glorify what you are doing. The problem is caused when people demand that they use that expertise for an event that is perfectly appalling. It is like taking your chimp to the beautician, and blaming the beautician for the results. When there is social turmoil as a consequence, you can count on somebody suggesting that we fix everything with fines and sensitivity training for the beauticians. And that somebody will be part of the coexist crowd.
And even if these people were entirely wrong about it — which they are NOT — why the coercion? Leave the fellow alone, and quit trying to get your ham sandwich at the kosher deli.
Their central tactic will be an unrelenting demand that you apologize, usually for breathing. I trust that you have noticed that demanding apologies is one of their central means of crowd control? 
Now this tactic frequently works on believers because believers have a conscience, and usually have a sensitive one. So you really should have a sensitive conscience coram Deo, before God. But when people demand that you apologize for your micro aggressions, your usual response should be to micro-care.
Third, in the chapter I referenced earlier, The Scouring of the Shire, one of the most glorious things about it is how unintimidated the returning hobbits were. A despotic system had been gradually set up in the Shire, and the hobbits who lived there had gotten gradually accustomed to it. The returning hobbits — and in my little parable, that would be you — refused to countenance any aspect of it, and cheerfully put their foot through the side of the whole thing.
Why do we say they are stupid for imposing stupid things? We are the ones who see through it, and still put up with it.
Lo, I will tell you a parable. But so that no one will think I am getting above myself, it will be a parable involving basketball.
Once there was a game of pick-up basketball, and there were two teams — red shirts and blue shirts. The red shirts were from red states and the blue shirts were from blue states. With me so far?
Beyond the basic rules of the game, the blue shirts had only two requirements. The first was that they needed to be allowed to ref the game as well as play it, and the second requirement was that if anybody on the red team questioned any call, it was an automatic technical, and they had to go sit on the racist bench, or on the misogynist bench, depending on which eyebrow they had raised in protest.
At first the game looked kind of normal. But as time went on, the calls started getting more and more outlandish. First the blue players would flop when there was just slight contact, then when there was no contact at all, and finally they commenced to flopping whenever a red player came within three feet of them. Bam. Right on the back, and one of the others would always call it. Charging! Of course, there were some protests, and thus it was that the red state bench started accumulating a bad reputation for racism and misogyny. I mean, look at all of them sitting there. Such a poor testimony.
As I said earlier, some of the guys on the red player bench started joking amongst themselves about how stupid it all was. But then they started getting charged for micro-charging from the bench, and were made to sit on another bench behind the first one.
Pretty soon everybody was used to this system, and when a hot-headed player started to argue, or even looked like he was thinking about arguing a call, all the evangelicals in the bleachers behind him would start hissing at him. “Tesssstimony! Tessssssstimony! Sssssit down!” Most of the time he would.
In the off-season, lots of evangelicals from the bleachers would attend conferences dedicated to the question of why we were losing so many basketball games. They could actually fill arenas for such conferences, with about ten times more attendees than would show up for the basketball games themselves, and the registrations cost about five times more than the basketball tickets did.
Nevertheless, the consensus among the players remained that this whole set up was really stupid — they would talk about it in the locker room afterwards. This was the only place they were still allowed to talk about anything, and that was probably coming to an end by the next season as well. But in their remaining time, in order to make themselves feel better, they would complain bitterly about what morons the blue players were being.
But one day a new guy on the team decided to ask a question, one that seemed obvious to him anyway. “Why are they the morons?”
“What do you mean?” somebody else asked.
“I mean they are getting everything they want, they win every game, they make us conform to stupid and inane requirements, our own fans police those requirements for them, and we all go along with it. So I would ask again, why are they the morons?”
I interrupt this instructive parable to note that the word moron is no doubt considered offensive by some, and that three blue players are flat on their backs, and that one of them is clutching his ankle and making a lot of noise. On top of that, I am refusing to go to the bench, and I refuse to apologize. In addition, ascending to my personal zenith of irreverence, I refuse to apologize for any of my earlier expressions like lesbyterians or gaystapo.
Thus far the parable.
In sum, this exhilarating program I now set before you, commending it to you. Figure out what they are actually demanding, stop apologizing, and get a grip.
First, they are not after your peaceful, law-abiding customs. They are demanding that you approve of them. They will not stop until they have successfully obtained that approval, and you must not stop until you have successfully established your right to refuse to give it. Say to them, sweetly but firmly, “arrange your own flowers.”
Second, stop groveling, crawling, whimpering, trimming, explaining, apologizing, back-filling, and throat-sobbing. That’s important. It is hard to speak with authority when you are throat-sobbing.
And last, back when the cultures of our respective nations were a bit more . . . intact, shall we say, it used to be said that there was an easy way to tell the difference between an Englishman and an American. The Englishman would walk into a joint like he owned the place. The American would walk in like he didn’t care who owned the place.
In neither case was the individual cowed, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely what we need quite a bit more of. We have work to do, and no need to wait for Gandalf.
Thank you very much.