One of the demands of any polemical exchange is the demand of naming. In every dispute, both sides always want to define the nature of the dispute. This need to name properly is not optional for the party that is in the right. Everyone has to do it. But when one of the parties is flatly in the wrong, then everything depends on polemical naming, which is why certain positions are sure to become increasingly shrill. It is the polemical equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. When you don’t have a game plan, and the clock is running out, you just heave the ball.
We want to name what is occurring to various Christian ministries in our town as a form of diversity cleansing. It is ideologically motivated, those bringing the complaints have not brought them against anyone else in the same tax-exempt position (and there are many others in the same position), and those bringing the complaints have been very open about their motivations in all of this (and have been kind enough to leave a permanent record of their agenda). And so we name accordingly. These are the Intoleristas. This is jackbooted tolerance. This is diversity or else! As Buffalo Springfield once put it, “You step out of line, the man comes and takes you away.” Starting productive educational institutions that employ scores of people is their idea of crime. And it is for them, because in their world, there is such a thing as a thought crime. Genuine education is one of their greatest threats because it trains lots of people in how to think outside the statist Hive, and to be guilty themselves of additional “thought crimes.”
And so when we point out that people with private ideological animosities are trying to use our local government as though it were their own private machinery for settling scores, our opponents want to name this response of ours as “whining.” But most assuredly, it is not. To expect (as I do expect) that our magistrates will obey the law, and refrain from discriminatory and selective enforcement of the law, is hardly whining.