© Jack Cashill
WND.com - April 13, 2016

I have been tracking the left’s obsession with hate for some time and have written about it in my newest book Scarlet Letters.

But just when I think our liberal friends cannot get more promiscuous with their accusations of “hate,” they reach into their demonic bag of tricks and surprise us.

Earlier this week I received an email from MoveOn.org, which describes itself as “the largest independent, progressive, digitally-connected organizing group in the United States.”

The email encouraged me to participate in MoveOn’s latest campaign, a "Global Strike and Protest for Higher Wages and Against Hate."

I understand “higher wages,” a coercive, self-destructive cause if there ever was one. It was the “against hate” part that threw me. Nowhere in the email was there any mention of who was doing the hating or how they might be doing it.

This was a free-floating accusation. So ingrained is their impulse to brand sinners, leftists no longer feel the need to define the sin. It is understood that if you oppose their agenda, even if concocted within the last half hour, you are ipso facto a “hater.”

A day earlier I had been sent a Facebook meme, created by Occupy Democrats, an advocacy group created in 2012 to “counterbalance the Republican tea party,” just in case, one supposes, the IRS did not finish the job.

More creative than MoveOn, Occupy Democrat posted an image of a smiling nurse alongside this tortured analogy, “I’m a nurse, obliged to provide top-notch care and comfort—even to individuals with freaking swastikas tattooed on their flesh.”

The analogy continued, “If I can take care of Nazi sympathizers, they can serve pizza to gay people.” Said one responder, “Love it.” Said another, “This is the best.” But then again, logic and language have never been the left’s strong suits.

I responded, “Is ‘Nazi sympathizers’ the antecedent for ‘they?’ If so, when did Nazis refuse gays pizza? For that matter, when did anyone refuse gays pizza?”

I continued, “Unless you mean the small town Indiana family that theoretically objected to catering a gay wedding--as if any gay person I know would ever have a wedding catered by an Indiana mom and pop pizza shop.”

The left’s long march through the institutions is turning into a sprint. Scarcely a day goes by that some self-appointed cultural commissar does not publish some diktat against common sense and the people who represent it.

“Some things are more important than a rock show and this fight against prejudice and bigotry — which is happening as I write — is one of them,” said Bruce Springsteen.

By his lights, cancelling an upcoming gig in North Carolina was “the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards.”

“Backwards” in this case, according to the Washington Post, meant a law that “prohibits transgender people from using bathrooms that don’t match the gender they were assigned at birth.”

Let’s see if I understand the logic of the left. It is hateful, indeed Nazi-like, to refuse to share your creative talents with people whose practices you see as sinful, but it is heroic to refuse to share your creative talents with people whose practices you see as hateful.

If hate-shaming were a fringe movement, it would be one thing, but is hardly that. Last month I was invited to sit on a panel titled “Muslim in the Metro,” an event sponsored by an enterprise called American Public Square and televised in edited form on the regional PBS channel here in Kansas City, KCPT.

At one point, a Muslim woman on the panel claimed to have been so appalled by the “anti-Muslim” tenor of the Republican debates that she would not let her children watch them. Echoed a Democratic U.S. Attorney, “Their children see grown men espousing hate.”

Bingo! There was the money quote. What was scary was that it was coming from an officer of the court, one capable of interpreting an unpopular sentiment, however true, as a hate crime.

At this intermediate stage in the long march, progressives have the power to hector and humiliate, but they have only a limited ability to enforce their values through the police arm of the state.

Until the death of Antonin Scalia, we enjoyed the added protection of the Constitution. If a Democrat is elected president in 2016, that protection will be gone.

The late Francis Cardinal George was among those traditionalists who sensed a change in the air. The government, George observed, was beginning to take upon itself “the mantle of a religion.”

He feared, a cultural-political “ruling class” was extending its sway over the nation’s institutions and was “using the civil law to impose its own form of morality on everyone.”

From his perspective, these moral czars seemed much too eager to tell citizens “what they must personally think [and] what ‘values’ they must personalize in order to deserve to be part of the country.”

But even on his deathbed just a year ago, the good Cardinal could not have imagined a whole state being shunned for insisting that men use men’s restrooms.