[Vision2020] Huskey's Hypocrisies

[Christopher Witmer]

Over at Cleaning House, Rose Huskey writes:

"To compare on any level, city/state/or federally sponsored terrorism and
genocide with individuals choosing not to shop or do business with
establishments owned by members of the Kirk is a monstrous insult to the
memories of the tens of thousands of French victims of the Holocaust. How
dare he? Mr. Foucachon employs the penultimate whine of religious
persecution; a shopworn strategy of the Kirk. Instead of parroting the party
line, it would be most beneficial if he decried the arrogant, sneering,
ignorant, anti-community behavior of his pastor which is the real genesis of
the division in Moscow. After years of thumbing his nose at the rest of us,
Doug (and his flock) should not be surprised that we are fed up to our
eyebrows, or that we are acting on that repugnance. And, we'll do it
peacefully by snapping shut our pocketbooks."

Actually, I happen to believe that people should have the right to
discriminate on just about any basis concerning how their property is used
in a private capacity. Constitutionally speaking, it is primarily a Fifth
Amendment issue. The right to discriminate would include, but not be limited
to, decisions concerning who they rent to, who they allow into their places
of business as employees or customers, who they allow into their clubs as
members, who they allow into their private schools as students, etc. Of
course it would also include discrimination concerning decisions on which
business they choose to patronize. Please note, I'm not saying that all such
discrimination is good. In fact, much of the discrimination that people
would be likely to engage in if permitted to do so is personally morally
repugnant to me, but I still feel strongly that there should not be laws
against it. I believe that God will bring all things into judgment,
including our incorrect discriminations, but it does not follow from that
fact that we should therefore declare all "incorrect" discriminations to be
illegal. From the Christian perspective, we ought to be discriminating just
as Jesus would discriminate if He was in our position. There is no doubt in
my mind that Jesus would discriminate if He was in our position, but the
difference is that his discrimination would always be perfect and free from
sin, while ours often is not.

Another way of putting it is, we are all called to make just judgment. God's
judgments are just; ours often are not. Nevertheless, judgment is
inescapable for humans since we are all made in God's image, and since
judgment is one of the things God does, it is also one of the things that
God's images do. But we must judge as He would judge if we are to image Him
correctly.

So, I repeat, I believe that people should have the right to discriminate.
It is one of the things that we need to live out what it means to be human.
Thus, I think Rose Huskey and her ilk should, legally speaking, have the
right to discriminate against people simply for being members of Christ
Church. According to my own logic I need to accept that they have that
right, even if they are making exceedingly bad judgment when they exercise
that right.

However, we should also note that when Huskey and her ilk discriminate in
this way, they are being hypocritical in the extreme. Can you imagine how
they would react if the shoe was on the other foot? What would happen if the
logic of this call for a boycott was applied in the other direction and
taken to its logical conclusion? I can tell you exactly what would happen --
we would see the complete overthrow of most of the so-called "civil rights"
laws that Huskey and her ilk fought to have passed in the past half century.
According to my logic, a boycott of Christ Church businesses is defensible
at least as being within the bounds of peoples' rights; however, according
to the logic that has been driving Huskey and her ilk, the boycott in
question cannot be logically defended. We simply have to say that it
constitutes gross hypocrisy, pure and simple. Basically, what it comes down
to is this: "Whatever I personally oppose is okay to discriminate against,
but whatever I personally support must not be discriminated against." That's
really what the position of Huskey and her ilk boils down to.

I have only one more thing to say about Rose Huskey's attempt to smear Mr.
Foucachon. After blabbing about how the notorious Klaus Barbie was based in
Lyon, the city from which the Foucachon family hails, implying that somehow
Mr. Foucachon was missing an important lesson to be gleaned from that
factoid, she goes on to say:

"And, by the way, the German people closed their eyes long before 1940. As
we know, many Europeans, including the French, were delighted at Hitler's
vision of a closely monitored, carefully controlled culture which celebrated
racism, homophobia, and, of course, sexism.

"'The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the
world. This is not at all as . . . . unmodern as it sounds. The female bird
pretties herself for her mate and hatches eggs for him. In exchange, the
male takes care of gathering food, and stands guard and wards off the enemy.
-- Joseph Goebbels"

Mrs. Huskey's obvious intent above is to smear Mr. Foucachon and Doug Wilson
by trying to establish some sort of a link between their beliefs and the
beliefs of Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. This is truly a shameful hypocrisy.
Note that she says "the French" were delighted at Hitler's vision. It is
true that some French were more than happy to go after Jews in very much the
same vein as the Nazis of Germany, but *some* French is a very long way from
"the French." Does anyone seriously believe that Mr. Foucachon's father
ended up in a Nazi concentration camp by being a Nazi sympathizer? Mrs.
Huskey needs to be much more specific and name names. How about naming noted
American feminist, free love advocate, racist and eugenicist Margaret
Sanger, an icon revered by modern American liberals and the author of such
niceties as "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda," "The Function
of Sterilization," etc. Board members of her American Birth Control League
(predecessor to Planned Parenthood) included Lothrop Stoddard, a Harvard
graduate and the author of "The Rising Tide of Color against White
Supremacy," among several such board members and writings in a similar vein
that could be cited. Sanger's "Birth Control Review" published such articles
as "Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics," "The Eugenic Conscience," "The purpose
of Eugenics," "Birth Control and Positive Eugenics," "Birth Control: The
True Eugenics," etc. It is worth noting that her "Birth Control Review"
published "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need" by Ernst Rudin, one of
Nazi Germany's leading eugenicists, just three months before Germany passed
the mandatory sterilization laws under which between a quarter and half a
million people were forcibly sterilized. Sanger never repudiated Rudin or
his orthodox Nazi views that she helped promote in the English-speaking
world. 

I'm not trying to say that Rose Huskey = Margaret Sanger = Ernst Rudin. But
it is true that such a connection would be a less tenuous and far-fetched
stretch than the suggestion that there is somehow a connection between Doug
Wilson and Joseph Goebbels. If the Doug Wilson living in Moscow in 2007 had
been transported back to Nazi Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, I don't doubt
for a moment that he would have been martyred like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or
Sophie and Hans Scholl before the war ended. Everything that Christ Church
stands for is absolutely inimical to everything that Nazism represents, and
any attempt to connect the two must be either woefully ignorant or guided by
malice and hypocrisy.

-- Chris