[Vision2020] real slavery?

[keely emerinemix]

My nomination for "Most Offensive, Outlandish, Insensitive, Inaccurate and Divisive" post of the month is yet again from Courtney's Right-Mind blog, wherein he features Walter Williams, an African-American libertarian conservative, commenting that real slavery still exists today.  

No, not the women of Sudan, or the women of the FLDS, and not immigrant children in U.S. cities, nor poor men and women in Third World nations throughout the world.  The truly enslaved are, to Williams, Courtney, and other foaming libertarians, the American Workers.  Yes, Williams calls "slavery" the government's tax claim on the income of the American worker.  This "slave" apparenlty toils from January to the end of April every year to satisfy the State's thirst for providing social service programs -- some "Christian" libertarians call this "theft" -- and inflating an ever-bloated war machine brought about, curiously, by a "conservative" President.  This is the real slavery of history, Williams asserts, and Courtney, ever one to gild the rotting lilly, tags the post with another mocking slam of Moscow's liberals, those of us who protested "slavery" in 2004 in light of the pompous melange of stupidity and horrid judgment that is "Southern Slavery as it Was."  Boy, he's just dying to see us repent and come to his side, where men are men, slaves are his kind, and liberals are . . . well, withering in a haze of daft posturing and naivete.

To equate the American wage earner as a victim of slavery, and a victim just as "owned" and exploited as the African slave of the Southern States, is beyond stupid, beyond grotesque, beyond insensitive, and beyond belief -- almost.  But since this covenant head and chosen one of God has found his home in a theology that rationalizes inaction in addressing racism, injustice, and poverty and rests in the presumed "laziness" of the poor -- see his pastor's blog on the Proverbs, poverty, and laziness -- I guess it's not too surprising.  What is surprising, what continues to puzzle me, is how Dale and his buddies manage to find anything at all appealing in the person and work of Jesus Christ.  They've constructed a patriarchal palace buttressed by dubious theology and alliance with the hyper-free market secular world that constitutes something that may be a religion, but is nothing like the Christianity of the Bible.  But Jesus -- he doesn't change, he can't be tampered with, and he embodies those things that our covenant libertarians seem to find truly offensive.  The attraction escapes me . . .

It's disgusting, and I apologize yet again for this sinful misrepresentation of How Christians View Slavery, the State, and Injustice.

Keely


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