From U.S. News and World Report. (H/T Sense of Events)
Excerpt:
When voters in Ohio’s 1st Congressional District threw Democrat Steve Driehaus out of office after only one term, he did not bow out gracefully. No, he decided to get even. So he did what anyone does in today’s culture: he sued somebody.
Charging that its activities contributed to his defeat and thus to his “loss of livelihood,” Driehaus is suing the Susan B. Anthony List, a group that supports pro-life candidates for Congress and which has been one of the leading and most effective organizations involved in the fight to cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood.
During the 2010 elections the Susan B. Anthony List engaged in a campaign to identify and call out a group of allegedly anti-abortion-rights members of Congress who provided the margin that allowed President Barack Obama’s reform of the nation’s healthcare system to get through the U.S. House of Representatives. The Susan B. Anthony List said their vote in favor of the law, which did not include any pro-life protections, amounted to a betrayal of their pro-life principles.
According to Driehaus, who was one of that group, what the Susan B. Anthony List said in its public communications amounted to a malicious lie that contributed to his defeat. Amazingly, rather than laugh the suit out of court U.S. District Court judge Timothy S. Black, an Obama appointee, is allowing it to go forward. …
Driehaus’s suit is breaking new legal ground and may already be having a very chilling effect on political speech. It goes directly at the heart of our First Amendment protections and criminalizes what is at least a difference of opinion. And it’s curious that the case has not received more attention from the national press.
What is equally curious, however, is why Judge Black has allowed the case to move forward and why he did not recuse himself from it since, as Barbara Hollingsworth reported Friday in The Washington Examiner, he apparently is the former president and director of the Planned Parenthood Association of Cincinnati. As seeming conflicts of interest go this one is a real humdinger.
So this politician takes certain positions and the SBA List makes known to the public what those positions are, and he sues them. And an Obama-appointed judicial activist thnks that the case should go forward. This is just another example of the left wanting to control speech and the flow of information. There is something alarming about the way that the left operates when dealing with dissent. They are so desperate to achieve uniformity of opinion, for all their misleading talk about diversity, that they don’t blink about using force to silence anyone who disagrees with them. And this doesn’t just happen on the abortion issue, where pro-life demonstrators are routinely hand-cuffed and arrested by police. It happens with everything from same-sex marriage to global warming to Darwinian evolution.
People on the secular left are the most close-minded people in the world, and they seem to think nothing about using force to punish those who disagree with them. They won’t debate – they prefer to overpower. Is it really so hard to believe? We just came off of the 20th century where the secular leftists murdered 100 million people, in places like Cambodia, North Kora, China and the Soviet Union. Human rights, like the right to life and freedom of speech, are invented rights on a secular leftist worldview. They aren’t objective – and that’s why people on the secular left find it so easy to violate them – because their worldview has no capacity to ground fundamental human rights. If there is no Creator and Designer of the universe, then anything is possible – we are all just matter in motion. Whatever standards of conduct we agree on are arbitrary and subjective – just conventions that vary from by time and place – from one society to the next. For a secular leftist, any immoral act is permissible. Their rule is “do what you like, and don’t get caught”.
Not all secular leftists are fascists, to be sure. But their worldview does seem to lend itself to narrow-mindedness and intolerance.