In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of pushing and shoving going on these days to bring about some pretty extreme changes in American culture and society. And, as I touched on last week, there are quite a few manipulative tools being employed to advance these changes and chip away at anything or anyone that stands in the way.
As we’ve all seen and heard over the past few years, this process involves a lot of name-calling and leveraging this country’s past sins and ongoing imperfections as reasons why the pushers of radical change should be given the power and authority and money they desire so they can rewrite the rules regarding pretty much everything under the sun in any way they see fit.
But I’d just like to take this opportunity to let everybody out there know that it’s okay if you don’t feel like passively submitting to all this, and it’s even okay to push back (in a nonviolent way, of course).
Last I checked, we’re still free people living in a free country – at least the Constitution and the Bill of Rights says we are.
And if those documents still hold true, we all have the inalienable right to determine and decide what we will believe and what we will value. And if what anyone decides regarding their own beliefs and values doesn’t line up with what our society’s self-appointed cultural judges say everyone is supposed to value and believe, then, I’m so sorry, but that it is what it is.
And, by the way, holding dissenting views and opinions doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you a free person.
If you so choose, you have the right to hold to old-school, Biblical beliefs when it comes to things like gender and sexuality.
And you’re also free to side with science and acknowledge that there are very real, genetically determined differences between the male and female sexes.
If you want, you can choose not to be obsessed by race or feel obligated to view everything through a racial lens.
You don’t have to accept that the color of your skin automatically makes you either an oppressor or a victim of oppression.
You don’t have to believe that all our society’s institutions are hopelessly polluted by systemic racism – or that America was originally founded on racist principles.
You’re free not to view your skin pigmentation or gender or some other immutable attribute as the most important thing about you as a person – and you’re free to think and speak and even vote in ways that are supposedly disloyal to some sacred identity tribe to which you supposedly belong.
And if you’ve got kids, you have every right to have a say in their education – and every right to speak out if anybody tries to indoctrinate them or expose them to stuff you strongly disagree with or see as inappropriate.
It’s okay to value faith and family and community and all the simple, everyday things that you love above partisan politics or culture war agendas or the latest existential threat or big corporate interests or anybody else’s bottom line.
And, in spite of what some people say, none of this makes you a racist or a homophobe or a transphobe or a bigot or backwards or unenlightened or an extremist.
It just means you’re a free person who has chosen not to get onboard with what is obviously a concerted and determined effort by some to fundamentally transform the cultural, moral, social, and political landscape of this country and impose those changes on everyone else, whether they like it or not.
And it’s okay not to be okay with that.
