Senior Reporter at CBC Articulates MSM's Godless Attitude Toward Christians

I have featured Neil MacDonald's writings on this blog a few times. He is intelligent and thoughtful when it comes to politics, but his inability to conceive of the possibility of there being a real God makes him a stereo-typical MSM reporter - one who thinks religious people believe a fantasy and are therefore idiots.

I could tell him how very real God is, but I'm quite sure he would not listen.

The CBC’s Neil Macdonald is an ignorant bigot

The Bridgehead
By Jonathon Van Maren

Neil Macdonald, one of those smug, elitist drones bestowed upon us by our government-funded state broadcaster to tell us what’s best for us, has just written a column that should win scores of awards in the categories of cluelessness and snottiness.

Macdonald, who happens to be the brother of the far more insightful comedian Norm MacDonald, has decided to hop on board with the Liberal Party’s official line that Andrew Scheer has the potential to be a dangerous fundamentalist, indicating simultaneously that he is aware of the Liberal Party’s ongoing support for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as well as why that is.

Macdonald starts off his column by congratulating himself on his open-mindedness, noting that he reads both the Weekly Standard and the National Review “regularly.” As a subscriber to the National Review myself, I can only assume this means that Macdonald has missed the vast majority of the essays the fine writers there publish, or that he is impervious to reasoning from those who are not members of his “own intellectual cohort,” as he puts it.

Macdonald then moves seamlessly from self-congratulation on his free-thinking and ability to be extraordinarily well-read into the main point of his column: “Religion…is by definition not fact-based. It is a pure belief system.”

Which is, in fact, one of the stupidest sentences I’ve read in a long time. Clearly, Macdonald is unaware of the intellectual traditions of Christianity—traditions, I might point out, that actually created the scientific method he worships and pioneered most of the scientific fields a man as well-read as he presumably grazes in—not to mention the intensive historiography that accompanies the Christian accounts of history.

But Macdonald makes that point to make a far more nefarious one: “To be clear here, I am all for a person’s right to believe in whatever he or she desires, to embrace foundational myths of aliens [a shot at Scientology], or miracles, or extreme positions of love or hatred, so long as it remains in a place of worship, with the door closed.”

Got that? Everyone else—be it the drag queens and nudists waving their genitals to the crowd at the Pride Parade, or the Black Lives Matter rioters shutting them down, or abortion activists screaming at families attending the March for Life—they have the right to express their views in public and to advocate for those views in the political sphere. But that’s because they’re not Christian. Macdonald thinks Christians should not have such rights. They can only speak to each other, in their churches.

And why? Because Macdonald doesn’t happen to believe what Christians believe, and because in spite of his alleged open-mindedness, he doesn’t have the faintest clue what Christians believe on any topic.

He objects to pro-life laws, for example, without mentioning the fact that it is legal to abort a baby at any time during pregnancy in Canada. I don’t know if Macdonald is a father and has felt a baby kick in the womb, but it is the abortion activists who have the weird religious belief that it is some sort of alien rather than a human being developing in the womb of his or her mother, not pro-lifers. Pro-lifers are merely requesting science-based human rights policy.

Macdonald is also mind-boggled that there are those who objected to gay marriage—a vast majority that included Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton until very recently, in fact—even though every nation on earth affirmed that marriage was between a man and a woman until the year 2000. But whatever—fortunately thousands of years of ignorant morons have culminated in the arrival of a luminary named Neil Macdonald, who is paid by the government to inform traditionalists that they are stupid. Tradition may be the democracy of the dead, as Chesterton once put it, but the dead are no match for a snarky CBC columnist.

Macdonald even takes a shot at those who do not believe that men can become women and women can become men, even though there is not a single shred of scientific evidence to support his snobbery. Screw the opinion of the psychiatrists at John Hopkins University and mental health professionals across the country. And silence anyone who might have questions to ask based on research that contradicts the baseless position of Macdonald and his cohort. They have no right to the public square, because they do not agree with Macdonald—and he promptly demonizes those who disagree with him as bigots, haters, and the possessors of various phobias.

How does Macdonald accomplish this? By lazy slander. “’Faith,’ apparently, confers licence to discriminate, bully, marginalize, and deprive someone of liberty (such as the liberty to end an unwanted pregnancy),” writes McDonald, as he discriminates against Christians, suggests they be marginalized and confined to their churches, and says they should be deprived of the liberty to have their voices heard in the public square. It’s ironic, isn’t it–Christians are always trying to legislate their values, says the guy who believes that his values should be reflected in legislation because he says so.

“And whenever someone calls them on what is often plain old hatred-laced bigotry,” he continues, “they smile and say, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. It’s a matter of ‘faith.’”

No. We don’t say that, although it’s a convenient straw man for Neil to be thrashing around with so as to avoid actually making an argument. When we make the case that late-term abortion is barbaric, we’re making a case that every other Western nation has already heeded and legislated. And when Maacdonald says that we do things “inexplicably,” he doesn’t mean that we don’t have articulated reasons for our beliefs. He means he hasn’t read them, or doesn’t understand them, and very probably both.

While feigning humility, progressives like Macdonald don’t realize the astronomical arrogance of their core assertion: That those who disagree with them should be silenced and the debate swept away because they cannot fathom the possibility that perhaps they might be wrong. Macdonald’s column did not contain a single argument, only the assumption that he and his intellectual cohort are our enlightened superiors, content to let us air out our crazy as long as we are confined to places where no one can hear us. His opinion, of course, was funded by us—the maligned taxpayers.

This airtight worldview is precisely the reason that the arrogance of the elites has left them so unprepared for what is happening across the Western world. When you silence your opponents with condescension and name-calling, you ensure that the only response can be political. And perhaps one day, Macdonald will be plucked from the government teat and forced to find a job where he isn’t paid with funds extracted from those he enjoys belittling.

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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.

The Next Front in the War on Christianity - Thanks to Islam and Us

ANALYSIS - After Orlando, time to recognize that anti-gay bigotry is not religious freedom

Will targeted nightclub shooting begin an overdue conversation about religions' attitudes toward gays?

By Neil Macdonald, CBC News
Senior Correspondent

Neil Macdonald is a Senior Correspondent for CBC News, currently based in Ottawa. Prior to that he was the CBC's Washington correspondent for 12 years, and before that he spent five years reporting from the Middle East. He also had a previous career in newspapers, and speaks English and French fluently, and some Arabic.

In December 1989, Marc Lépine armed himself with a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle and headed off to Montreal's École Polytechnique, hunting women.

He separated male and female students and ordered the men to leave. He then killed the women, execution-style.

By the time he turned the weapon on himself, he'd slaughtered 14 young women for the offence of being women, earning himself a place at the apex of misogynistic violence.

Lepine's suicide note read, in part:

"I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker … The feminists have always enraged me." 

The atrocity, and its stated motivation, immediately triggered an angry and overdue conversation in Canada about misogyny and collective male guilt.

Men who'd never as much as lifted a hand to a woman in their lives were told that even so, if they'd ever smiled at a sexist joke or tolerated discrimination against a woman, they'd done their bit to shape a culture that culminated with the funerals of those 14 women in Montreal.

It was hard to swallow, but only a dullard could reject the logic outright.

And, at least partially as a result, open sexism and misogynistic humour became far less okay after Polytechnique, at least in polite company. It was a transformative moment.

The Orlando gunman has been identified as Omar Mateen, of Fort Pierce, Fla. Police say he was killed in a shootout with SWAT team members. (Omar Mateen/MySpace)

Now, after Omar Mateen armed himself, reportedly professed allegiance to ISIS and went hunting gays in an Orlando night club, could there possibly be a better time to have the same conversation about organized religion, and what responsibility it bears for the pain and misery and death inflicted on gays for so many centuries in the name of god?

And not just the Muslim god. That is happening now because of Mateen, and deservedly so, but restricting the discussion to Islam is far too easy.

Islam may be more overt about its homophobia than the other major religions — anyone who's worked in the Middle East has heard some fool in high office declaring that there are no gays in Islam, and therefore no AIDS — but the fact is, conservative iterations of all the monotheistic faiths are deeply and actively and systemically anti-gay.

The sacred monotheistic texts contain prohibitions that would by just about any legal definition be considered hate speech in the modern secular world.

The Old Testament Book of Leviticus 20:13 states: "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them."

The Old Testament Book of Leviticus, like other OT books presented the Mosaic Law as handed down from God. I know you don't believe in God, Neil, so that is all just foolishness to you, as is all religion. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah were first told in the OT - God Himself providing the fire and brimstone.

That was OT. With the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God completely changed the playing field. The only deaths at the hand of God in the New Testament happened to two people who chose to lie to the Holy Spirit. There is no mandate in the NT to punish anyone outside of the church; the mandate is to love them. To show them the love of Christ Who died for us while we were yet sinners.

I admit we do an abysmal job at that. Many 'Christians' want to invoke OT laws in an attempt to create a Utopian society. They are completely wrong and they alienate those who most need salvation. This is the opposite of what Christ taught us to do and is the reason why the church has rendered itself unChrist-like and incapable of carrying out the Great Commission.

The Qu'ran proscribes sex between Muslim males, and mandates punishment, although it does sometimes allow for leniency. Elsewhere, though, it cites the destruction of Sodom, held as divine punishment for homosexual sex, as a lesson.

And the Hadith, the Qu'ranic commentaries, contain references to punishing the "abomination" of gay sex with stoning or immolation.

Mohammed, 1400 years ago, reversed the message of grace in the NT and returned people to OT legalism. Jesus did not suffer and die so God could put the world back under legalism. This apparent reversal of direction for God only serves to verify that Islam's Allah is not the God of the Bible and not the God of Abraham. He is, in fact, not a god at all!

Such prohibitions could be dismissed as antediluvian anachronisms, not to be taken seriously in the modern world.

But of course they are taken quite seriously. Deadly seriously.


Rights and religious freedom

Fundamentalists and traditionalists of all three faiths not only regard such passages as divine instruction, they actually portray their homophobia as a matter of religious freedom; something noble, protected by constitutions and essential to democracy, when in fact they are working to oppress and deny fundamental rights to people based solely upon the sexuality with which they were born.

As a Christian of some 30 years and a veteran of more than a dozen churches and several denominations - I have never viewed homophobia that way, nor have I ever met anyone who did.

There is no scientific proof that anyone was ever born gay. The dean of gay genetic research, the guy who started the lie that gays are born gay, Dean Hamer, now has stated that the majority of gays are NOT born gay. 

If being gay was inherited it would have bred itself out of existence long ago.  The majority of gays, at least, are gay because of environmental factors in their childhood - very dominant mother, very weak father, distant or unknown father, abusive father, etc.


Supreme Court Gay Marriage What Might Happen


California's Proposition 8 to overturn the state's legalization of same-sex marriage passed with the support of major churches in 2008, but was later overturned in the courts. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

A perfect example is Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative whose purpose was to block the advance of same-sex marriage, on the grounds that it would somehow harm or invalidate heterosexual marriage, and would result in schoolchildren being taught that gay sex is normal and acceptable.

Prop 8 proponents included the Roman Catholic Church, the Knights of Columbus, the California Catholic Conference of bishops, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), the Union of Orthodox Jewish Organizations of America and assorted evangelical Christian groups. Together, they poured a fortune into the campaign. The Mormons alone provided $20 million.

They won, then immediately lost when the initiative was vacated by secular courts.

Since then, organized religions have continued their anti-gay activities, often going to court to ensure their right to discriminate against gays in hospitals and schools and other religiously affiliated institutions.

Yes, it is true that Pope Francis has softened his church's line on homosexuality. But his tolerance is only remarkable in contrast to his hardline predecessor, and church doctrine remains unchanged.


Nightclub Shooting Florida


Kelvin Cobaris, a local clergyman, consoles Orlando city commissioner Patty Sheehan, right, and Terry DeCarlo, an Orlando gay-rights advocate, as they arrive on the scene near where a mass shooting occcured in Orlando, Fla., Sunday. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel via Associated Press)

It is also true that the Reform and to an extent the Conservative streams of Judaism have moderated their tone where gays are concerned.

Not so Islam. That religion remains largely hostile to gays, and anti-gay sentiment is woven into the laws of many Muslim countries.

Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar, a British-born physician and imam, has spoken at public venues in the United States, softly and diffidently asserting that as a matter of compassion, homosexuals should be put to death.

There are many, many other sheikhs like Farrokh Sekaleshfar.

And while evangelical Christians don't seek the death penalty for homosexuality, many do want it punished. In 2004, Dr. Richard Land, the Oxford-educated former president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, told me on camera he thought gay sex should be outlawed. 

This is very unfortunate that a man with those credentials could be so unlike Christ. Christ didn't outlaw anything; He concentrated solely on spiritual aspects of life. It is to our own shame that so few of us Christians follow His example.

In any event, this much is singularly true: the worst mass murder in American history was directed at one group, and it was done by some one who had sworn allegiance to a fundamentalist religious group.

If casual misogyny and sexist humour helped create Marc Lépine, then organized religion must reflect on helping shape a culture that will this week have led to 50 funerals in Florida. It's not just the extremists who want to deprive gays of human rights.

People of faith might ask themselves this: even if they've never so much as lifted a hand to a gay person, have they smiled at a homophobic joke? Or overlooked mistreatment? Or nodded during an anti-gay sermon?

And if so, wouldn't this be a good time to speak up?

I am speaking up, but if Christians won't listen to God, they are not likely to listen to me.

ANALYSIS - Too Much Democracy? Donald Trump Dividing Republicans Top to Bottom

Before getting into Neil's excellent piece, just a couple of very quick thoughts regarding Trump and the electoral process:

Donald Trump is a caricature of American politics

American politics has ceased to be politics and become entertainment

Mitch McConnell is the Koch Brothers instrument on earth

Trump's ascendancy has Republican thinkers, brass talking of thwarting the will of primary voters

By Neil Macdonald, CBC News

The Republican establishment's dilemma: How to remove Trump's podium without totally fracturing the GOP
(Joe Skipper/Reuters)

It's generally accepted in America that democracy is an absolute good; that, like tolerance, there can never be too much of it.

But absolutism never survives the test of rational thought.

Tolerance goes too far when it tolerates intolerance. And democracy flounders when people are convinced to embrace something fundamentally undemocratic.

That is what the Republican Party appears to be doing at the moment by embracing Donald Trump, who by his own words, would behave undemocratically as a president.

For example, he says he would order the U.S. military to torture captives, and go beyond waterboarding when dealing with enemies of the state.

He says he would bar a quarter of the world's population from entering the U.S. solely on the grounds of religion.

His ban might even apply to Muslims who are already American residents returning from travels abroad; it is impossible to know because Trump speaks in such bizarre, sweeping terms.

And, of course, he would deport 12 million undocumented, mostly Hispanic, workers, throwing the American economy into chaos — he would throw out even those whose children were born in the U.S.A.

So Republican intellectuals are now talking about making a courageous choice, albeit one with potentially calamitous consequences: That would be thwarting, if necessary, the will of millions of the party's voters, many of whom comprise its bedrock base.

Columnist George F. Will, whose conservative credentials are beyond question, has warned that Trump is not just a buffoon ("Is there a disagreeable human trait he does not have?" Will asks) but an "avatar of unfettered government and executive authoritarianism."

Michael Gerson goes even further. Trump, he says, undermines American security and must be denied the Republican nomination, even if he arrives at the party's convention in Cleveland with the most delegates.

'Disqualifying in a president'

Gerson, based in Washington, is a member of America's evangelical intelligentsia, a man whose conservatism is infused with Christian values — the compassionate sort, rather than the ferocious nativism embraced by the more fundamentalist evangelical cohort.

Michael Gerson, a Washington-based op-ed columnist, was an adviser and speechwriter with former Republican president George W. Bush. (CBC)

As a speechwriter and adviser to George W. Bush, Gerson was in the Oval Office the day after the 9/11 attacks, as the president struggled with what to tell an enraged, volatile American public.

"At that moment," Gerson told me recently, "we had no idea how Americans would react to Muslims in U.S. To Muslim-Americans.

"And George Bush set out as a leader to say we're an inclusive, tolerant country… we don't blame a religion for what happened. He went to a mosque within days of the attacks.

"But imagine," Gerson went on, "if George Bush had said, 'Yeah, I'm going to whip up resentment of Islam for my own political purposes? He could have done it in a minute."

That, says Gerson, is what Trump has done, manipulating public fear by proposing his blanket ban on Muslims following the mass shootings by Islamic extremists in Paris and in California.

"When Donald Trump does this as a populist tool … he is directly undermining the national interest of the United States for political reasons," says Gerson. "That itself is disqualifying in a president."

'A hot rock'

Gerson is among a growing group of Republican thinkers these days who feel the party must deny Trump the nomination, vox populi be damned.

"The U.S. government does not have an absolute populist democracy," he argues, "and the parties are not run as absolute populist democracies.

"There's some deliberative role in the party structure that says, is this best for the party? Is this best for the country?"

That's a more refined version of what Republican Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, urged: that the party drop Trump "like a hot rock," even if he wins the primary season.

The calculations and rules for the Republican convention in July are bewildering, but there are options for keeping Trump from the nomination even if he arrives in Cleveland with the most delegates.

Most of these delegates are only obliged to vote for him on the first ballot.

The trouble is, the man now running second, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, is, in some ways, more extreme than Trump, though perhaps somewhat more predictable.

So "moderate" Republicans — and they do still exist, even if they've been pushed into the margins by this wave of bare-fanged populism — need to find someone capable of moving a mass of delegates.

There is no such candidate now in the race. House Speaker Paul Ryan, if he could be persuaded to stand, is a possibility.

There is even the possibility the party brass will orchestrate a rewriting of the rules at the convention to exclude Trump, says Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

That, of course, would mean the party leadership overriding the millions of voters supporting Trump, not to mention ignoring all the anger feeding the party revolt against the Republican leadership itself.

As Ornstein puts it: "That would mean blood on the streets, and on the convention floor."

Be it resolved

In Texas last week, a Republican local president, Buffie Ingersoll, showed me a resolution her precinct had passed following Trump's big Super Tuesday victory. Several other precincts passed identical measures.

It cites McConnell's "hot rock" comment, and goes on: "Be it resolved that Republican voters reject the decision of the United States Senate Majority Leader to abort the will of the people," and condemns any effort to "silence voters" at the convention.

The party had better pay attention, says Ingersoll, "or else."

And yet, that is exactly what people like Gerson, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist Kathleen Parker are urging, if necessary. With all the attendant consequences.

Kathleen Parker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated newspaper columnist in the U.S. (CBC)

"I can easily see vast numbers of people descending on Washington," Parker told me. "I can see people rioting. I think it's going to be a historical moment when that happens. And I don't think it's going to be pretty."

Nonetheless, she says, "I agree with Michael Gerson. I think he [Trump] has to be stopped."

It didn't have to come to this. The party could probably have found a sensible, winning champion had it not remained deaf to grassroots anger and dismissed Trump as a joke for as long as it did.

But if voters must be thwarted, it's probably good that it will be conservatives themselves doing the thwarting. They are, after all, the ones who have complained most loudly about Barack Obama and liberal judges corrupting democracy.

The Democrats need only stand back and watch.

Neil Macdonald is a Senior Correspondent for CBC News, currently based in Ottawa. Prior to that he was the CBC's Washington correspondent for 12 years, and before that he spent five years reporting from the Middle East. He also had a previous career in newspapers, and speaks English and French fluently, and some Arabic.


Now if the party leadership were successful in robbing Trump of victory in the leadership race, he might well start his own party which would make a Republican victory next November absolutely impossible. 8 more years of Democratic government - I shudder to think it. Not that I'm afraid of what the Democrats would do, although I am, but more-so because I am afraid of what all you gun-toting, super-patriots might do.