BRUCE LOGAN: The Tyranny of the Offended
The Tyranny of the Offended
Bruce Logan: 21 June 2022
The Ministry of Education wants Tauranga’s Bethlehem Christian College to erase from its statement of belief that marriage is between a man and a woman. Of course it does.
The Ministry has its own competing statement of belief; the gospel of diversity, inclusion and equality (DIE) which fails before it begins by excluding the diverse opinion that marriage is between a man and a woman.
Bethlehem College says that marriage is between a man and a woman because it believes the Biblical story that declares human beings have been created male and female in the image of the sovereign God.
That nearly everyone believed that marriage is between a man and the woman until half an hour ago and that most people in the world still believe it would seem to cut no ice with the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Education.
Subject to DIE the Ministry believes and preaches the sovereignty of identity politics; that human beings are self-creating self-affirming creatures. The Ministry is a government bureaucracy and marriage is what it says it is. Unbelievers must be silenced.
The battle for truth spins around opposing commandments. Bethlehem College believes that human beings should love and obey God with all their heart and soul. The Ministry of Education believes that we should love ourselves with all our psyche; souls and hearts optional.
Freedom of choice is a cardinal “virtue” underpinning DIE’s commandments; a necessity for self-creating creatures. It’s not about what one chooses but simply that one chooses. But such freedom applies only to those people who believe in DIE’s concept of freedom. It cannot possibly apply to unbelievers because that would undermine the entire self-creating enterprise.
The old idea of freedom of speech and religious belief and expression has no traction in the world of self-creation. The old idea rests on the belief in a created and ordered world. Human dignity is a permanent gift from God not something presumptuously imagined by the individual and the overreaching state.
If human dignity is not God-given an alternative and sovereign authority must be found. The contemporary discovery is the self-creating individual sustained by the ideology of identity politics. The necessary consequence of which is that those who control the gates (or is it corridors) of power will decide what it means to be human.
The ideology of self-creation would declare the purity of human passion and have the efficacy of that passion written into law. That is the new freedom.
Ironically the new freedom turns out to be more like tyranny. It reinforces the tribalism of identity politics which must be arbitrated by the sovereign state. Freedom of speech, religious belief and expression is impossible because criticism of self-creation is offensive and must be protected by evolving hate speech legislation.
If one is the creator of one’s own truth, that truth cannot suffer criticism. Admission of error would bring down the entire house of cards and DIE seen for what it really is, a civil religion.
The attempt by the Ministry of Education to censor Bethlehem College’s expression of marriage is at the sharp end of the sexual revolution and its claim to human meaning.
On the one hand we have a belief in objectivity and permanent truth in a created and ordered world; the kind of thinking that gave us scientific method and the dignity and primacy of the human conscience.
On the other hand we have DIE which is a parasite plagiarising its notion of dignity from the Genesis story while denying it has done so. Freedom of conscience is irrelevant because the fundamental freedom is the freedom of personal desire. One cannot define marriage as between a man and a woman because that would inhibit the free flow of sexual desire.
And so we have a world that no longer knows what marriage is or indeed what a woman is. But never fear, the Ministry of Education will tell us what both are.
