Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Glenn Beck Insanity Theater: Death to Social Justice!

Now that the word 'liberal' is considered tainted and people are moving to identify themselves as progressive instead, the Right is moving to redefine the terms of the debate once more. The most prominent, as always, are Beck and Limbaugh. Both have sought to conflate progressivism with Nazism and socialism/communism (completely interchangeable, in their book) simultaneously, confusingly enough. Beck is now taking it a step further and tying in any church which has social justice on the agenda:
"I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"
Uh... alright.  Social justice has been around for a while, and I'm reasonably sure that a bunch of major sects advocate it. Going by the definition proposed by the Catholic church, the seven tenets of social justice include:

"That human life must be valued infinitely above material possessions; institutions must be judged by how much they enhance the life and dignity of human persons; every human has the right to what is required to live a full and decent life such as employment, health care, and education; our words, prayers and deeds must show solidarity with, and compassion for, the poor; workers have a right to work, to earn a living wage, and to form trade unions to protect their interests; all the peoples of the world belong to one human family; and that we cannot use and abuse the natural resources God has given us with a destructive consumer mentality."

Oh OK, I think I see the problem. Whatever shitty god Beck et al loudly worship can't be arsed to actually care about people- the guy who said you get to heaven by selling all your possessions and giving to the poor must have been some kind of crackpot!  Let me go ahead and rewrite this to a more Beck-friendly format:

"Material possessions must be valued infinitely above human life; institutions must be judged by how much they they profit from human persons; the upper class has the right to what is required to live a full and decent life such as employment, health care, and education; our words must show solidarity with the poor around election season; the rich have a right to earn an extravagant wage, and to form corporations to protect their interests; all the conservative straight white Christian peoples of the world belong to one human family; and that we must use and abuse the natural resources God has given us with a consumer mentality."

Actually, I could see Beck unironically endorsing this, if you just re-encode it a little bit. Anyway the bizarre sight of a conservative pundit telling people to stay away from churches sorta sidetracked me for a minute, lets get back to his bit:

Later, Beck held up cards, one with a hammer and sickle and other with a swastika. "Communists are on the left, and the Nazis are on the right. That's what people say. But they both subscribe to one philosophy, and they flew one banner. . . . But on each banner, read the words, here in America: 'social justice.' They talked about economic justice, rights of the workers, redistribution of wealth, and surprisingly, democracy."
Honestly I'm pretty surprised Beck managed to limit himself to cards, because this seems like a great opportunity for a chalkboard depicting the inexplicable connections between contradictory ideologies. "That's what people say" is my favorite part, by the way- "people" in this case apparently refers to "anyone who knows what they're talking about." As opposed to "guy who makes stuff up to scare people on TV for a few hours every day," that is.

1 comment:

  1. I love the Beck definition of social justice. I don't even know if you need to clean it up, most teabaggers would probably sign on to that as is.

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