Democrats: Party of Elites (and Elitists)

From the Wall Street Journal:

Hillary Clinton is the only presidential candidate in recent history to lose popularity after a defeat, and she seems determined to keep it that way. Speaking in India over the weekend, she blamed Donald Trump’s election on voters who “didn’t like black people getting rights . . . don’t like women, you know, getting jobs . . . don’t wanna, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are.” She also claimed that “married white women” supported Mr. Trump in response to “pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son—whoever—believes you should.”

More interesting than this “basket of deplorables” redux, though, was Mrs. Clinton’s commentary on the role of economic concerns in the 2016 contest. “There’s all that red in the middle, where Trump won,” she said. “But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product.” To scattered applause, she continued: “So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

This is an unexpected twist in the debate over Mr. Trump’s rise. Analysts on the center and right have tended to emphasize the economic factors that made Mr. Trump’s victory possible, noting that voters in regions with stagnating incomes and diminishing job opportunities are likelier to be drawn to populism. Many on the left, meanwhile, have argued that economic concerns are simply an excuse for bigotry. “Economic anxiety” is even a running joke on progressive Twitter — a sarcastic response to reports of racism among Republicans.

But now Mrs. Clinton herself has endorsed the “economic anxiety” thesis, albeit in a backhanded way. She sees her electoral disappointment in economically downscale regions not as a political failure but a source of validation—and, apparently, an indication of those voters’ failings. Similarly, last September she told Vox that the Electoral College is “an anachronism” in part because “I won in counties that produce two-thirds of the economic output in the United States.” Should those voters have more of a say?

Since Andrew Jackson, the Democratic Party has usually been identified as the party of the “common man,” and its adversaries as defenders of wealth and economic privilege. Jackson earned that reputation for his party by reducing property qualifications for the franchise for white men. But the Democrats’ most recent standard-bearer sounds an awful lot like the 19th-century conservatives who thought political representation should be tied to wealth. This is a significant moment in America’s partisan realignment.

Not merely “significant” but stunning. But not new either. In the 60s, when leftist students and activists were marching against the Vietnam War — indeed, rooting for a communist victory — construction workers were marching in support of the war, and were demeaned as “hardhats” by the left.

And the conflict over social issues like abortion has long been one that pitted affluent liberals against working class conservatives such as the famous “Reagan Democrats.” Thomas Frank’s 2005 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? lamented how working class voters didn’t vote “their own interests,” but voted Republican because of social issues.

Hillary’s snobbish elitism is not new. But it’s not been so blatantly expressed by a presidential candidate until Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” speech. And now she has doubled down.

Political Correctness

Whatever their actual beliefs (and Obama probably pretty much thought the same way) no candidate has so blatantly and overtly embraced political correctness. The essence of political correctness is the view that there is no legitimate disagreement with the standard leftist agenda. Oppose Black Lives Matter and you are a racist. Oppose gay marriage and you are a homophobe. Oppose abortion and you are a sexist. No debate or discussion allowed.

The Reality of Social Class and Politics

The reality, of course, is that Trump voters were not at all the poor white trash that the elitist Democrats make them out to be, as the 2016 Exit Polls show. While Trump did particularly well with whites with no college degree, he carried a plurality of whites with a college degree.

Clinton did carry those with postgraduate degrees (by a 58% to 37% margin), but there is no reason to believe that people with postgraduate degrees are any more “enlightened” than other groups. All graduate education is vocational, and simply socializes students into a particular occupation —  typically one whose interests are served by liberal policies.



As for income, if the richest people are the most productive (a notion that the left traditionally abhorred), then the most productive people split evenly between Trump and Clinton.



Hillary is using something called the “ecological fallacy” — confusing the aggregate characteristics of a unit with the characteristics of the individuals in it. So while affluent areas are indeed the quite liberal, it doesn’t follow that affluent people are. The same goes for education. Put another way, plenty of rich and well-educated conservatives live in those affluent areas, where they are unfortunately outnumbered by the liberals.

But more fundamentally: do you really want to assume that the rich and well-educated are the most enlightened? Or does wealth and education (which is often indoctrination) corrupt?

On that issue, the Democrats have come down on the side of the elitists.

Update

What Hillary actually said is even worse than the journalistic descriptions of it. Watch the entire response to the question below:

Democrat Identity Politics Backfires

From Reason Magazine, an analysis of the “New Nationalism” from Jonathan Haidt, via the BBC:

Q: And what is it that you think is the outcome of this new division of globalists versus the nationalists because there appears to be not just a sense of acute polarization but actually intolerance on both sides.

Haidt. Yes, I think that there are two disastrous outcomes; two things I am very, very worried about for my country, and for all of the Western democracies; it’s the same thing. One is identity politics on the Left has been brewing for a long time. I’ve been a professor since 1995 at the University of Virginia and now at New York University; so I’ve watched identity politics get stronger and stronger; more focused on matrices of oppression – straight white males this and straight white males that — and after a while, as I forget who pointed out in the current election, if you keep treating white men as an identity group, you keep saying that “they are terrible; they are evil” — eventually they become just like another identity group and they voted their racial interests, in a sense you might say. So identity politics on the Left eventually triggers identity politics on the Right.

Translation: the people whom the elitist liberals despise have revolted.

They resent being called “bitter clingers” or a “basket of deplorables” and they fought back in the one arena were the have the most political power — at the ballot box. This was true of white males (the great villains of identity politics) but also of the women who like their husbands and boyfriends (a majority of married women voted for Trump) and decent people who dislike the racial, gender and sexual hustle.

A Trump vote was a very blunt instrument, since Trump was a deeply flawed candidate, but given the choice between the arrogant elitists and Trump, Americans who were tired of being demeaned, tired of being told they had to accept being victims of discrimination, and tired of being told that they needed to change to be like the elitists, revolted.

Media Arrogance and the Trump Victory

From, of all places, CBS News, a biting critique of the elitist liberal attitudes of the media.

The writer notes that a lot of Americans, and Trump voters, hate the media. He then asks:

And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.

It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?

We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.

You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.

This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!

That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.

Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.

That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads us to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, we retreat further into our bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong. [emphasis in original]

The media (and liberals generally) have been going through the motions of taking stock and rethinking and reassessing some of their attitudes and practices.

But the toxic cultural prejudices that afflict the media (and liberals generally) are deeply ingrained, and part of a very insular and parochial culture. The odds favor only the most superficial self-examination, after which they will go back to their smug elitism.

Hillary Clinton: Elitist Snob Demeans Lots of People

It was the id of elitist liberals showing itself, the now famous comment by Hillary Clinton about how Donald Trump’s backers belong to a “basket of deplorables.”

But Clinton has a long history of demeaning people whom she stereotypes as not sharing her elitist liberal views. From Front Page Magazine:

Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” remark revealed her utter contempt for ordinary Americans, which stretches back decades. Before an adoring audience of wealthy elites, Hillary dismissed millions of American citizens, who happen to support her opponent Donald Trump, as being “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” She said they are “irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

Hillary Clinton had no compunctions about branding millions of her fellow citizens “irredeemable” and “not America,” while saying on another occasion that we must show “respect” to our enemies and “empathize with their perspective and point of view.” Moreover, she wants to vastly enlarge the basket for “refugees” admitted from the Middle East, without sufficiently robust vetting in place first to make sure that jihadist terrorists don’t find their way into that basket.

After coming under withering attack for insulting so many hardworking, patriotic Americans, Hillary half-apologized: “I regret saying ‘half’ – that was wrong.” What is really wrong is Hillary’s 100 percent condescending attitude towards ordinary Americans who do not inhabit her insular bubble of self-righteous snobs. And her condescension is a deeply ingrained character trait she has evidenced for years in her attitude towards stay-at-home moms, working people, parents who do not want government interference in how they raise their children and people with religious beliefs that are not in accord with her secular progressive ideology.

Stay-at-home moms, for example, are not worthy of Hillary’s respect. During her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, she strutted her status as a career woman while putting down those women who regard being a mother a full-time job.

“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” Hillary declared, “but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

The truth is that Hillary rode her husband Bill’s coattails in Arkansas and Washington to promote her own career as a partner in the Rose law firm and then onto the national stage.

“You know, I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette,” Hillary remarked during a joint 60 Minutes interview with her husband.

The only problem is that Hillary not only stood by her man while he was carrying on multiple affairs. She ran interference for Bill, demeaning and allegedly intimidating those women who had dared to come forward to tell the truth. Demeaning ordinary women who were exploited by her husband gave Hillary no pause as long as it helped advance the Clintons’ political fortunes.

Working people in industries that do not fit Hillary’s progressive ideology, such as combating climate change at all cost, are also disposable. In March 2016, Hillary added to her disposable basket the coal miners, who have risked their lives to help provide the fuel that powers this country. “We are going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she vowed.

Parents who want to be left alone to raise their children according to their deeply held moral values are also not worthy of Hillary’s respect.

Commenting in “Harper’s Magazine” in October 1992, Christopher Lasch, professor of history at the University of Rochester, pointed out that Hillary Clinton’s writings demonstrate how “from her perspective the ‘traditional’ family is, for the most part, an institution in need of therapy, an institution that stands in the way of children’s rights—and an obstacle to enlightened progress.”

Consistent with her “It Takes a Village” collectivist philosophy, Hillary enthusiastically supported the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which her husband signed as president. This treaty potentially pits children against their parents. Irrespective of the child’s age, parents would not have the final say on their child’s access to materials the parents find to be morally offensive.

Article 12(1) provides that “States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”

Article 13 of the Convention guarantees each child the legal right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child's choice.” (Emphasis added)

Article 37 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child provides for free legal services and access to the courts for any child who thinks that his or her “liberty” has been violated by a parent.

The United Nations, through an unaccountable committee of experts, would have the power to monitor each State Party’s compliance with the Convention’s provisions and to establish norms in implementing the Convention that may become part of customary international law.

Thus, if a child does not want to accompany his or her family to the family’s house of worship, the parents risk being dragged into court by the resisting child if the parents do not submit to the child’s wishes. The parents are responsible for keeping a roof over the child’s head and making sure the child is well taken care of. But when it comes to matters of faith while the child is in the parents’ care, the rules of the global UN village put the ultimate decision-making power into the hands of the child and the state.

Indeed, Hillary wants to change ordinary Americans’ religious beliefs that get in the way of her progressive globalist agenda. At the Women in the World Summit last year, Hillary said that in order to fully secure the reproductive rights of women, “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Hillary demeaned the sincerely held religious belief in the sanctity of life held by millions of Americans, reminiscent of President Obama’s contemptuous ‘clinging to religion’ quote back in 2008. People with such beliefs belong in Hillary’s basket of “deplorable sexists,” as far as she is concerned.

Hillary Clinton’s contempt for the beliefs, livelihoods and concerns of ordinary Americans is deplorable, not the millions who were targets of her invective.

The Smug Style of Liberalism

From the left leaning Vox, a perceptive essay about “The smug style in American liberalism.” The author (one Emmett Rensin) seems to be not so much a conservative but an old labor leftist, with a large dollop of populism.

Some choice quotes:

There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.

In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.

It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.

The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography.

Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1948, in the immediate wake of Franklin Roosevelt, 66 percent of manual laborers voted for Democrats, along with 60 percent of farmers. In 1964, it was 55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent.

The white working class in particular saw even sharper declines. Despite historic advantages with both poor and middle-class white voters, by 2012 Democrats possessed only a 2-point advantage among poor white voters. Among white voters making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, the GOP has taken a 17-point lead.

Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt The consequence was a shift in liberalism’s intellectual center of gravity. A movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the center of the country to its cities and elite enclaves. Minority voters remained, but bereft of the material and social capital required to dominate elite decision-making, they were largely excluded from an agenda driven by the new Democratic core: the educated, the coastal, and the professional.

It is not that these forces captured the party so much as it fell to them. When the laborer left, they remained.

And later:

Nothing is more confounding to the smug style than the fact that the average Republican is better educated and has a higher IQ than the average Democrat. That for every overpowered study finding superior liberal open-mindedness and intellect and knowledge, there is one to suggest that Republicans have the better of these qualities.

Most damning, perhaps, to the fancy liberal self-conception: Republicans score higher in susceptibility to persuasion. They are willing to change their minds more often.

The Republican coalition tends toward the center: educated enough, smart enough, informed enough.

The Democratic coalition in the 21st century is bifurcated: It has the postgraduates, but it has the disenfranchised urban poor as well, a group better defined by race and immigration status than by class. There are more Americans without high school diplomas than in possession of doctoral degrees. The math proceeds from there.

Why does smugness to dominate the liberal culture?

As we have suggested, liberals are better able to cocoon themselves among like-minded people. They likely had liberal high school teachers, but most certainly had overwhelmingly liberal college professors. They self-select into professions defined by strongly (often monolithically) liberal or left politics (academia, journalism, the government regulatory and welfare state). They segregate themselves into ghettos (like Milwaukee’s East Side) and mostly interact with people like themselves. They get their news from liberal outlets.

While conservatives can isolate themselves to a degree, they cannot avoid the liberal indoctrination in college, nor exposure to the liberal media (whether it be the New York Times or the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel). They are more likely to work in settings where politics is a bit peripheral and there is some diversity of opinion.

Thus liberal smugness is not justified by superior knowledge, or superior reasoning ability, or superior open-mindedness. It is simply the result of an intense tribal mentality.

Thus liberals richly deserve to have lost the support of the white working class. But this working class populism can play out in different ways: voting for Reagan or voting for Trump, for example. Not all ways of opposing liberal smugness are equal.

It’s All Your Fault

Obama: Hypocrite on Private Schools

This issue is typical of how liberals think. They condemn parents who send their kids to private schools, but send their own kids to private schools (or are ensconced in affluent suburbs were the public schools are quite elite).

They want to force the masses onto public transit, while they feel free to drive their Priuses wherever it’s convenient for them.

A few decades ago, they were supporting the massive busing of school children to achieve racial balance in public schools. But somehow, mostly black kids, and sometimes working class whites got bussed. The white liberals’ kids virtually never did.

They are strong proponents of “social justice” — imposed on other people by people like themselves.

Who Needs an AR-15?

From, of all places, CNN:



We don’t happen to believe that the Second Amendment protects citizen’s right to own what are essentially military weapons.

On the other hand, the 1994-2004 assault weapons ban was a failure, providing no reduction in gun crime.

As with so many of the things that elitist liberals favor, the desire to ban assault weapons is driven by cultural bias rather than hard-nosed policy analysis. Gun people are, to the liberals, “the other,” who don’t sufficiently obey their “betters,” and need to be put in their place.

The Cultural Bias Behind Gun Control

From Frontpage Magazine:

But media-stoked irrational hysteria about gun violence isn’t the only reason we are hearing calls for more gun control. Politics is a factor as well. According to the New York Times, while 60% of Republicans have a gun in the house, only 25% of Democrats do. “Whether someone owns a gun,” Nate Silver writes, “is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South or a number of other demographic characteristics.” That’s why Obama used the Newtown killings to bully the Republicans into caving on his demands for higher taxes. Like class warfare, gun control is a reliable issue for Democrats to exploit for political gain no matter how ineffective the resulting policies. Just as the soak-the-rich policies dominating the Democrats’ solutions to the “fiscal cliff” will do nothing to reduce the deficit and control spending, so too more gun control will not stop tragedies like the Newtown massacre.

Gun control laws, then, represent yet another instance of the progressive ideology that distrusts the average person to control his own life, and so demands ever greater regulatory intrusion into private life that necessarily expands the scope and power of the government. Restrictions on guns assume that most people, especially those conservative “bitter clingers to guns and religion,” as Obama called them, are too untrustworthy or incapable or stupid to own and carry a weapon. Such laws are written by elite snobs who think they know how to run your life better than you do, just as progressive economic policy is predicated on the belief that the federal government has a right to confiscate your money because it knows how to spend it more efficiently or justly.

In the end, the progressive point is not to solve problems that history shows big government is usually incapable of doing without extracting prohibitive costs. The point is to expand the leviathan state at the expense of individual freedom and autonomy, based on a contempt for ordinary people whom progressives at heart believe are not as worthy of freedom as they are. The emotional excesses that surround a tragedy like the Newtown massacre are merely the camouflage for advancing this assault on freedom.

Gun, control, in other words is merely a symbolic issue. Liberals want to put people whom they define as “the other” in their place, and symbolicly vindicate their own claimed lifestyle superiority. It fundamentally, deep down, has nothing to do with decreasing gun violence.

Cramping the Style of the Street Car

One of the fiascoes of Milwaukee City government in recent history is a plan to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money to build a streetcar line that connects the trendy, affluent east side (where most people have cars, and where bus service is good) to the train station on St. Paul Street.

It will do no good for people who live on the suburbs. It will do no good for black people who live on the city’s North Side. It will do no good for people who live on the South Side. It will do no good for people who live in the Marquette area. It quite clearly reflects, not sober policy analysis, but rather the fetish of certain elites with mass, government planned and run transportation.

The costs of relocating utility lines to make way for the streetcar will be massive, and the City of Milwaukee has been demanding that ratepayers throughout the entire service areas of the affected utilities (the vast majority of whom will get no benefit at all from the project) should be forced to pay these costs.

Now enter the The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which today urged at a public hearing of the Public Service Commission that utilities not be forced to foist on ratepayers the entire relocation costs. According to the Institute:

September 27, 2012, Milwaukee, WI - Brett Healy and his fellow utility ratepayers, represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (“WILL”), scored a significant victory in today’s proceedings before the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. The City of Milwaukee had argued that the construction of its 2.1 mile downtown streetcar project is a proper exercise of its police power to promote the public safety and welfare, and therefore it has the legal right to force the utilities that will be affected by the project (and their ratepayers) to absorb all of the costs for the relocation or reconstruction of their facilities. Those costs have been estimated at more than $50 million. The City, which expects to essentially pay for the $65 million project with federal funds, has no room in its project budget to pay even one dollar of utility relocation costs.

The Commission declined to rule today that the construction of the streetcar project is a proper exercise of the City’s police power, setting that issue for a later hearing. More importantly, however, the Commission held that even if the streetcar project is a proper exercise of the City’s power, the City cannot impose all of the relocation costs on the utilities that will be affected. Only those costs that the Commission finds to be “reasonable” can be shifted to the utilities. The Chairman of the Commission particularly noted that the Commission’s duty is to protect Wisconsin’s utility ratepayers, and expressed serious reservations that it would be appropriate for the City to pass on millions of dollars in costs to Southeastern Wisconsin utility ratepayers who will receive no benefit from the City’s project. The Commission rejected the City’s contention that it had no jurisdiction to decide the cost issue, and said that it would hold a hearing to determine what costs it would permit the City to pass on to the utilities and their ratepayers.

Rick Esenberg, President and General Counsel of WILL, said “this is a clear victory for our clients and for the concept of government accountability. The Public Service Commission has done what we asked it to do, and will take a close look at the City’s decision to impose millions of dollars in costs on ratepayers who do not live in the City. We are confident that the Commission will decide that, if the City wants to move forward with the streetcar project, the City’s taxpayers should pay for it.”

Brett Healy, who originally brought the matter before the Commission, said “it’s clear that the City has no room in its budget for paying any of the utility costs and equally clear that the Commission will not let the City get away with shifting all, or even most, of those costs to utility customers. It’s time for the City to let its taxpayers know that the streetcar project cannot be financed with “free” federal dollars, and that it will likely cost them in substantially increased property taxes at the end of the day.”

This mania for mass transit among liberal elites, as we have noted before, reflects the resentment of these elites at the uppity nature of ordinary Americans. They want to live where they want to live. They want to drive their cars where they want to. They don’t want to have to conform their lifestyles to what urban planners think is best.

And the liberal elites hate that hugely.

Liberal Methodist Elites Demean African Methodists

The United Methodist Church is one of those “mainstream Protestant” denominations that are controlled (in the U.S.) by liberal, fundamentally secular elites.

But Methodism has a long history of evangelism in Africa, and these U.S. elites have made the mistake of allowing African Methodists the right to participate in the affairs of the denomination on an equal basis. The result: there is a majority in decision-making bodies against the gay agenda.

That’s what happens when you give people from Africa equal treatment.

So what do the U.S. Methodist elites do? They demean Africans.

From Juicy Ecumenism:

Recently United Methodist Bishop Minerva Carcano of Phoenix chastised the just concluded governing General Conference of her church for failing to overturn United Methodism’s biblical teachings about marriage and sexual ethics.

“Our homophobia was blatant as we heard delegates compare homosexuality to bestiality, and voice other dehumanizing expressions against our LGBT brothers and sisters,” she complained in a column. She targeted the African delegates specifically.

“Delegates from Africa once again proclaimed that their anti-homosexual stand was what U.S. missionaries taught them. I sat there wondering when our African delegates will grow up. It has been 200 years since U.S. Methodist missionaries began their work of evangelization on the continent of Africa; long enough for African Methodists to do their own thinking about this concern and others. Our conservative U.S. United Methodists continue to depend on the conservative vote of African and Filipino delegates to maintain our exclusionary position on homosexuality, a position I believe would be changed for the inclusion of our LGBT sisters and brothers if a U.S. vote for a U.S. context were taken. The manner in which we deal with the concern of homosexuality affects all of ministry in the U.S., and we are the poorer for it. It is time for us to let go of our wrong position and be the church of Christ Jesus, a church that excludes no one.”

As to the “bestiality” allusion, Carcano was echoing the New York Times report on General Conference, which said:

Several Americans begged delegates to ‘hear the pain’ of gay church members. Moments later, a delegate from Africa said in Swahili that saying that a homosexual person was created by God was like saying “that God created me to live with animals.”

The New York Times then quoted a gay advocacy caucus spokesman:

The Rev. Troy Plummer, executive director of the Reconciling Ministries Network, which advocates full inclusion of gay people, said in an interview: ‘I’m tired of being compared to beasts in our church. Even if our world understandings differ, it’s just horrendous. That our perspectives differ is the truth, and we just voted 61 to 39 percent that we can’t tell that truth.’

The ostensible beastiality quote that Carcano and Plummer cited is based on a Congolese delegate who said:

“I rise to stand against this reasoning for the following reasons. First, the theme of our general conference is to make disciples for the transformation of the world. If we accept homosexuality, it means that the world transforms the church on homosexuality. You say a homosexual person is created by God the way he is or she is. I stand to say that that is not true. If we say that this is the way that God created them I refuse to accept that when they say ‘I am homosexual, I was created like this.’ Because God is a loving God, He cannot create a person with something that makes him or her suffer. If another person would come to the church and say, ‘God created me to live with animals,’ if we say ‘No’ it doesn’t mean we don’t love that person. I stand to say that the grace of God is for all people, but the grace of God does not allow us to sin. I ask to not accept this petition.”

The African delegate was not comparing homosexuality to beastiality, as Bishop Carcano claimed. Nor was he comparing homosexuals to “beasts,” as the caucus group spokesman claimed. Instead, the Congolese was saying the church’s mission is to “make disciples for the transformation of the world.” He noted that affirming homosexual behavior would be to allow the world to transform the church.

Allowing the world to transform the church has been the seeming mission for liberal bishops in America for many decades. The result is 3.5 million lost members in America. Carcano’s own Desert Southwest Conference is now down to under 39,000, having lost nearly 17 percent in the last 10 years alone. Meanwhile, there are over 2.2 million United Methodists under the 3 bishops in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The African churches are growing because they believe in transformation through the Gospel. Their success sadly earns them condemnation from some liberal, declining areas in the U.S. that are making their churches irrelevant by endlessly seeking accommodation with American secular culture.

One of the commenters on the Juicy Ecumenism website noted that the U.S. Methodist elites are engaged in “cultural colonialism.” That’s a good assessment.

But also note that these liberal elites always claim to be on the side of “people of color,” on the side of poor people and on the side of “oppressed” people of the Third World.

But what happens when those people get uppity, and fail to serve the agenda of their First World patrons? They get demeaned and derided.

Liberal Elitist Bigotry: Bill Maher & Michael Moore Say Americans Are Like Dogs

To state the obvious: not all liberals are as bigoted as Maher and Moore.

But to state the less obvious: liberals have created for themselves a culture where this kind of bigotry is nourished, and flourishes