RUSH: I’ll tell you, there’s something else I’d like to spend some time on today and develop further if it works out. I’m making no commitments. Hillary Clinton has come out today for gay marriage. I warned you about this months ago.
This issue has now catapulted to the top seemingly of everybody’s list. It’s stunning the way this has happened. In the millennial generation, 25 and under, it’s all that matters. Gay marriage. Young conservatives 30 and under, 35 and other, Manhattan bar scene conservative: Gay marriage, all that matters. People are willing to leave the party if the party doesn’t change its mind, and you know how it’s happening? Not just on the basis that love is a wonderful thing and who are we to say somebody could or could not love somebody.
It’s also coming under the umbrella of freedom. This is something that concerns me, because I think “freedom” is being misapplied or maybe incorrectly defined. Freedom does not mean hedonism. Freedom does not mean the sybaritic pursuits, “Just do what you want.”
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RUSH: One of the things here that the left does, that the Democrat Party does, is they pretend to be the party of freedom and liberation. You talk about marketing? What a masterful marketing trick they have pulled off here, with the notion that they are the party of freedom and liberation when, in fact, it’s just the opposite. You see, the left’s big lie is that government frees people and that only government can liberate people, when really it’s just the opposite.
That’s why the left is constantly looking for new groups that they can cast as victims. I mean, we acknowledge that the left seeks to victimize everybody. But many people think that it’s so that they can provide benefits and grow the welfare state — and that’s, in part, true. But there’s another hideous reason for trying to put so many people into different groups of victims, and it is that those groups need protection. From whom? Mean-spirited, extremist, radical, right-wingers!
Who are the groups all of a sudden or for all times who need protection? Gays, they need to be liberated by the government. Blacks, Hispanics, women, left-handed people, you name it. Anyone they can claim is being discriminated against and who must be protected by government, can then be liberated by government. So the Democrats set themselves up as these great liberators, when in fact they stigmatize people. They make them members of groups, they plug them into these groups, and they cease to exist as individuals.
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RUSH: Okay, this is crucial. Remember what we’re about here: Informing people, educating people, while, at the same time, interesting everybody with a good show. We’re trying to explain things, making the complex understandable. Now, a lot of things are happening in the world today, and we could fit them all in under one umbrella: Radical liberalism. Socialism. Communism. Whatever you want to call it, it’s radical, and it is governing not just our country, but the world.
Our country used to be an exception to this kind of governance. But now we have been ensnared by it, to the point that “freedom” is taking on a whole new meaning, incorrectly and dangerously so. I might say — and I know I’m gonna make some people mad by saying this. But this very broad definition of freedom that is used to, for example, justify gay marriage, is being advanced not just by radical leftists but by libertarians as well, and even some conservatives.
But the reason the whole issue of freedom is working against us… Ron Paul said something, and I’ve mentioned this before, in his so-called farewell address to Congress when he left. This was his last speech before leaving the House of Representatives. He said he couldn’t believe how difficult it was, or is, to sell freedom to people. Now, he meant freedom from government, self-reliance, responsibility, taking control of your own life and making the most of it as a concept.
The Republican National Convention? My gosh, from the standpoint of timely and timeless American tradition, it was terrific. One story after another of how up-from-nothing success occurred. Hard work. You know, people smirk now when you tell ’em that kind of a story. “Yeah, I worked hard.” You can see it, too. You can. You can watch people react to a politician on TV or anybody who talks about, “Yeah, I came from nothing. I worked really hard. My parents raised me right.
“I remember doing two or three jobs to pay my way through school,” and people smirk at it now. What’s happened is the Democrats/the left have successfully convinced people that they are the party of freedom, that they are the party of liberation, that they free people from constraints or bondage or what have you. For the longest time I noted, and I always laughed at it — and, as usual, I should have taken it more seriously than I did, I remember when Bill Clinton was inaugurated.
You know, in the celebrations that takes place a week before the inauguration, all these liberals showed up and they had parties in Washington on the Mall. Every day people like Aretha Franklin would get up and sing songs about, “We shall overcome! We have overcome!” like they just got out of jail, like they were just freed from tyranny. I sat there and laughed, and said, “What kind of locoweeds are these people?” At the time I didn’t have the maturity — or the experience, is probably a better thing to say — to understand what was really going on.
These people really do believe that those of us who are not liberals want to constrain them from having a good time. We want to punish them if they have a good time. We want to deny them fun. We are rock rigid, and then after that we are judgmental — and why is that? Well, because they view us as people with a moral code, and they don’t want a moral code. A moral code itself is punishing! A moral code has lines beyond which you’re not supposed to go, and that’s not fun.
“The people in charge of that are a bunch of old-fashioned, dryball, fuddy-duddies who go to church every Sunday and have sex once a year (and then think they’re committing sin), and we don’t want to have those people running our lives.” The Democrat Party comes along and agrees with them and says, “Yeah, well, we’re here to liberate you. We are the party that will free you.” When, in fact, at the end of the day it’s just the exact opposite.
But that’s why the Democrat Party is looking constantly for new groups that they can cast as victims, groups that need protection from us, that need protection from the Christian right. They need protection from conservatives like Sarah Palin, and me, and whoever else you care to name. Gays and blacks are oppressed. I mean, that’s the message, in 2013 America: “There are large groups of Americans still under the yoke of oppression.” They are made to believe that. They go through their day believing that they are oppressed.
When a Democrat wins an election, that’s when they think they’re set free. It’s the most amazing thing! War on Women? What do you think that really was? In addition to being a vote-getting scheme, it was a continuation of this notion that women are oppressed and the Democrats will free them. “You want contraception every day paid for by somebody else so you can make love as often as you want? Here it is! We’re gonna make it possible for you, and we’re not gonna judge you.
“We love you more than anybody in the world. Go ahead and do whatever you want to do! We’re the party of freedom.” Anybody that they can claim is being discriminated against must be protected by the government. So there’s the primary need for government. “Government can protect people from the oppressive right wing!” The left has to have some group to champion. So gay marriage, gay rights is the new cause celebre of the day. At the same time the left needs a group to champion, they need a group to demonize.
The group to demonize, of course, is the people who are opposed to gay marriage — and to give young people the sense of being part of some re-creation of the civil rights era, to give young people the illusory the idea that they are part of some big movement that is championing freedom and love and all of these wonderful, horizon-expanding things that the Republican Party doesn’t want you to do. “They don’t want you to do that. They don’t want you to do this. They don’t want you to have fun over there and no fun over here. But we the Democrats are here to liberate you!”
That’s why Obama had to make a big deal out of pretending he was at Selma when he couldn’t find it on a map before that day. He had to pretend he was part of it, civil rights movement. But if you notice, blacks have never been liberated, have they? The really truly liberated blacks are conservative Republican blacks, and look what happens to them and look what’s said about them? The left portrays these people, or themselves, as the great liberators of everybody, the champions of freedom. When in reality that’s who we are.
Now, I ran across something, there’s a book out there. I had not heard of this book. It’s by Os Guinness. Maybe some of you have heard of Os Guinness. His book is A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future. I want to read you just a short little paragraph excerpt that I think is probably a summary, a teaser summary of the book.
“Americans today are heedlessly pursuing a vision of freedom that is short-lived and suicidal. Once again, freedom without virtue, leadership without character, business without trust, law without customs, education without meaning and medicine, science and technology without human considerations can end only in disaster.”
Now, what does that mean? We have low-information voters tuning in, and they hear me reading that, do you think they get it? I don’t know. Not quite sure. I understand it instinctively. Freedom without virtue isn’t freedom. It will eventually destroy a society. Freedom without morality. Freedom without proper constraints and restraints. Freedom without an accompanying sense of responsibility. Freedom without a spine or a spinal cord of morality. We’re not talking freedom. But in today’s modern vernacular, we are. To young people today, that’s exactly what freedom is.
Freedom is hedonism. Freedom is your sybaritic pursuits. You do whatever you want, and as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else, there’s nothing wrong with it. And it’s the “as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else,” that’s where the trouble begins. Because is there great harm to a society when an age-old, I mean, as old as humanity itself custom is corrupted? Any custom, any tradition that has demonstrated it’s usefulness, its primacy over hundreds of thousands of years, is a freedom that would corrupt that, actually good? Is it virtuous? It isn’t.
But that’s where we are right now, and we are here because the Democrats have succeeded in convincing so many people they’re oppressed. So many people are convinced that they need to be liberated. And the Republican Party’s the people that have everybody in chains. And the Republican Party wouldn’t know chains if they ran into ’em on a snow covered road. The Republican Party right now is willing to let pretty much anybody have whatever they want in their process of rebranding. Just do battle with this image that they are the oppresses. But that’s what this is really boiled down to.
It’s about the brand problem of the Republican Party, that’s what it is. It’s old-fashioned antifun, bunch of super-moralistic Christians, Victorians, boring, dryball, no fun kind of people who are so mean they would even deny people the freedom to love somebody else.
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RUSH: So what do we have here, folks? What is it that’s going on? Well, same-sex marriage, homosexual marriage is just the latest way to portray Republicans as oppressors. After they get same-sex marriage, it will be on to something else. They always have to have a cause that is liberation related and it’s the Republicans who are the oppressors. But have you ever noticed all of the left’s solutions for more freedom always involve us giving to government more control over our lives. We always end up expanding government. We always end up giving up a little freedom in order to be liberated by the left.
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The second thing is, homosexual marriage. If the party makes that something official that they support, they’re not gonna pull the homosexual activist voters away from the Democrat Party, but they are going to cause their base to stay home and throw their hands up in utter frustration. Now, whether they like it or not, the Republican Party’s base is sufficiently large that they cannot do without them. And their problem is they don’t like ’em. It really isn’t any more complicated than that.
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RUSH: Okay. So same-sex marriage. The latest way to show the Republicans are oppressors. And the next group, illegal aliens. They are, in fact, they may already be, the next group sharing the stage with the same-sex marriage crowd. Illegal aliens, the next cause celebre to demonstrate the oppressor Republicans.
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