2018 Postmoderns: Children of Pro-Slavery Liberals

Today’s postmoderns are the offspring of the pro-slavery crowd of 1860.

Postmoderns have rejected the concept of truth and chosen lies. They have rejected reality in favor of delusion. They are not content that we hear their arguments; rather, we must accept their position as our own. There is no room for a free conscience or an alternative opinion.

The courts have said that what a woman carries in her womb is a “product of conception” and not a human life. We must affirm that abortion is not an evil but a profound good. The courts have redefined marriage to accommodate two men or two women. The larger population is expected to embrace this redefinition. To refuse is to be called hateful and homophobic, sued, fined and perhaps incarcerated.

When Johnny says he is really Sally, we are pressured by the culture and increasingly by the force of law to accept Johnny’s delusion as “reality.” We are mandated to violate our own conscience and abandon the reality of 6500 genes that declare Johnny is a boy. We are to identify him as a girl and call him Sally.

Today, postmoderns promote evil as good.

This is not the first profound division in our nation’s history. The American Civil War was preceded by a divide over the nature of the “union” and the issue of slavery. A young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln took on the task of clarifying the divide in his generation and leading the nation back to unity.

In 1858, Lincoln, the Republican candidate for senate, challenged the incumbent from Illinois, Democrat Stephen Douglas. The seven Lincoln–Douglas debates helped prepare Lincoln for a later run for the presidency.

Democrats the party of slavery

During the time of slavery in the US, the Democrats were the party of slavery. Most slave plantations were operated in states with Democratic majorities. They denied the humanity of Africans. The slave culture rejected the Declaration of Independence affirmation that “all men are created equal.” Senator Douglas fairly represented the position of the Democratic Party toward slavery.

On February 27, 1860, Lincoln, an unannounced candidate for president, gave what became known as the Cooper Union Address in New York City. This speech marked a turning point in Lincoln’s presidential ambitions and laid the foundations for opposing the slave culture and institutions represented by Douglas and the Democrats.

Lincoln spent months preparing the speech, doing impeccable research to ensure that his facts and arguments were sound. He understood what was at stake in the battle between slavery and freedom. In that context, he accused the slave states of a willingness to destroy the government:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

He then declares that the slave states will not stand by if a Republican is elected President. They will bring the government down and blame the Republicans for dissolving the union:

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

What “woke” looked like 150 years ago

Lincoln argued for Republican restraint.

A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace … one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.

“What will satisfy them [the opposition]?” The answer has striking similarity to today’s climate in the West. Free states must not only accept the slave states’ arguments, but join them in calling the evil good. Only the abdication of truth and free conscience will satisfy the opposition.

What will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

Both then and now, to be woke is to crucify one’s conscience and assent to a lie.

Slavery was considered morally right!

Democrats demanded that the free states disavow their own constitutions and stop speaking against slavery. Lincoln pointed out that the free states had not tried to interfere against the slave states; it was simply the existence of free state constitutions and free people speaking against slavery that riled the slave states.

But we do let them alone – have never disturbed them – so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.

And this was so because the slave states considered slavery morally right and thus legally right and not subject to challenge.

Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.