For all the craziness in the world, there isn’t much that can match the sheer lunacy of liberals standing for both homosexuality and Islam at the same time. Islamic law calls for death for gays. How can we explain why the left loves Islam they way they do?

The best I can come up with is that gays and Muslims share one thing in common: they’re both minorities in the Western world, and the left is all for standing up for minorities.

It’s a reason. I’m not saying it’s a good one. It’s filled with contradictions. A closer look at it, though, reveals an even worse paradox within liberalism.

Liberals and Power

The reasoning begins with the left’s standard opposition to established power, and to whoever or whatever group is seen as holding that power.

As Jeffrey Hart wrote in 1972, and National Review just recently re-published, the liberal educated class

views history as a series of recurring moral melodramas in which villains or oppressors are continually defeated by their victims. One after another, kings, religious establishments, slave-owners, malefactors of great wealth and tyrants of various kinds, have been brought to earth by those whom they have wronged. It is a secularized version of “the last shall be first.”

This way of looking at the world, says Hart,

“tends habitually to structure reality in terms of what [Kenneth R.] Minogue calls “suffering situations.” As a matter of settled moral habit this sensibility instantly structures events in the political realm in terms of suffering, in terms of oppressor and victim.

The oppressor is bad, the victim is good. Thus a professor blogging at the American Mathematical Society can say that all “cis white men” should quit their jobs or take a demotion just for being members of that group.

No Human Motivation Is All Bad

This isn’t all bad. There was, after all, a day when people of color had no voice, not even a vote. There was a day (I’m old enough to recall it myself) when most people thought a young woman had just four decent career options to choose from: secretary, nurse, teacher or waitress.

There was a day, in other words, when liberals arguably stood for true freedom and justice for those who lacked power in society. But the left lost track of the fact that the problem was never power, but abuse of power. No social system can work without some structure, which means some people must have more power than others. It’s unavoidable. It’s even good: a society without order will quickly collapse.

Power Isn’t All Bad — Unless You Ask a Liberal

And power can be used for others’ good. Jesus explained it in just three sentences:

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Matthew 20:25-28)

Blind to this, though, liberals see power as one leg of a triad, linked inseparably with oppression, the second leg. The third leg is whichever group is guilty of holding that power. Wherever one leg of that triad exists, the other two are there along with it. Thus if there’s a dominant culture, it has power, and it’s bad. In fact it’s pretty much all bad. Other people don’t have power and they’re not bad. It’s just that easy.

If that sounds too simple to be true, consider the claim that all whites are racist and no non-whites can be.

Consistency isn’t the left’s strong point — which is why liberals can support Islam.

And that’s how Islam, being a minority group, is granted such favor from the left. It’s a minority group, therefore it’s an oppressed group, and thus it’s not bad — even though it was founded in blood, conquest and rape, and continues to mandate death to gays.

The Greater Contradiction on the Left

But the left has committed itself to an even greater contradiction along the way. Over the past few decades, liberals have gained positions of enormous power in education, media, publishing and the arts. Seeing themselves as champions of the weak against the power of straight “cis” white males, they’ve blinded themselves to the fact that they’ve become the Western world’s dominant culture, holders of tremendous power.

And now the left has become a group united in throwing its weight around in order to stop (what they see as) a powerful group throwing its weight around. If they were truly consistent with their own values, they’d be casting themselves out of their own positions of power.

I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. Consistency isn’t the left’s strong point — which is why liberals can support Islam.

I said at the beginning I might be able to suggest a reason they do that. I didn’t promise it would be a good one.