How Are Ferguson, Religious Liberty Narratives Related?
On Monday’s “Rush Limbaugh Show,” the outspoken radio talk-show host offered his thoughts on the Left’s sudden outcry over Indiana’s religious liberty law that merely reiterates what the Constitution has always stipulated. Limbaugh compared the Left’s furious rebellion with the faux “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative in the shooting death of Michael Brown. What the two incidents boil down to is selective outrage and an insidious disregard for the facts.
“It’s not the perfect analogy, but it’s pretty close. We’ve got ‘hands up, don’t shoot,’ except in this case it’s supposedly discrimination against gays and lesbians and bisexuals and transgenders, and that’s not what it is. It’s a law that says the freedom of religion clause in the First Amendment has been affirmed. But you see, it’s selective outrage. …
”[T]he media is telling you that the governor of Indiana, Mike Pence – who we know here; he’s a good guy, he’s a good man – and the people of Indiana have decided that they don’t like gays and they don’t want gays anywhere in the state and they don’t want gays doing business there. So the gays say, ‘Fine! You don’t want us here? We’ll leave, and we’re gonna take all our business with us.’
“That’s not what the law is. But that’s how it’s being construed, that’s how it’s being portrayed. On one side we’ve got the facts, the history, the context, and it doesn’t matter. Over here we have what the media is saying about it. It’s purely emotional. It is driving people’s emotions and is creating almost a replica of the lie that ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ was. As I say, it’s not a perfect analogy, but terms helping you to understand what’s going on here, it might work.”