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Deconstructing #takingtherainbowback (Part II) [1]
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Date: 2023-06-08
This is Part II of my examination of Rabbi Kurt Schneider’s video “The Weaponization of Empathy—Gay Pride Month.” If you have yet to read the first part, I encourage you to do so, as that sets the stage. This diary will jump right in to about three minutes into Schneider’s video, his attempt to convince his audience that empathy is a landmine that they must avoid—that they’re being tricked into caring for and supporting their same-sex sisters and brothers.
From this point, I focus on specific phrases, if only to move through the video—by this point, as I noted in the other diary, I’d only made it through three minutes of content.
Schneider’s comments are blockquoted.
Common sense tells us when something is abnormal.
→Why is Schneider focusing on what’s normal? Someone as a Jewish advocate for Jesus would have to admit that Jesus’s alleged birth and death were highly abnormal. But of course our minds detect anomalies—that’s what functioning brains do: they distinguish items in the environment, if for no other reason than to discern reward or danger in one’s surroundings.
My heart goes out to those who have been born with same-sex attractions due to sin.
→Amazing. He acknowledges that this identity is inbuilt but then immediately judges that baby as having preloaded sin. There’s no way to reconcile this. That one sentence is cognitive dissonance.
Listen, intelligent design is built into creation.
→Opinion spoken as fact.
Anyone who has an open mind to the truth can recognize that intelligent design has been built into creation.
→More raw repetition, but now also flattery in an appeal meant to seduce the listener by playing to ego. Who doesn’t want to claim “an open mind to the truth”?
When we get an infection, for example, our bodies automatically create antibodies to combat the infection.
→Again, the rabbi presents LGBTQ people as internal threat, as disease, as plague.
Birds know to fly south in the winter to survive. What happens if all of a sudden birds stopped flying south for the winter and they all started flying north for the winter? Divine intelligence in creation would lead the bird population into extinction. And, in the same way as this, LGBTQ agenda is gaining steam. It’s the biggest measure of abortion that’s ever been introduced to society since the pill.
→There are so many things wrong with this insipid analogy. No one is saying all people are to become gay or to stop being heterosexual. So this whole argument by analogy falls apart. (Besides, would it really be divine intelligence if the architect allowed the extinction of birds due to one small fluke—wouldn’t it be creating that fluke in the first place? Couldn’t that fluke be modified so as to rescue and retain those birds? At any rate, the poles have flipped more than once in Earth’s history, so it’s not out of the question that some birds [not all birds—non-migratory birds exist] might fly to that new South pole if their understanding of electromagnetism changes. They would have to adjust to the new polar reality.)
Then, of course, the buzzwords of pregnancy termination or prevention are crammed all in one small space to really drive a neurological response, heightening the simultaneous firing of the part of the brain where those concepts would reside (hippocampus, the memory center; amygdala, the fear center; maybe even the hypothalamus and other parts of the limbic [feeling] system) to reinforce meaning and create an amplification of neural response, solidifying connections between associations.
I’m talking today about how we got to this place, where we’ve allowed this agenda to sweep over the Western world like a tidal wave and the way it got to this place. First of all, it was just demonic. It was just a result of satanic, a demonic darkness deceiving mankind and drawing men’s souls into agreement and alignment with untruth. That’s the first explanation.
→Literal demonization. Nothing is explained. There’s no substance at all to what the rabbi just said. These are billboard words, boilerplate, a Potemkin village of so-called explanation.
But the way that the enemy did that was largely through the deception, listen now, of empathy. The enemy weaponized empathy. He played on human emotions, because we as human beings care about one another. And so when we see somebody that’s being mistreated or being oppressed, all of a sudden we want to come to their rescue. And so we know people that are in the LGBTQ community and in times past people that were in that community were treated in a way that oftentimes was cruel. And so as a result of that playing on our emotions and our sympathy, we as a human people in the Western world decided to take up the cause of protecting those that were in the LGBTQ community. And we do need to protect human rights. We’re all created by the same creator. But there’s a difference between loving people and honoring them as human beings.
→What now? Come again?
There’s a difference between going that far versus going all the way over to the left and saying, ‘Not only do we love you and honor you and see you in the realm of human dignity as one that’s created by God,’ to go from that to now saying, ‘We go even beyond that and now we bless your behavior. We bless homosexuality. We bless transgenderism, and not only are we going to bless it but now, you know what, we’re going to push it on society.’
→So this is the heart of his argument, I would say. Schneider is intentionally conflating tolerating something and blessing it, tolerating another person’s gender identity or marital status (the fact that societally now same-sex couples can marry) and venerating it. These are two completely different things. Indeed, if such a status were blessed, then attacking it as this rabbi is doing would be considered taboo and the attack itself would not be tolerated. That’s the nature of items of worship. Human rights are sacrosanct in a liberal society. This man, this supposed teacher, would make human rights conditional, based on whether he and his listeners say those rights support something abnormal or demonic or are of unnatural design.
Just think about this. You’ve maybe gotten behind the LGBTQ agenda because your emotions, your human empathy has been exploited so that you’ve been manipulated to stand up for the oppressed.
→Huh? That’s an opinion dressed up as a hypothetical. Because it’s a hypothetical, even if it’s not personally true for the listener, not something he or she actually agrees with, the listener is obliged to hold it in mind as true, even if only temporarily, for whatever else this person is about to propose. Thus it gets tagged as ‘true’. It acquires the status of a belief. And even if the listener rejects that hypothetical in that instance, the vocalizer might return to that very theme, with those very words. Those words have already been tagged as true, so they begin to more permanently take on that status of truth, and the belief solidifies.
From 6:20 to 9:25 and onward, Schneider goes on this extended example of the school system being run by gay administrators and counselors, all conspiring, I guess, to intervene on children going through puberty to get them to transition. It’s a specious argument / guided visualization that involves a teenager being teased and called gay (also the rabbi throws in some stereotypes for good measure—“Maybe he’s creative, maybe he’s athletic and the bigger kids call him gay”) and then becomes so confused that the instance of being called gay is what turns the child gay, or at least puts the teen on the road to becoming.
Then the school counselor, anticipating this transformation, encourages the questioning instead of affirming the child “in his manhood.” (This type of rhetoric really only has heft when discussing boys, as it plays on gender stereotypes, the construction of masculinity.)
Such dreck, such gender conformity that is supposed to be sanctioned by the school counselor! But the rabbi paints this whole scenario as the school “separating your child from you.” That’s the disgusting idea he’s communicating—he’s trying his level best to drive a wedge between parents and their schools, the administrators, faculty and staff who are there to support children.
Just as with Covid, where fundamentalists told their followers to distrust the medical system, here we have a religious teacher telling his audience to distrust the school system. Brick by brick, these fundamentalists, these extremists, are encouraging more and more distance between their followers and the institutions of wider culture. The believer must make a choice between what is being presented as an article of faith and their role and relationship to society at large, in the very basic institutions that help society run.
It’s absolute lunacy. It’s madness. And it’s hostile towards the light and towards truth.
→This is his stripped-down thesis statement, the underlying sentiment that has run through his entire presentation. That the thesis is unsupported and inflammatory gives us all the hints in the world that what Schneider is telling us is not dispassionate but rather meant to play on our emotions.
By the by, Schneider somehow brings into his argument the Constitution of the United States, telling his audience that they need to vote in school administrators and school board members who will follow the Constitution “in their integrity.” If there were any doubt that this message was a piece of Christian nationalist propaganda, that mention rather clears up any ambiguity.
You and I need to be the light that God’s called us to be. We’re the light of the world. We’re the salt of the earth. And Jesus said, ‘If the salt loses its saltiness, what good is it?’ Have you been a victim of the weaponization of empathy? Have you been manipulated because you’re a loving person, because you care about people, to accept the LGBTQ agenda and even get behind it just because you weren’t able to separate your concern and empathy for someone versus the trajectory that getting behind that movement would eventually lead humankind into?
→ So he’s inviting the listener to think of themselves as victims and then tells them (though ostensibly in the form of a question) that they’ve been abused and mistreated, and precisely their empathy is proof of that. This is highly twisted, extremely convoluted. He’s turning a human endowment into a liability; and he’s instructing his audience to distrust that faculty, exactly that facility that he describes as human, the very engine that drives kindness and compassion. He’s telling them to switch it off.
→He says three times, around 13:00, that “God’s people are ashamed of the rainbow.” He constructs the sentence as an interrogatory: “Why are God’s people ashamed of the rainbow?” But it’s not in the rhetorical common ground where the position can be challenged; thus it becomes an incontestable statement. The fact that he repeats it three times in quick succession increases the chance that the listener will accept it uncritically.
“Beloved, now is the time. Now. If not now, when? We need to speak up. Listen, if you won’t speak up for truth, you’re going to get washed away by the flood. Jesus said, ‘If you’re ashamed of me and my words in this wicked and adulterous generation, I’m going to be ashamed of you when I come again in the glory of my father, with the holy angels.’” You need to be willing to take a few hits for righteousness’ sake. You will be rewarded for it. Great will be your reward in heaven.
Then he starts selling merch. Wow.
Rabbi Schneider also brought his views onto Eric Metaxas’ show, where they spent an entire hour exploring these themes. I plan to delve into that as well in the near future. Metaxas is a well-known Christian nationalist extremist, so the fact that he is promoting this crusade (Metaxas’s word, not mine) is concerning, to say the least. He must see the charge as simpatico with his own vision for reshaping America. You can check it out in the meantime.
Also, if you are curious, here is another instance of a Christian nationalist decrying the use of the rainbow as a symbol of LGBTQ outreach. This was posted months before Schneider’s campaign began.
Also, another religious figure, Jonathan Cahn, is making the rounds on the evangelical media circuit, linking the use of the rainbow (particularly Biden’s administration’s choice to bathe the White House in rainbow hues) to a demonic portal. He says that the use of the rainbow hearkens back to an ancient pagan goddess that “has the power to turn a man into a woman, a woman into a man.”
Overall, these instances strengthen the case that there seems to be a current movement in right-wing circles to turn their followers against LGBTQ persons for the use of this symbol which, incidentally, is a universal symbol that belongs to all persons at all times. These extremists are stoking resentment in the hearts of their followers.
Lastly, in case you made it through all of this deconstruction without having viewed Rabbi Schneider’s video, here it is in its entirety:
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