The left's boogie man theory of political debate

Peter Heck:

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While the internet is full of classic Shapiro debate moments, speeches, and sound bites, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him better than his recent conversation with Shannon Bream about the left’s hatred, not of Donald Trump, but of Vice President Mike Pence.

Shapiro started off by confronting the painfully unhinged New York Times writer Frank Bruni’s assessment that impeaching Trump would only bring about a “bigot,” “liar,” and “self-infatuated holy terror” in Pence. Exposing the boy-who-cried-extremist credibility problem the left has when it comes to this sort of thing, Shapiro pointed out how McCain was once portrayed as radically unstable, then Romney was a crazy extremist, now Trump is a deranged madman, but there’s always someone worse according to the left…whoever the next person is that the right supports. It gets tiresome and ineffective politically.

But where Shapiro earned my standing ovation was when he articulated, perhaps better than I’ve ever heard done before on television, how and why it is Pence’s Christianity that makes him such a hated figure to progressives in America – from media to politics to entertainment:

“[T]here’s a baseline level of hatred, really, for Christians, on the cultural Left; it’s most evident in New York and Los Angeles, places where I’ve spent a lot of time. There’s this belief that everybody who deeply believes their faith is actually, secretly a bigot, that the reason they are acting out their religion in public is not because they believe their religion, but because they are using the religion as a cover for bigotry. It’s the same sort of thing that they’ve used with regard to Jack Phillips over at Masterpiece Cakeshop; really, he hates gay people; it’s not that he’s a Christian who believes he has to abide by his religious standards; it’s that he secretly hates gay people and trans people and he’s just using religion as a cover. They say the same sort of thing about Mike Pence; truly there’s a tyrannical tendency among religious people, and then they just use Jesus or the Bible as an excuse.”

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Think about it: liberals actually believe that Christians like Pence would compel every woman in America to wear bonnets and red dresses. They fear it and believe it no matter how ludicrous it is. Perhaps the origin of that fear comes from the fact that when they themselves have the opportunity to harness the power of government, they are happily compelling non-progressives to participate in activities against their will and conscience.
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Liberalism is the religion of the left and they are willing to use the coercive power of the state to impose it on non-believers.  Their fear of religious people appears to be based on their own warped sense of morality and imposing it by force.