"Every individual had to work on him or herself to be decent, strong, courageous, and self-controlled, and every parent had to work, first and foremost, on raising such people."

In American Greatness, Dennis Prager writes about what he learned attending a high school,

...Though it was Jewish, this worldview could also be called “Judeo-Christian.” Students at traditionally Christian schools were immersed in essentially the same worldview. We were all taught that the most important battle we need to wage in life was with our own nature. Jews and Christians learned from the same Scripture that “the will of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21).

Therefore, being a good person involved a constant battle with our flawed human nature: our urges, appetites, and innate weaknesses. This battle was also the only real route to a better world. Every individual had to work on him or herself to be decent, strong, courageous, and self-controlled, and every parent had to work, first and foremost, on raising such people.

One day, I came to realize that this was not how the vast majority of my fellow students were raised. They were raised to believe that the great battle in life was not with one’s nature but with outside forces—with parents, in many cases, but most of all with society, i.e., America.

All of us, whatever our political outlook, have to confront personal failure, loss, disappointment, and unhappiness. When confronted with these challenges, religious Jews and Christians are taught to look inward for both the primary source of their problems and the primary solutions to those problems: What have I done wrong? What can I change in my life to solve my problems?

Of course, some nonreligious liberals and conservatives also have this attitude. But most of them likely inherited it from religious parents or, at the very least, from parents who were raised in a religious home or a home that retained the remnants of such an upbringing, which was common in pre-1960s America. (It is therefore questionable how many secular parents will succeed in passing this attitude on to their children.)

The Left, which proudly rejects Judeo-Christian values, has adopted the opposite of the Judeo-Christian view regarding pain in life. Leftists (as opposed to liberals) hold outside forces responsible for their pain. That is the reason for the litany of left-wing enemies: capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, systemic racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, sexism, xenophobia.

Read it all here.

Extorting compliance with their own intolerant agenda

Andrew McCarthy writes that the controversy in Indiana is trumped up, but the RFRA isn't a good law.

If this were actually about pizza, a demand for specific performance would be frivolous. We have a controversy in Indiana, and now nationally, only because liberal fascists want a controversy. They want what a free society should never grant: License to use the law not as a protective shield but an offensive sword for extorting compliance with their own intolerant agenda — something that, as Tammy Bruce explains with moving eloquence, ought to be especially offensive to gay people who’ve felt the sting of condemnation over being different.

...Messrs. Clinton, Kennedy, Schumer, et al., knew what they were doing: Progressives like transferring decisions to the courts, which are more likely to share their predilections than the public. They also knew their movement. As long as the RFRA was being invoked on behalf of radicals in an effort to buck the law, it would be dandy. But the moment it was relied on by traditionalists to safeguard their Judeo-Christian values, the left’s shock troops would brand the traditionalists as “haters” and no one would care to remember that Democrats wrote the law.

Read more here.