The Evil Of Thought Control

By Catholic League president Bill Donohue

Jack Phillips made a name for himself when he stuck to his Christian convictions and refused to personalize a wedding cake for two homosexuals who planned to get “married.” He never denied service to someone because he was a homosexual; it’s just that in this instance he was asked to affirm a ceremony he could not in good conscience perform.

He was sued, and although he won in the Supreme Court, he did so on a technicality, leaving the larger issue—his religious rights v. their gay rights—unresolved.

Now there is another case before the Supreme Court that involves Phillips. Represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), he refused to make a cake for a person who sought to celebrate his transition to the opposite sex (this, of course, is a biological impossibility, but, no matter, he thinks he’s a woman).

This is more than just harassment. ADF says the attorney who is pursuing him “will continue to harass him no matter the outcome of this case, because the attorney wants to ‘[c]orrect the errors of Jack’s thinking.’”

This is thought control. It is evil.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the term “political correctness” was used by Marxists to profess allegiance to the Communist cause; no other thoughts were allowed. This was the first time a regime sought to institute thought control.

Solzhenitsyn suffered under the Czars, but they were angelic compared to what Stalin did. Under the Czars, people were at least free to think what they wanted. Not so under Stalin. As the Russian freedom fighter said, the first freedom is freedom of conscience, a right inextricably tied to freedom of religion. It was that which Stalin sought to crush.

Thought control was not perfected until the 1960s in China. As detailed by Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, it was during the Cultural Revolution when Mao unleashed a huge brainwashing campaign, making sure that the only correct thought was that of his own. Those who resisted Maoism were punished, and many perished. 

Jack Phillips is not being threatened with his life, but he is being threatened by the thought-control police. This time it’s the Gay Gestapo that is trying to “correct the errors of his thinking.” They are trying to poison his mind with their anthropological falsehoods. There is no more serious invasion of privacy, and threat to religious liberty, than this.

There is a huge difference between an authoritarian personality and a totalitarian personality. The former is bossy and acts like a little dictator; the latter wants to consume his subjects, dictating his every thought. That is what Phillips is being subjected to, and that it is being done in a democratic country makes his condition all the more perverse.

How did we get to this stage in American history? It is all traceable to intellectuals, many of whom take up residence in the professoriate. They are the sponsors of transgenderism, as well as the totalitarian thought-control tactics used to punish “deviants.” Indeed, they are the supreme tyrants of our age.