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RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I’m still thinking here. I think a lot. I think all the time. My brain never takes time off. I mean, even when I’m sleeping, and I wake up, I realize I had a couple of brainstorms while I was asleep. My brain never takes time off. I don’t know how to. And I have been thinking even more about this Garland, Texas, incident. Now, yesterday I made a point about the selective application of religious belief that we are going to accept.

For example, the militant Islamists command us not to draw cartoons or any other kind of picture of the prophet Mohammed, and our Drive-By Media and Democrat Party readily agree, “Ain’t no way that should happen! It offends them, and we shouldn’t do it. And when anybody does, and they get shot at, it’s their fault.” To which I ask, “Well, now, wait a minute. The same militant Islamists who do not permit the drawing of pictures of the prophet Mohammed also do not permit homosexuality and do not permit gay marriage.

And we know what their attitudes toward women are.

Why don’t we respect those? Can you imagine? If you turn on MSNBC, all you’re gonna see, given the day — maybe not every day, but the odds are, at least a portion of the day — you’re gonna see a total devotion to the concept of gay marriage. Isn’t that insulting to the Muslims who would be watching? Would it not then be understandable if the Muslims watching take some kind of action against MSNBC for offending them?

They’re not tolerant of gay marriage.

They’re not tolerant of homosexuality, and you turn on MSNBC or CNN or any other Drive-By Media outlet and all you get is total support for it. Is that not offending our Muslim friends in the viewing audience? Why is there no concern for that? When people draw cartoons of “the prophet,” it’s, “Oh, Rush that’s intolerable! You can’t accept it. You gotta stop! Oh, my God, that’s horrible!” But we can taunt them with gay marriage, and we can taunt them with women’s rights and feminazism, and we can taunt them with homosexuality, and we are somehow not concerned about how that offends them?

My question is: Where do we draw the line on this?

Where do we draw the line on those aspects of Islam that we’re going to respect and not offend them, and then on the other hand say, “We don’t care if it offends ’em; we’re gonna do it anyway”? But that’s not the totality of my thought. I was also thinking about this. The left respects and applauds militant Islam’s effort to shut down free expression, i.e., the drawing of cartoons of the prophet.

The same left, however, demands that Christians (say Catholics; Hobby Lobby is an example) pay for health insurance that would pay for abortions and things that make them happen. Well, by the same token, if the left is to be consistent, shouldn’t Muslims be forced to pay for these cartoon contests? Now, follow me on this. I am the mayor of Realville. As such, I am possessed with logic sometimes to my own detriment because other people aren’t.

But if the left says that Christians, despite opposition rooted in their religion, must pay for people who want to have abortions to have them — if the left says that Christians say, like at Hobby Lobby, must pay for any drug or whatever is necessary that facilitates an abortion even though they have a religious opposition to it — by the same token, does it not make sense that the left should be demanding that militant Islamists pay for these conventions that have cartoon contests with the prophet Mohammed?

I know what some of with you are saying. “Wait a minute! Rush, do you realize what you’re saying? It’s outragous.” No, it’s not. I’m just a logical progression. If the left in this country can make Christians pay for people who want to have abortions when Christians oppose it, my only question is: Where do we draw the line here in areas and various different religions on what we’ll tolerate of them and what we won’t? I’m just asking. I’m not advocating anything here.

I know asking makes people nervous and that is when they lash out.

It’s what happens when you hit the bull’s-eye, folks.

They come for you.

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RUSH: I’m not through with this whole event in Garland, Texas. Something else. I just got an e-mail question. “Rush, don’t you think Pamela Geller was a little bit excessive in trying to make a point? What is the reason? Why taunt these people? Isn’t it unnecessary, and therefore isn’t
she somewhat responsible for what happened?” See, this is the trick that’s played.

And I’ve heard a bunch of conservatives in the media trashing Pamela Geller and her cartoon event as “unserious” and as “unnecessarily taunting.” It’s almost as though we’re back to a period where some conservatives think they need to demonstrate to liberals that they’re reasonable, that they’re not extremists like “the rest” of the conservative movement is.

For people that don’t understand what Pam Geller is doing and what she is trying to illustrate, it’s their problem. The left does things like that all the time! I’m sick and tired of any effort made to expose the left — either their hypocrisy or their terminal incorrectness on things — always said to be “unnecessary” and potentially harmful and so forth. You know, people are always complaining about the unfairness of the media.

Somebody like Pam Geller will come along and expose it as a means of trying to inform others and some say, “That’s unnecessary. It’s unnecessary and provocative. It’s generating sympathy for the wrong people.” I disagree with this profoundly. Free speech is under assault. Anybody that can illustrate it in a way that makes it understandable is fine by me. Free speech is my business.

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RUSH: John in Chicago. Thank you, sir, for waiting, and welcome to the program.

CALLER: Hello, sir. Thank you so much for taking my call.

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: I’ve spoken to you before, and I generally like to give you the opportunity to demonstrate your intellectual consistency and lack of hypocrisy, and that is why I have called you today. You were saying that you felt it was wrong for anyone in the media to object to the event in Garland, Texas, and that it was inconsistent for liberals to object to it because you feel that they don’t express enough objection to things on behalf of Christians. And so I wanted to give you the opportunity to demonstrate that you are totally consistent on this issue. And since you feel there is nothing wrong with hosting an event that is deliberately intended to offend Muslims, I wanted to ask —


RUSH: It was not done to offend Muslims. I don’t want to sidetrack you, but that’s not why the event took place. Now, go ahead and ask your question about me.

CALLER: Okay. My question is, would you similarly defend an event that was entitled, “Submit your best cartoon of Jesus being sodomized”?

RUSH: There’s nothing odd about that. Christians have already witnessed Piss Christ, you familiar with that? That’s Andres Serrano and a work of art, traveling around museums with a crucifix of Jesus in a vat of urine, and nobody protested and there was no anger and we ripped the lack —

CALLER: — if you would object to it.

RUSH: We ripped the lack of culture and art about it, but nobody protested Serrano and told him he couldn’t do it.


CALLER: Really, you didn’t object to that?

RUSH: I objected to the left claiming it was great art and there was something to learn from it but nobody made a move to stop Serrano. There’s been all kinds of stuff done. Models of Jesus Christ placed in elephant dung way back in the nineties. I mean, Robert Mapplethorpe has done all kinds of stuff that you’ve suggested. There hasn’t been one riot. There hasn’t been one shot fired at any of these artists. I mean, you’re not on firm ground here, which is why I wanted to take the call.

You’re trying to draw an analogy here, and I’m telling you, you cannot construct a scenario where you’re gonna find the intolerance of Christians on a par with the intolerance of militant Islamists. You just can’t do it. But the premise that you called about with this business that the reason Pam Geller did her cartoon was not to provoke Muslims. She didn’t want to get shot at. She’s trying to illustrate to people the double standard that exists and the precarious balance the First Amendment is placed on right now.

Free speech is under assault, and too many people are looking the other way and not willing to stand up for it. She wasn’t trying to offend anybody or provoke anything. She was trying to illustrate a point about hypocrisy. I think because she was successful in it, she has to be destroyed and taken down a peg and ridiculed and all that. Anyway, I’m glad you called out there, John, and I hope I passed your test from your perch of superiority and cocksureness. Try again any time.

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RUSH: So we’ve had Piss Christ which was Andres Serrano’s fine work of art. We were told that we must study it, and we must consider it. We must learn from it and understand the rage that was behind it. Crucifix of Christ in a jar of urine. We’ve had the Virgin Mary in elephant dung. All of this in museums, by the way, and much of it federally funded from the National Endowment for the Arts. Remember Carol Finley, performance art, nude, covered in chocolate with anti-Christian overtones, much of this paid for with tax dollars otherwise it would not have had, quote, unquote, funding or an audience.

And we were told, as I say, to have to embrace Piss Christ in order to learn from it. But the left refused to embrace the Passion of Christ, Mel Gibson’s movie or to try to learn from it. No, they try to trash and destroy that. I remember those incidents like they were yesterday. They all got museum placements and the media was out celebrating just how wonderful it was. And not to mention all of the books and the movie in the mid-2000s devoted to the assassination of George W. Bush. We were told: Don’t reject these. This is art. We must understand the intention of the artiste. So the left gets to pollute our culture left and right, and everybody’s told we must step back to try to understand it.

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RUSH: That’s right. I just went back and looked. Piss Christ by Andres Serrano was funded by the NEA, and nobody shot up the NEA. Christians didn’t run around shooting it up. But you have that racist organization called the Southern Poverty Law Center with that geek-looking guy, Mark Potok that runs it, and one of the loyal follows followers of his website went up to some business and shot it up because he named them, the website named them as a hate bunch.

It wasn’t Hobby Lobby, but it was some organization like that. It was in Washington, DC. It’s the left that runs around doing all this violent stuff; it’s the left that runs around and claims to be tolerant and are not at all. We’ve had to put up with Piss Christ. We’ve had to put up with elephant dung surrounding the Virgin Mary and other works of so-called art that I don’t even remember, including this Finley babe’s performance art — nude, covered in chocolate — all funded by taxpayer dollars.

When all of it came up, we were supposed to sit there and be tolerant and understand the rage and learn from it and yada yada yada. The point is that, this guy calls me and says, “You’re telling me you wouldn’t mind if there was a piece of art with Jesus Christ being sodomized?” I said, “We’ve been through it, sir! Been there, done that, and as last I looked, nobody ran around shooting the people that did it.” Yeah, they groused about it. Yeah, they were upset by it.


They wondered why their own government was paying for it, but they didn’t go on any protest march and they didn’t start shooting people. They didn’t start issuing edicts that people’s First Amendment rights be denied. They just questioned, “Why in the world in is our own government paying for this filth?” (i.e., their own tax dollars). … I knew this was gonna get to ’em. I knew it when I asked a very logical question.

Let me repeat the question that explains why the caller called in with his attempt to trip me up. We’re told that we have to respect militant Islam’s right to shut down free expression. Right? We can’t have pictures of the prophet Mohammed. We can’t do that because it offends Muslims and we can’t offend them; we’ve gotta understand that. But at the same time, we can flaunt gay marriage and gay rights and feminism in front of them all the time.

I mean, can you imagine militant Islamists turning on MSNBC? They’d be profoundly offended watching it. Where do we draw the line? If we’re gonna respect their religious prohibitions against drawing pictures of “the prophet,” then why do we not respect their prohibitions against gay marriage and homosexuality and feminism? Why don’t we throw that back in their face?

I said, “If you look at the Hobby Lobby case, here you have the federal government demanding that Christians who religiously oppose abortion nevertheless pay for it in employee benefits or in other ways. The religious objection to abortion doesn’t matter. You have to pay for people who want them or their abortifacients or what have you. Well, by that thinking, then doesn’t it make sense that the militant Islamists who shot up the place in Garland, Texas, actually should have had to pay for the convention?

I mean, if you can tell one religion that it has to pay for people to engage in activity that it prohibits, its religion prohibits — i.e., abortion — wouldn’t it make sense that militant Islamists would have to pay for Pamela Geller’s convention for the cartoon contest? It’s the same line of thinking. It’s the exact same thing, just different subject matter. I imagine a lot of leftists in the audience were just outraged at that.

So rather than call and debate that, they try to trip me up, and it was a flailing and failed attempt.

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RUSH: Start in Los Angeles with Kyle. Thank you, Kyle, for waiting. You’re next. It’s great to have you here. Hi.

CALLER: Thanks, Rush. Appreciate it.

RUSH: Appreciate it.

CALLER: Going back, it’s a popular culture war, and CNN, or as I like to refer to them as the Communist News Network, they’re espousing the strategy of “the enemy of my enemy is my ally,” and they are attacking us. It’s the middle and the one-percenters who defend one another. And it’s horrible. But this change of the Obama agenda, and they’re deconstructing our Constitution. And who better than a quote, unquote constitutional scholar, Obama. And they’re against our morality. That’s why they do these things such as the piss crucifix that you rightly said the National Endowment of the Arts has paid for.

You also have wealthy designers such as Tom Ford do a penis crucifix. It’s awful what’s happening. I happen to be stuck on the Left Coast, but I’m not gonna give up, and like you, I’m in a battle, and we’ll win this country back. But we have to be careful, because the next thing universities are gonna start teaching is moralitism, and that’s where morality is bad. And we have to be very careful ’cause I see it in these young people, you know, I’m in my early forties. I came out of the university here in California and I fought it at that time, and I made —

RUSH: Now, that’s an excellent point. I think they’re already teaching it. In fact, I had a story in the Stack the last couple of days about some of the latest courses being taught at mainstream American universities. I haven’t had a chance to get to it. Maybe I still have it on display here. But your notion that they’re gonna start teaching anti-moralitism, they’re already doing it without saying so. The whole thrust of the leftist educational agenda or anything else, the pop culture, movies, books, TV shows, is a direct attack on common morality as unjust and unfair and immoral, and who has the right to define it anyway? There shouldn’t be any.

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RUSH: Here’s Todd in Yreka, California. Greetings, sir, and welcome. It’s a delight to have you here. Make it count.

CALLER: Yeah, hi, Rush. I just had a question. I keep hearing “freedom of speech” all the time. I want to know what your opinion is on when “freedom of speech” actually becomes “hate speech.” It seems to me like it’s racial. As soon as you get into some racial thing or, you know, maybe the homosexuals, whichever. I just wanted to know what your opinion was on that.

RUSH: “When does free speech become hate speech?” Whenever the left says it is.

CALLER: That’s what I’m thinking.

RUSH: You don’t know it’s “hate speech” until a liberal hears it and doesn’t like it and accuses you of engaging in “hate speech.” Same thing with a hate crime. I mean, what is a hate crime? You commit a crime and they double your penalty or intensify it because you supposedly hated somebody while you’re in the midst of committing it? This is all arbitrary stuff, and it’s rooted in the left trying to control speech

It’s all about the left trying to prohibit speech they don’t want to hear. And it doesn’t have to be about African-Americans or gays or whatever. It could be truth that they don’t want to hear. And they simply say that the person who articulates it was obviously rooted in hate for people he disagrees with or some such thing. But these are the speech codes that emanate from the left. Political correctness is nothing more than censorship.

The left enforces PC, practically gave it to us, maintains it to this day, and defines it. Now, understand none of this could happen without willing accomplices in the media. I mean, all these people squawking, “The Offended,” if it were not for media amplifying what it is that agitates them it wouldn’t be a big deal. So you can’t take the media out of it, either. But hate speech is just what the left doesn’t want anybody to say.

In fact, more properly, it’s speech they don’t want to hear. So calling it “hate speech” is nothing more than a mechanism to get people to shut up. It could be something very persuasive. If you have a way of saying something about anything or anybody that is going to be persuasive to people and change their minds about it, then the left doesn’t want to hear it and they don’t want you getting away with it.

They’ll come along and try to discredit you or whatever it is saying it by calling it “hate speech,” rooted in hate. You know, you look at the “hate.” I mean, just make an objective look, study our culture and society every day, and I’ll tell you: The vast majority of the hate that I run into is on the left, and the vast majority intolerance I find is on the left. Of course, while they claim to be the exemplars of both.

They claim to be the most tolerant and the most understanding, and they are the least! They pose a grave threat, in my opinion, because they’ve succeeded. A minority of people — I don’t care what the issue is, a minority of people — have succeed in silencing, frightening, cowing other people into shutting up. It’s gotten to the point like it was in the old Soviet Union, where people retreat to a bathroom to tell each other what they really think about things.

Because they’re afraid somebody might overhear them and might not like what they hear or might tell somebody what they’ve heard. I mean, how many times now do people, when they tell you what they really think about something, whisper to you? Or how many of ’em get really close so that they don’t want to run the risk of being overheard? You can tell the telltale signs, and there’s a lot of fear, which is exactly what the left wants.

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RUSH: Jeremiah in Minneapolis, great to have you, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. I just wanted to comment and say that I think, you know, us as conservative Christians, I don’t think that we really scream loud enough when we’re offended about things. I think that’s because of the fact that we believe in personal freedoms and expressions. And, you know, there’s an old saying that says the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I think that we need to start squeaking a little more. I mean, talk about offensive, you know, how about cutting the heads off Christians and posting it on the web and whatnot? I’ve seen some craziness, and it’s really starting to tick me off.

RUSH: Wait a minute. Cutting off the heads of Christians and posting it on the web, who? You talking about ISIS?

CALLER: Yeah, I was looking at some stuff, I was listening to some programs on the radio and went on the Internet to look at some of this stuff and it’s just disgusting.

RUSH: Well, there is an all-out assault on Christianity all over the world, but particularly in the Middle East. I mean, one day 300 Christians will be killed, slaughtered, the group does it claims credit. Nobody says anything. It’s all rooted in a very perverse place that we find ourselves in this country, and maybe not just in this country, but around the world. Everything is cyclical. Right now we’re in a cycle where majorities, simply because they’re majorities, are guilty, and whatever pain they incur and suffer is legitimate simply because they’re majorities.

Ergo Christianity is perceived to be a majority religion because of the power — I mean, Islam’s big, but there is no Islamic Vatican. But there is the Vatican. The trappings of Christianity are all over the place. And, as such, they’re evil simply because they’re the majority. The minority, whatever minority it is, is almost angelic and permitted to do anything to overcome the tyrannical powers of the majority. It’s one of the things that motivates Obama, in a sense. And, as such, because we’re considered the majority, we have been told that we are not to yell and squeak and squawk. It’s unbecoming and we have to understand this. But I get your point on it. We are tolerant as well, which is interesting because that’s the last thing that is said about us.

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