Sooo, this happened last week (Steve Rogers: Captain America #1);

Oh, and for those inclined to believe this is some complicated double bluff, the writer is pretty open about… well, how much he just hates those darned Republicans;

In case it’s hard to follow (or hard to believe), yes, Mr. Spencer here, writer of the current Captain America comic for Marvel, thinks that ‘the good Republican’ is a myth, embraces his hatred of the right and justifies it, oh, and has Marvel’s most famous Nazi stand-in give voice to a grab bag of somewhat rightist positions. It’s so classy.

My point here isn’t that Nick Spencer is a putz (thought he certainly plays one on twitter). The point is that it is now entirely typical for many on the Progressive left to vitriolically condemn perceived intolerance on the Right (and among libertarians) while at the same time expressing a rather broad actual intolerance themselves. This particular bit of cognitive dissonance resurfaced, earlier this month as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio decided to renew the Progressive war on the orthodox Christian beliefs of Dan Truett Cathy, President and COO of the Chic-fil-a chain of restaurants.

“I’m certainly not going to patronize them and I wouldn’t urge any other New Yorker to patronize them.” Opined de Blasio, which the NY Post (pithily) noted as a clucking travesty. A travesty, clucking or otherwise, but by no means something peculiar to the embattled de Blasio: he joins august company among progressives, such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and internet gadfly Dan Savage. Dan Cathy’s transgression that earned such a chorus of hate from the left?

Dan Cathy, gave an interview in which he stated, “We don’t claim to be a Christian business … [Christianity] is about a personal relationship. Companies are not lost or saved, but certainly individuals are. But as an organization we can operate on biblical principles. So that is what we claim to be.” And he added with regard to the company’s support of WinShape Foundation, “That morphed into a marriage program in conjunction with national marriage ministries.” Does the company support the traditional family? Said Cathy, “guilty as charged … We are very much supportive of the family – the biblical definition of the family unit ….”

After de Blasio made his statements, Gregg Gutfeld was fond of asking; ‘why just is de Blasio only going after Christians that object to same sex marriage? There are a whole lot of Halal food trucks in NYC; is the mayor going to urge people to stop patronizing them? How about businesses owned by Orthodox Jews? More then a few of them in NYC.’

the progressive movement has no compunction whatsoever as declaring orthodox Christian thinking and attitudes outside of the acceptable range, but at the same time, considers any discussion about the propriety of mass Muslim immigration into Europe as indistinguishable from being a neo-Nazi. This despite the fact that Muslims from the areas of emigration into Europe hold vastly more retrograde views on everything from sex outside of marriage, drinking alcohol to the moral acceptability of homosexuality.

How is it that an expression of caution and a basic appeal to national identity is something that (some) progressives are ready to associate with Marvel’s own version of Hitler*, but Bill deBlasio can continue to call for widespread boycott’s based on an American’s expression of faith? How can calling out the evils of Christian faithful (and their “Hate Chicken“) be socially responsible and progressive, but worry about Muslim social views and their compatibility with a Western, liberal democracy be the height of intolerance?

Of course, there is an explanation that explains all of this and immediately resolves the cognitive dissonance: if you believe that Muslims cannot be held to the standard of white men, which is to say they occupy an inferior moral situation, then it’s not dissonant at all to hold one standard for white and another for non-white. One would suppose that Progressives simply believe that it’s unfair to critique these immigrants; after all, they’re just “acting their color”.

*Let’s gloss over that in the Marvel Universe they really did save Hitler’s brain, only to see him return as one of the incarnations of HateMonger (subtle, no?).