No the title of this post is NOT meant to be tongue in cheek. It is a sincere appraisal of the circumstances that have transformed Currie into the force for the radical religious left he is today.
Over the past month or so, I have had several people write me and giving me a better idea of who Chuck is. As much as I have come to know of him, nothing connected the dots like a recent article from the MidCounty Memo he has linked to on his blog.
The article relates an event from Currie’s youth:
The director of homeless shelter Baloney Joe’s had spoken to
Currie’s class a year earlier, recruiting student volunteers. Though Currie had pledged to
aid, he had not followed through.When the returning director asked students if they knew why poverty and homelessness
had increased since his last visit, he raised his finger across the crowd at Currie and said,
“Because people like that don’t keep their commitments to help.” The guilt drove Currie to
volunteer that weekend. He would stay for four years.
The typical American is quite generous. Not only does he or she consent to having both state and federal income taxes taken from their paychecks every pay period, they continue to pour money into the sieve that is the Social Security system.
Yet here we see the director of Baloney Joe’s emotionally beating up on a young Chuck Currie as if the high schooler had anything to do with the fact that there are a lot of lazy people in Oregon who refuse to take responsibility over their lives.
This is how the liberal religious left machine works. It is no different from many elements in the religious right- it uses guilt and shame to effect its ends. The right at least is a bit more honest with regard to their methodologies.
Knowing a bit more about what brought Chuck to have the positions he has today makes me have genuine sympathy for him. By all accounts he is a passionate, dedicated individual who cares about helping others. Unfortunately, there were undue influences in his life that caused him to take a detour.
