Is Stealing Wrong? .. 7 November 2021

    Is Stealing wrong?

    Is Stealing Wrong? Not on the Left by Dennis Prager
    To most readers of this column, the question is absurd. The
reason is not because the question is, in fact, absurd; it is because
most readers of this column are conservative, and many are religious.
    Am I implying most leftists do not believe stealing is wrong?
    Yes, I am.
    As incredible as this assertion is to just about all religious
people and virtually all conservatives, most leftists do not believe
stealing is wrong. Since I always draw a distinction between those on
the Left and liberals, let me add that I suspect most liberals think
stealing is wrong. But it almost doesn't matter because they vote for
people who do not think it is.
    One proof is the passage of Proposition 47, a California ballot
initiative passed in 2014, under which theft of less than $950 in
goods is treated as a nonviolent misdemeanor and rarely prosecuted.
As a result, in Democrat-run California cities such as San Francisco
and Los Angeles, retail theft has soared.
    Walgreens stores in San Francisco are racking up four times the
average amount of theft in Walgreens stores across the country;
spending on security guards in San Francisco is 35 times more than
the chain's average in other cities. Walgreens has been forced to
close 22 stores in the city since 2016.
    As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle: "The Safeway located
in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood - was a longstanding, 24-hour
fixture in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood. But as of last week,
the store's hours have been cut back to 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. . A Safeway
spokesperson (said) that the cutbacks are 'due to an increasing
amount of theft at the store.'"
    Further proof that the Left doesn't consider theft wrong — at
least when committed by a person of color — was an interview broad-
cast on NPR last year with the author of a book titled "In Defense
of Looting." The NPR interviewer threw only softball questions to
the author.
    In the last election, Los Angeles voters elected San Francisco's
previous district attorney, George Gascon, as Los Angeles's district
attorney. It was Los Angeles's way of declaring that stealing is not
wrong. And it is worth noting that it is not only racial minorities
and the poor who make the elections possible; it is also prosperous
whites. The Los Angeles DA is a wealthy white, and he was supported
by a white billionaire, George Soros.
    It is hard to believe that millions of Americans do not deem
stealing from stores morally wrong, so let's try to explain how this
has come about.
    *Reason No. 1 is moral relativism. For as long as there has been
a Left, it has rejected moral absolutes. As the great British his-
torian, Paul Johnson, pointed out a half-century ago in his magnum
opus, "Modern Times," the secular world applied the relativism of
the natural sciences to morality.
    *Reason No. 2 is the reason for reason number one: the collapse
of the Judeo-Christian value system and the accompanying abandonment
of, and often disdain for, biblical ethics. Biblical morality posits
moral absolutes — meaning that stealing is wrong for everyone, cer-
tainly people of every color. Yes, one can offer a biblical defense
of a starving man stealing food for his starving family. But that is
hardly what is happening in San Francisco and other American cities.
    *Reason No. 3 is Marxist morality. From Marx to the present,
Marxism has divided the world not between right and wrong, but be-
tween economic classes. Therefore, it is morally acceptable for mem-
bers of the poorer classes to steal from members of the more af-
fluent classes. This notion has made its way into young people's
minds for decades. About 30 years ago, I spoke to students from four
Cleveland high schools. I asked them to raise their hand if they
would steal something they really wanted from a department store if
they were certain they would not get caught. Nearly all the students
raised their hands. When I asked some of them to justify their rea-
soning, they all said the same thing: they wouldn't steal from a
mom-and-pop store, but they would steal from a department store. It
is OK to steal from "the rich."
    *Reason No. 4 is leftists' view of nonwhites, especially blacks,
a view that conservatives have never shared. Leftists truly believe
that blacks are intellectually and morally inferior to whites. The
evidence? They do not believe blacks should be held to the same
intellectual and moral standards to which leftists hold whites.
    Leftists do not defend whites who steal, and they hold whites to
higher intellectual standards. Leftists do not argue for lowering
math standards for whites, only for blacks.
    The bottom line is the Left is immoral. That is why it defends
stealing.
    'by Dennis Prager'
    The videos are on TV almost daily. People stroll into stores and
walk out with arm loads, bags, bicycle baskets, shopping carts full
of whatever they want like they are entitled.
    They show NO respect for the law or the rights of the owners and
what damage they are doing to their bottom line or insurance.
    At some point this will have to stop. 
    They are being enabled by the police, the corruption of the 
Justice Dept., city and state governments, and everyone that sits
back and watches it happen.
    Americans need to turn back to God and the Constitution and take
action to take back our country.

Conservatively,
John