The more the Donald Sterling spectacle dragged on last week, the more I found myself recalling Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale of the Scarlet Letter. Jack Cashill at American Thinker had a similar reaction: The Suffocating Neo-Puritanism of ‘Progressive’ America.

 
Casting not just the first stone, but a whole bucketful, our Leftist friends are growing viciously intolerant. Consider how former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was recently demonized(for supporting California’s Prop 8) – and the way Paula Deen was shunned (for alleged racist remarks made years ago) last year. There’s the college campus indoctrination/intimidation that I just wrote about. The Gaystapo. The Thought Police in Great Britain.
 
And now, for the last week or so, the mainstream and sports medias have latched onto the LA Clippers owner like a rabid pit bull, furiously shaking the old guy, refusing to let go. By the time they’re finished with him, Sterling may never be allowed in public again.
 

Cashill has dubbed this progressive form of virulent ostracism “Neo-Puritanism” ~

Neo-Puritanism is unforgiving. It shows sinners little mercy and offers them no path to absolution. Indeed, like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, the sinner is publicly branded with her sin.
 
Celebrity chef Paula Deen did not commit the sin of racism; she is a “racist.” She must forever wear the Scarlet R, just as Mozilla’s Brendan Eich must wear the Scarlet H for “homophobe,” and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali wears the Scarlet I for “Islamophobe.” From the Neo-Puritan perspective, nothing else counts; that letter is their identity.
 
The cult’s clerics add new sins regularly and new sinners daily. Of late, in addition to Eich and Hirsi Ali, Cliven Bundy, Phil Robertson, even Alec Baldwin have joined the ranks of the damned. Hawthorne described his seventeenth century ancestors as “being of the most intolerant brood that ever lived,” but these “little Puritans” had nothing on the big ones that would flourish four centuries later.

In place of Hawthorne’s scarlet “A,” (for Adultery) Cashill imagines an “R,” for Racist, and “H” for “Homophobe,” and so on. I suggest a “B” for Bigot. That particular designation would nicely apply to all the present “trangressions” as defined by Progressives; racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, nativism, Islamophobia and xenophobia.
 
Commit one of these new “sins” and you’ll find yourself cast out from “polite” society faster than you can say Neo-Puritanism. How this new elitist class of Leftists managed to set themselves up as the new arbiters of right and wrong; judge, jury and executioner, is a mystery. The speed with which they’ve accomplished it is frightening.

In both the old and new Puritanism, worshippers achieve a sense of moral worth simply by designating themselves among “the elect” — no good works required. To validate that uncertain status, however, they feel compelled to heap abuse upon the sinner lest they too be thought guilty of the sin.

The Progressives, who endlessly berate conservatives for being “judgemental,” have turned out to be the most arbitrarily merciless “judges” America has ever seen.