I happen to like Donald J. Trump.

In fact, if he becomes the next president of the United States I will react with joy, for one simple reason: he will have vanquished political correctness.

Once upon a time, political correctness was an inside joke on elite campuses.  Twenty-five years ago, it referred to outlandish arguments at Cornell and Oberlin about whether to celebrate "Womyn's Herstory Month" or ban the word "Oriental."  Now it's become something far more serious.  It grew and grew, breaking out of the college elite to universities everywhere, and then eventually to the government and all of civil society.  It now stands as a system to silence people who oppose the power brokers' cultural agendas; it punishes dissenters through defamation, intimidation, a new McCarthyism, and even threats of outright violence.

Nothing we debate matters if Americans can't have a real debate.  And we can't have a debate on anything as long as political correctness blockades us.  So whether or not I agree with Donald J. Trump on Bush's Middle East policies or funding Planned Parenthood, the bottom line is this: he is the only candidate who offers us any hope of ending political correctness.

I Reject the Christian Case against Trump

Christian commentators, both Protestant and Catholic, have denounced Trump for his divorces, past promiscuity, vulgarity, and alleged ignorance about the Bible.  Such denouncers are an embarrassment to their faith.  The entire narrative of Jesus Christ is based on human redemption.  God gave His only Son on a cross to be sacrificed so all of us could be ransomed from the bondage of sin.  Without the notion that human beings can be delivered from evil and change for a better purpose, there is no Christianity.

I was once a young gigolo.  I engaged in unchaste acts with almost two hundred men before I found redemption in Christ and repented for my sins.  Unlike Donald J. Trump, I also drank more rum than a British pirate, committed misdemeanors, and fell into years of malingering sloth.  Am I therefore now to be disqualified from any public office?

If so, I am curious as to what these Trump haters believed was the purpose of the crucifixion.  Was it so that sinners could remain sinners and people who never made any mistakes could keep to themselves and hoard all political power among the like-minded?  If so, maybe Paul never needed to travel to Damascus.  He could have kept on telling crowds to stone Christians, and it would not have made a difference.

I Reject the Racism Charge against Trump

I know a lot about racism – I am the sole Latino male in an English department on a campus with over 40,000 students.  The department has no black faculty members.  It appears likely that in 2007, the search committee saw my mix of liberal/conservative scholarship and assumed I would be submissive and complacent about racial issues yet progressive on homosexuality and feminism.  Surprise – they got the exact opposite!  For being a brown-skinned Latino who speaks up and doesn't hesitate to defend his race and his faith, I've been the target for eight years of abuse from people who think of themselves as paragons of tolerance and egalitarianism.

Racism means denying early promotion, vandalizing the office doors of minorities, blocking them from important committees, and investigating them for phony charges in craven attempts to discredit and fire them.  These are the activities that allow an entire institution to bring the number of blacks on a department's faculty to zero.  Zero!  I don't see Trump doing things like that.  This is the kind of thing Hillary and Bernie supporters do, like the Hillary and Bernie supporters who staff the campus where I work.  Those things really happened to me.

People who engage in these real forms of racism always keep their agenda secret, which is why they are the loudest attackers against Trump.  He blows their cover by getting people everywhere to say what they really think about race instead of continuing America's politically correct charade.

True malevolence adores secrecy and dissembling. More often than not, racial injustice thrives under disguises of condescension, exploitation, and mental manipulation.  Higher education, Hollywood, and big-city bureaucracies are the biggest foes of Black Lives Matter despite the fact that they are universally led by Democrats who claim to love and defend people of color.

"Racism" does not mean saying insensitive things. It means doing harmful things to people of color.  It is not racist to speak frankly about border security.  In 2006, Barack Obama voted for H.R. 6061, which allocated $1.2 billion for 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border.  Seven hundred miles is long enough to insult Latin Americans but short enough to entice them to come through the massive gaps left open.  What harms immigrants of color more – clarity about future prospects, or mixed messages that might lead them to spend their family's only money on a human smuggler?

A wall between the United States and Mexico sends exactly the right "message": these are two different countries with different ways of thinking, and their peoples should flourish by building their homelands into great nations rather than by being exported en masse from dysfunctional governments that do not want to change to a dysfunctional government that does not know what it wants.

Ditto on Islamophobia

"Racism" does not mean expressing reservations about the mutual benefits between a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values and immigrants who adhere to Islam, a religion practiced by people practicing ethnic cleansing and even genocide against Jews and Christians in those immigrants' home countries.

There is a profound racism embedded in the notion that the best thing for any Latino or Muslim is to settle permanently in the United States.  In being naturalized, they sever their ties to the civilization from which they came and assimilate into the Democrats' toxic liberal brew of consumerism, iPods, abortion, sodomy, fornication, pornography, marijuana, and atheism.  Shame me though it does to say it, this mix is American culture, which I should know – I was born in the United States and have been fighting the left's influence on popular culture for most of my life.

If the prevailing forces on the American left are so incensed by a Christianity that celebrates chastity, complementary gender roles, and strict family values, why on Earth are they promising Muslims that they will be happy settling in the very country the left strives to secularize?

Is free in-state tuition to California State University, Los Angeles, where a near riot exploded simply because Ben Shapiro was invited to deliver a speech, so important that a Moroccan family should forever forsake their rituals and Arab traditions and move to Sherman Oaks, California?  If they try to keep their values alive while living in Los Angeles, the Democrats will turn a deaf ear to the complaints that their daughters are getting abortions and dressing like tramps while their sons are dyeing their hair green and loitering outside gay nightclubs…just like white liberal Americans.

Is it more racist to say, "You come from a beautiful home country that needs your talent and hard work" or "Come to America so you can change and become just like Miley Cyrus and George Clooney"?

Policies Don't Matter if Our National Culture Is Dead

I am a one-issue voter: I want our country to have real discussions about things.  In a real discussion among people speaking truthfully, better ideas will prevail over weaker ones.  Both unconstitutional censorship and unofficial silencing are killing our country on every front.  We have to end political correctness before we can fix anything.  And the only person who can end political correctness is Donald J. Trump.

Early on, I was dismayed by my mistaken impressions of the Trump campaign.  One of his supporters told me, "none of the policy matters if we don't have a national culture anymore."  At the time, I assumed he was speaking as a white supremacist opposed to the dilution of genetic purity.  Perhaps he was, in part – but it doesn't matter now, because I have stumbled upon a different meaning of that quote, to which I wholeheartedly subscribe.

Government can grow and shrink, unemployment can rise and fall, banks can open and close – but when our culture unravels, it cannot be sewn back together again.  My friend is right that countries do rise and fall, based mostly on the unquantifiable facets of national character: shared values, which cultivate trust among citizens and inspire people to collective sacrifice.  Our culture is being murdered by those who hate religion, despise nationalism, elevate hedonism of all kinds, and seek to continue the complete erosion of courtship and intact families.

For many years, I made the mistake of thinking that the solution would be to raise up leaders who shared my values.  I thought we had to follow bellwethers who exemplified the purest form of our highest ideals, a standard that all but excluded flawed figures like Donald J. Trump.  Our purism sounded sensible, but it backfired.

What we need, instead, are leaders who create the conditions under which we can defend our values in the public square, speaking for ourselves rather than having others speak on our behalf.  Maybe Donald Trump accepts gay marriage, something I oppose; even if he does, I find him the one who is most likely to forge a new national arena where I, free of any debt to some pedigreed expert, get to say things that "offend" others without worrying about being able to feed my two children.

How does it help me if Matt Walsh gets to write column after column about awful liberalism is if I lose my job for publicly opposing gay adoption?  How does it help my best friend, a Marine who served in Iraq, if FOX News employs a tiny team of conservatives interviewing the same 100 or so contributors in New York and Los Angeles studios, but my friend can be fired for speaking truthfully about what he saw Muslims do to each other in the Middle East?  How does it help the people in my Baptist church if Russell Moore can publish columns, but they have no way of blocking their teenage children from watching porn or using transgender bathrooms?

I don't need a president who thinks exactly the way I do.  I need a president who celebrates free and honest expression, so I can defend my thoughts in my own life.  That's why I like Donald J. Trump and hope he becomes the next president.

Robert Oscar Lopez can be followed at English Manif or on Twitter (@baptist4freedom) or Soundcloud.