On November 29, while speaking about flag-burning on MSNBC's Hardball, former U.S. representative Barney Frank said the late Justice Antonin Scalia was "the leading advocate of fag-burning."  The interviewer, Chris Matthews, reacted to the hideous expression with amusement.

Mr. Frank's image of Scalia as fag-burner dramatically illustrates what psychologists call a relational frame.  His absurd and abusive statement is evidence that he is cognitively fused to a relational frame that is contextually functional for him. 

For years, left-wing ideologues like Frank have sounded mentally ill, in part because of their outlandish vilification of people they disagree with.  The left wing no longer bothers to speak of rulings, writings, or positions.  Rather, leftists relate people they disagree with to racism, sexism, and other phobias.  Clinically, this can be understood, through Relational Frame Theory (RFT), as mental fusions with hateful relational frames.

No American has witnessed a person being burned alive due to sexual orientation, or even seen images of such an outrage.  Even in Islamic areas where homosexual people are publicly put to death, those punishments are not inflicted through burning.  The idea that a venerated Supreme Court justice would advocate death by burning is insane.  Yet Chris Matthews understood the meaning of Frank's words and reacted with laughter.  This is due to the infinite capacity of the language-based human mind to create and communicate relational frames.

RFT is important in current psychological research because it is the theoretical basis of what are known as "third wave" mindfulness cognitive behavioral therapies.  Mindfulness psychotherapies arise from the theory that cognitive rigidity and fusion – the inability to question or detach from negative relational frames about oneself, about others, or about one's life – is a principal source of human suffering.  In this model, left-wing post-election suffering is understood as the result of fusion with irrational, even hateful, relational frames against Trump, his supporters, and his nascent administration.

Relational frames are the language structures of what we believe, how we feel, and ultimately how we behave.  RFT posits that the basic process of the human mind is the infinite ability to create language-based relationships between objects.  Animals learn through association with stimuli; humans learn through the creation of verbally mediated relationships among stimuli.  (As an illustration of this distinction, take a moment to create a relationship between an elephant and a tweezer.)  Barney Frank displayed that capacity when he verbalized a preposterous relationship between a venerated justice and a heinous crime.

We have just witnessed an astounding validation of the political process, as directed by the Constitution, in the election of Donald Trump.  But when we listen to the voices of the stunned left, all we hear is a senseless tantrum on the theme "Trump is racist."  Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton's aide, said, "I don't know whether the Trump campaign needed to give a platform to white supremacists to win.  But the campaign clearly did, and it had the effect of empowering the white nationalist movement."  The president-elect's chief adviser is characterized using an antiquated apartheid term, "white nationalist."

Tens of millions of ordinary Americans who voted for Trump are "white supremacists."  The political explanation for this is that the left cannot criticize Mr. Trump's aims.  The psychological explanation is that their vilifications are contextually functional.  They are relational frames of moral superiority, in support of the indefensible dogma of the post-Judeo-Christian worldview, discussed below.  They cannot say we want a weak military or ailing veterans to be poorly served.  They cannot admit they want to eliminate the nation's borders or decimate the prospects of the middle class.  All they can splutter are variations on the imprecation "Trump is racist."

Functional contextualism is a post-Judeo-Christian, mid-20th-century pragmatist philosophy of science generally credited to philosopher Stephen C. Pepper's 1942 book World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence.  Contextualism holds that belief systems are organized around worldviews that have their own distinctive underlying "root metaphors."  Root metaphors develop within a worldview to promote the common knowledge and understanding of a particular worldview.  The aggregate effect of root metaphors is to establish the "truth criteria" of the worldview.   Consciously and unconsciously, root metaphors inform the language of relational frames, which in turn function to strengthen the belief system of the worldview.  Psychologically, this is a closed, positive reinforcement loop – which is why trying to rationally converse with a left-winger usually doesn't work.

The defeated Democrat cozeners of the media are focusing on the fact that we are now two Americas, and to a great extent they are right.  For the purpose of understanding the irreconcilably different truth criteria of those two nations, we will divide American history into two epochs: the classical Judeo-Christian period (Founding until 1973) and the post-Judeo-Christian period (1973 onward).

The transition away from the Judeo-Christian worldview has been gradual and continual.  In fact, contextual functionalism is a movement within philosophical pragmatism and cultural relativism generally traced to William James, John Dewey, and other 19th-century harbingers of post-Judeo-Christian America.  The date 1973, when the Supreme Court enshrined the absolute fallacy called Roe v. Wade, marks a chronological borderline between the two worldviews.  Even the terms Judeo-Christian and post-Judeo-Christian can be understood due to currency of the relevant relational frames.  

There are many differences in the two worldviews regarding virtue, values, and guidance for life.  In the Judeo-Christian worldview, "truth criteria" are based on universal, unchanging values and principles based in God and His revealed word.  Fundamentally, the post-Judeo-Christian worldview has been a rebellion against that moral code.  Post-Judeo-Christians have abandoned God-given, fixed moral ideals in favor of a humanistic impulse for each mind to project its own personal truth, the discovery and pursuit of which is life's primary directive.  The post-Judeo-Christian worldview is a philosophical hodgepodge that enables the left wing to honor themselves as Christians or "spiritual," while fiercely rejecting the most fundamental Judeo-Christian tenets, such as the sanctity of life.  The psychodynamic of that moral rejectionism is a grandiose, compensatory sense of superiority.

"No more fag-burning!"  "Trump and his racist friends are deplorable!"  And so on.  The relational frame that enmifies the deplorables functions to protect the self from honest introspection.  In summary, left-wing accusations of racism against Trump and his supporters are the fusion of contextually functional relational frames arising out of anti-moral post Judeo-Christian thought.

There is hope.  This author has plans to conduct a mindfulness psychotherapy recovery program (in the form of an American Thinker essay) for the left-wing lost ones.