Imagine a closed, regressive, sometimes violent culture. Freedom of thought brings punishment. One is not encouraged to consider alternative views. One's place in the culture is determined by circumstances of birth, and he can never be otherwise defined than by such things as race, gender, and social status. Strict adherence to the code is enforced at the risk of severe repercussions. Only carefully cultivated and proscribed beliefs are acceptable, and others are strongly, even violently discouraged. The beliefs are not grounded in truth, and often are the product of bigotry and overt prejudice. Intolerance and self-righteousness are hallmarks of the culture. Only dogmas approved by the hierarchy are permitted to be repeated. Those who chant and believe them, while punishing those who do not, are faithful. They are rewarded with acceptance, financial benefits, and even fame. They are held up as examples of virtue. They are deemed heroic.

Opponents of the closed culture, however, are portrayed as dim-witted and slow-thinking, motivated by malice rather than wisdom or experience. Those who presume to profess a different faith have earned the privilege of being slandered and defamed by the culture. In this culture, religion and law are hopelessly blurred, so that the tenets of the culture's religion become policy. There are core beliefs which cannot be challenged or limited. Nonbelievers are infidels, and those who convert to conflicting beliefs are apostates.

The dishonest beliefs of the culture are forced into the minds of its children from the earliest age. Indoctrination motivates the educational system as well, which encourages prejudice against those who think differently while encouraging self-congratulation for one's own prejudices and false beliefs. The culture has decided it owns the children and will form them as they should be.

Those who do not adapt themselves to the closed culture are shunned, ostracized, publicly humiliated. They are treated as unworthy of existence alongside the virtuous practitioners of the closed culture. They are labeled the cult's "enemy".

Perhaps, by now, you have concluded I was referring to an intolerant religious culture generating news by making its presence felt, and I was, but not the one you might have thought. I was speaking of the culture and religion of Liberalism, sometimes also called Progressivism. It has sacraments, such as abortion, socialized medicine, gay rights, green energy, wealth redistribution, gun prohibition, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, among others. Its high priests are treated as infallible. The religion actively seeks to reduce and replace all other religions with which it competes. It is enmeshed with the state, so that the religion and government have become virtually indistinguishable.

The practitioners reveal themselves whenever they must defend the faith from any risk of exposure as a fraud. They wage their own form of jihad upon the nonbelievers and apostates.

We saw them advance the faith when they fabricated and then railed against an imaginary war on women, smearing and destroying as they crusaded. We watched them attempt and sometimes succeed in falsely criminalizing guns and gun ownership, at the expense of citizens who had done no wrongs. We have seen them willfully tell lies on the Senate floor, in White House press conferences, or on television news shows, regarding matters about which we already knew the truth. We saw them consciously conceal examples of their ideology fully realized, as with the Gosnell trial. We have seen them coldly attack and smear blacks and Hispanics who dared speak against their own repression and exploitation by the scions of the cult. We have seen them sprint from the muck whenever there is a tragedy they can falsely pin on their enemy, and slither back when it is revealed that one of their own, or one they enabled, was the perpetrator.

However, we see them at their most dishonest, and their most vicious, when the high priests of their culture are in danger, as exemplified presently by the Benghazi hearings. Terms like "witch hunt" and "politicize" and "liars" are deployed to damage those who would expose cult leaders who have engaged in evil or criminal actions. Bomb-throwers limber up, eager to lob verbal incendiaries for the faith. Lies must be told loudly and in unison to drown out or erase truth. The followers who accidentally learn of the proceedings must be reminded of their duty to the cult. To stray is to invite damnation. They must blind themselves to evidence and facts. Logic is an enemy. Believe only what the cult approves.

Those who saw the cult's malice practiced first-hand in Benghazi and at home, and who have the courage to risk their names and their life's work, are marked by a liberal fatwa. The integrity of truth-tellers must be publicly attacked. Their honor must be murdered. Defenders of the faith chant as one, and none can speak out against the lies and damage done to their own country unless they too wish to be afforded the 'apostate' treatment. Ideology trumps country. It trumps truth, integrity and honor. Ideology trumps God. The infidels must be destroyed. The cult comes first.

So it will be for the next several weeks or months, as those who were repressed by the hierarchy of the culture escape their bonds and, in the light, tell the truth about what happened in Libya. Their names and reputations have been sentenced to death by the cult. Nonbelievers must be fundamentally transformed into failures and malcontents for their sins, as must we all. There can be no accountability, no truth and no consequences to the cult from this process. The cult must be protected, even at the expense of the collective soul of a virtuous nation.

When truth is punished, and honesty is condemned, all members of a society are obliged to look clear-eyed at those whom the cult protects, and question why any of us would permit such people to rule us. It is long past time to protect our honorable nation from the soulless culture that seeks its destruction from within. God bless those whose courage is on display in these hearings, both the elected representatives and the witnesses who understand the evil that has been done, and which will be done to them for telling the truth. The dishonesty and vitriol of their detractors could not more clearly illustrate the differences between the cult and the rest of us.

Those who have testified, and who will endure the gauntlet to come, remind us that we can defeat the cult, and that at our core, we are still a nation in which integrity and virtue matter.