Interesting thesis, but you need to explain all the public statements about how HIV/AIDS is God's punishment (lots of that, back when it first was going around), occasional statements about how hurricanes are punishment for immorality, and so on, from the deeply religious.

It's the exact same sentiment, going back decades.

And it's usually conveyed with a lot more vitriol that Takaki's extraordinarily mild "they shouldn't get priority over other people with equally serious medical problems".

This suggests to me is that what's going on is precisely the opposite: as religion weakens in a secular society, the fundamental instincts that people used to only express through religion get expressed in other ways--in this case, self-assured, morally haughty, vindictively intolerant judgment.

It used to be that the only context in which someone could do that and not be a universal pariah was while wearing the mantle of religion (in the U.S., maybe with racial superiority, too, ); secularism has allowed the growth of other communities with sufficient self-assurance in their moral superiority to do the same thing.

It's depressing, but it's not new (just expressed newly via social media). Just humans being their not-exactly-saintly selves.

I am not sure what a member of the non-religious morally-self-righteous-left does when they realize they've overstepped into actual cruelty...talk to their therapist, I suppose, instead of confessing?