Which side is intrusive?
A commenter at Right-Wing News provides a nice counter-balance to the “throw the socons under the bus†crowd, and to those who are under the delusion that it is the right that seek to intrude into every nook and cranny of life.
I’m hardly the most religious guy you’d ever want to meet. My last church service was my wedding, some four years ago. And that was a Unitarian service. Really, my main concern in politics is maintaining my freedom. And, in practical, definable terms, the daily threats to my liberty are not being pushed by religious conservatives. It wasn’t religious conservatives who’ve told me I’m breaking the law if I light up in a bar. It wasn’t religious conservatives who’ve forbidden me from buying food made with trans fats. It wasn’t religious conservatives who pushed speech codes on our college campuses and dictate hate crimes laws. It wasn’t religious conservatives who’ve made it a bureaucratic journey to buy a gun to protect my home and family. It isn’t religious conservatives I see trying to revive the fairness doctrine to specifically silence their political opposition. It wasn’t religious conservatives to gave us “campaign finance reformâ€. It isn’t the religious conservatives who have told me that I have to separate my trash, even to the point of removing individual trashcans in my office building.
Put bluntly, I can’t help but feel I’m being sold a bill of goods here. Progressives, with the full consent of moderates,…chip away consistently and unabashedly at my freedom. All the while, telling me how scared I should be of the religious conservative bogeyman hiding under the bed. Do I think there’s some religious conservatives who go over the top? Sure. But, marginalizing the religious conservatives en masse is a surefire way to empower just those religious conservatives who do go over the top. Moreover, I’m getting a little more than tired of being told to be scared about the threat to my liberty posed by my allies by people whose own behavior tells me they want nothing more than to restrict my freedom.
Exactly. The left continuously pushes for invasions of our liberties, and yet we’re told that somehow conservatives are the proponents of a police state. The essence of modern liberalism is a quest to perfect society. It really should come as no surprise, therefore, that it is the left that seeks to use government to achieve that end. More often than not, social conservatives are merely fighting against greater government intrusion. But a lie told often enough – in this case, that conservatives are authoritarians bent on control – often becomes the truth.
(Cross-posted at Crankycon.)
“It wasn’t religious conservatives who’ve told me I’m breaking the law if I light up in a bar.”
How ’bout Huckabee?
I’ll grant you Huckabee (although he never actually enacted legislation himself – he just advocated on behalf of said laws), but I’d also argue that Huckabee represents the extreme element that the commenter mentioned in his second paragraph. Still, almost all of the anti-smoking ordinances have passed in cities hardly controlled by conservatives.
Oh, I agree that the great bulk of the threats to liberty, including annoying little stuff like smoking bans, come from the left. I’m just determined to police our own side, too, and call out any statist impulses that creep in.
On more theoretical level, my argument is this: a good work is one that not only is outwardly in compliance with God’s law, but that also proceeds inwardly from a desire to obey, and thus glorify, God. To the extent that society motivates behaviors that outwardly comply with God’s law by the threat of human legal penalty, society is not producing — and indeed, in some cases may be inhibiting, by muddying the motives — the commission of good works.
[...] Here is the original:Â Which side is intrusive? [...]
Scurvy,
I think we’re more in agreement than not. I oppose statism in all forms, whether it comes from the right or left. One of the main reasons is that because while you can control the government today in order to steer it towards “good” ends, tomorrow you’re opponent may be in control and steer it towards evil ends.
Sure there are extreme elements on the right, but I happen to think conservatives are the victims of a poor caricature, and so often the caricaturists are fellow travelers on the right.
Any thoughts on my theoretical argument, Cranky? This is the analysis that underlies what you took to be a strawman on the earlier thread.
I don’t have a huge issue with your theoretical argument, but I’m not sure I am fully on board. After all, we have laws against murder, theft, rape, etc. Now, one can argue there’s not a theological argument augmenting such laws, but the fact remains that the state does compel adherence to certain tenets of the natural law by threat of penalty.
That said, I have always maintained that social conservatism – and conservatism in general for that matter – is about more than advancing one’s goals through the state. For example, we’d agree – presumably – that the family is the foundation of society, and it is in our interests to promote family life. But what can the state rationally be expected to do in order to promote traditional family values? Most of what must me done should be done at the local level, and really lies outside the political realm.
As for the straw man accusation – my objection was that I took your original comment to be an implication that conservatives in general seek to impose religious values on society through the state. I think this is at best a gross exaggeration save for the Huckabees of the world, who represent a minority – perhaps a significant one, but a minority nonetheless – of conservative though. Again, I think most conservatives recognize the limits of using government to advance social values, and as this post suggests, it’s often the left that seeks to use the government to advance their values.
We do indeed have broad agreement.
My fear is that — perhaps as a reaction to having neglected it too much in earlier times — we have overemphasized the political realm in trying to shape the good society. My hope is that being out of power for a time can help us to refocus more energies into the non-political realm.
1) Huckabee’s thing with banning trans fats and smoking isn’t derived, at least not in any rational sense, from his religiously motivated social conservatism. Maybe he tried to keep them in the same box, but those are two entirely different cans of worms.
2) One might observe also that even those intrusive policy preferences that the “extreme” social conservatives have (say, prohibiting contraceptives as an extreme) would remain subject to important procedural constraints like the 4th Amendment. It was always (and still would be) nigh impossible to prosecute such a crime because you can’t get a warrant to investigate it. New left intrusiveness, however, tends to regulate behavior in public, where plain-view rules would always apply.
[...] knows that they will have a willing accomplice in the White House soon. They are emboldened and eager to force their will into your daily lives. So even though you are not a Christian hold on to your [...]
Huckabee is a health freak because he was a big fatty years ago. I loved the commentary above. Ironically, we have a lefty smoker entering the White House in Jan. I can see him sneaking them, like President Bartlett on The West Wing. lol
It is tough for us more libertarian-leaning types (sinners). We work hard because it’s in our economic interest, but when we try to play hard, we sometimes feel stymied by our moralist brothers.
Whenever I run into a socio-con who favors things like banning liquor by the drink, smoking, gambling, etc., I tell him that he’s violating God’s will. God gave us free will and then put these things on earth to let us decide and to test us. By removing God’s tests, you’re interfering with his plan, you Communist spawn of Satan.
I don’t really care about the argument; I’ve just been enjoying the testing.
Yeah, what Centinel said.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine there is laughter and good red wine.
Flambeaux – although I agree, I think that single malt Scotch is even better proof. Or a nice Bourbon. You know, with the little pewter horse on the cork?
Fireduck,
On this we do not disagree. Who’s bringing cigars?
As the guy who complains the most about smoking bans, I’ll crash your party and bring the cigars. Centinel, you sound a lot like that wonderful product of the Reformation, John Milton:
“And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I can not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”
Areopagitica (1644), still the most eloquent defense of freedom of publication.