Alana Goodman, at the conservative site Hot Air, is quoted as saying the following about anti-pursuit of happiness candidate Rick Santorum: “Where’s the conservative outrage? If Santorum’s comments aren’t nanny state-ism in its purest form, then what is?… If you’re a conservative and you give Santorum a pass on this, you forego any future right to complain about liberals taking away your Happy Meals and trans fats.”
Goodman is referring to Santorum’s recent and past comments that freedom as specified in the U.S. Constitution is not absolute, and that government policy must take a position on birth control, abortion, and private activities by consenting adults if the government deems them immoral.
I agree with Goodman’s sentiment entirely. However, she’s missing an important point. Most of these social conservatives who support Santorum have no problem with government regulating things they consider immoral. Doesn’t she get it? This is what social conservatives and Obama liberals have in common: Each wants their version of morality and religion to enjoy the force of law.
Liberals believe it’s immoral for people to make too much money, and for human beings to use natural resources to better their own lives. Socialism and environmentalism are the two religions animating the Democratic Party. Similarly, elements of the Republican Party are animated by the religion of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalists believe that fun and happiness should be limited by government — not just when they get in the way of somebody’s legitimate rights to be free from force or fraud, but even when they don’t.
If Santorum wins the Republican Party nomination, then people who want a limited government will quite literally have no place to go. They must choose between the imposition of liberal religion, or traditional religion. A “choice” between the God of Rick Santorum’s imagination, or the secular God of Barack Obama’s socialist-fascist state.
You can judge for yourselves which side is worse, but I refuse to make that choice.
Santorum, and the people he represents, are sick puppies. They cannot stand the idea that anyone is having sex in a context or manner which they personally find offensive or disgusting. We’re not talking about rape or sexual abuse here, but any sex of which they don’t approve. Imagine the mindset and mentality of a person who has such things on his mind. Do you really want somebody like this with control of the military and the entire federal government?
This is no endorsement of Obama, of course. And it’s no endorsement of Mitt Romney, who is more on Obama’s side than on Santorum’s on most issues. But the real crisis in America is that, at present, we have no political movement on the side of individual rights. Obama wants government to control all economic activity, while Santorum wants government to control private, personal behavior — including, by some reports, the legality of gambling and other unspecified freedoms on the Internet. Each will deny he favors totalitarianism in the abstract, but each has the attitudes, impulses and in some cases positions that will lead us right to totalitarianism’s front door.
The battle for America’s soul is a battle to reestablish the separation of Church and State. With Santorum, it’s easy to make this point clear. It’s just as important to make this point about Obama and the liberals. The liberals are in favor of the religion of government. Government is their “God,” so long as the government is run by people with their socialist and environmentalist ideology. ObamaCare is to liberals what laws and constitutional amendments banning gambling, contraception and homosexuality — and who knows what else — are to the Santorum conservatives. Obama is after our banks, our medical care and our retirement accounts — and ultimately our minds and souls. Santorum is going right for the soul — but he’ll eventually get his hands on everything else, as well.
It’s true that conservatives have no business complaining about the food police, the health care police or any other leftist police squads being organized by the Obama Administration when they themselves support a different kind of police. But the battle between liberals and conservatives has come down to: Which police (or whose police) shall police us?
Republicans and Democrats are not interested in liberty, or individual rights, or capitalism, or separation of church and state. If anybody out there still supports these things, they had better rise up against both of these parties and form a new political movement. If something worthwhile comes out of all this, then maybe America can make a new beginning. Otherwise, Obama (in a second term) is going to preside over the destruction of American life as we’ve known it — and his only opposition will have been Rick Santorum.