
Douchehat haz a sad.
Ross Douchehat, New York Fucking Times:
Government and Its Rivals
I am thoroughly convinced that the New York Times is engaging in a long-running trolling of modern conservatives. Ensuring that no matter what year it is, there is always a prominent reminder that any conservative who talks about a meritocracy or complains about “affirmative action” has a ready example proving them completely full of shit.
The current sacrificial example is of course the Chunky Witherspoon fearing, poor man’s Jonah Goldberg that is Ross Douthat.
Today he is whining because after 30 years of surviving on bullshit and scare-mongering in the suburbs, real people are starting to notice that all the government scare-mongering has just left them with a shitty economy, no safety net, and collapsing cities.
I’ll let him explain.
When liberals are in a philosophical mood, they like to cast debates over the role of government not as a clash between the individual and the state, but as a conflict between the individual and the community. Liberals are for cooperation and joint effort; conservatives are for self-interest and selfishness. Liberals build the Hoover Dam and the interstate highways; conservatives sit home and dog-ear copies of “The Fountainhead.” Liberals know that it takes a village; conservatives pretend that all it takes is John Wayne.
Yes, when liberals aren’t pounding their heads against the table at the prospect of having to argue with a simple-minded toadie who sleep-walked his way to a 6-7 figure salary, they sometimes like to point out that government isn’t actually a nickname for a gigantic troll monster that eats children, but rather that it’s a word we use to describe a creation of the people, by the people, and for the people to keep everything running so the rest of us can get back to our day jobs of looking up strange new forms of erotica and sampling bubble wrap.
In this worldview, the government is just the natural expression of our national community, and the place where we all join hands to pursue the common good. Or to borrow a line attributed to Representative Barney Frank, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”
Yes, this fantasical, strange “worldview” and its zany crazy views of the world working the way it does.
Many conservatives would go this far with Frank: Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.
But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power — the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we “do together” as a government, in many cases, the fewer things we’re allowed to do together in other spheres.
Oh of course, I know that when I let the government keep me from dying from preventable causes, that my meetings with the local rotary club go down the crapper and my D&D group gets seized by the FBI.
See, the problem with the constant attempt by conservatives to sell the idea that government is somehow against liberty, is the constant fact that reality keeps contradicting them. When the government is allowed to keep people from starving or dying in the gutters, the Churches don’t magically cease to exist and social clubs don’t stop meeting, aren’t broken up, or infiltrated on, unlike when anti-government zealots try and seize control.
And since he’s basically doing a slow-burn to arguing that churches are being “brought down by the Man, man”, I’m going to skip ahead and note that Churches have the most “coercive power” with regards to their stations, often tying charity aid with proselytization or mandatory conversion, removing social support from anyone who becomes a “member in bad standing with the Church”, not to mention demanding political orthodoxy as a requirement for a sense of community.
But then, that’s the feature, not the bug.
Zealots like Douchehat want people to be dependent on the Church so that people like him can feel better knowing that there are a whole bunch more suckers stuck with him.
Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches. Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.
Yes, every tax dollar is a dollar that doesn’t go to charity. Because you see, every dollar spent in America goes to charity, church, or taxes.
Wait, that sounds insane. Let me instead argue that it’s because tax and charity are directly related and people give a set amount no matter the situation, so when you give people a tax cut, they immediately give that money to charities and churches as we saw with the Bush tax cu-
Damnitt! Just pretend this makes sense and isn’t an obvious and poorly played three-card monte to setup a “Church good, Government bad” retread later on in the post.
But sometimes the state goes further. Not content with crowding out alternative forms of common effort, it presents its rivals an impossible choice: Play by our rules, even if it means violating the moral ideals that inspired your efforts in the first place, or get out of the community-building business entirely.
This is exactly the choice that the White House has decided to offer a host of religious institutions — hospitals, schools and charities — in the era of Obamacare. The new health care law requires that all employer-provided insurance plans cover contraception, sterilization and the morning-after (or week-after) pill known as ella, which can work as an abortifacient. A number of religious groups, led by the American Catholic bishops, had requested an exemption for plans purchased by their institutions. Instead, the White House has settled on an exemption that only covers religious institutions that primarily serve members of their own faith. A parish would be exempt from the mandate, in other words, but a Catholic hospital would not.
HOW DARE THEY!
The nerve!
Demanding that institutions which take federal dollars have to actually-I can hardly say it-actually follow the federal rule of law governing such funds.
Is it not the very founding moral character of religious institutions that they have a right, NAY a calling, to fleece the public chest without a single action binding them in anyway?
Truly this is exactly akin to having Churches banned from any form of community building of any form or having all the religious members of an institution denied a voice in government or something that would be akin to actual oppression rather than having your abusive over-reach and attempt to evade the law mildly rebuked.
Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they don’t want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not. The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying “no Protestants need apply.”
Uh yeah! If a religion can’t deal with being part of a general secular society and wants to selectively discriminate against the public, then they don’t get to be a public service receiving public money.
Your Catholic Hospital can hand out a sign saying “No Protestants need apply” and decide that medicinal drips only go to people who affirm their belief in the Trinity, but then they don’t get federal money designed for making sure everyone gets actual medical care.
You want to play in the big pond, then you have to follow the Big Pond rules. You can’t just say, I want in the Big Pond and then start pissing wildly and trying to molest all the girls. People are going to throw you out and send you back to the Fundamentalist Mormon swimming pool where you belong.
The regulations are a particularly cruel betrayal of Catholic Democrats, many of whom had defended the health care law as an admirable fulfillment of Catholicism’s emphasis on social justice. Now they find that their government’s communitarianism leaves no room for their church’s communitarianism, and threatens to regulate it out of existence.
Yes, I’m sure Catholic Democrats totally agree with your life-long crusade to try and make Chunky Reese Witherspoon’s life as miserable as possible and aren’t more concerned with that Father McWanderingHands scandal.
Critics of the administration’s policy are framing this as a religious liberty issue, and rightly so. But what’s at stake here is bigger even than religious freedom. The Obama White House’s decision is a threat to any kind of voluntary community that doesn’t share the moral sensibilities of whichever party controls the health care bureaucracy.
SEE! If you take away the religious right’s ability to selectively ignore any laws it doesn’t like while still stealing public money that could go to people who actually want to help the public good, then you take away that right for everyone.
How will your Superbowl Party be able to survive not being able to steal federal funds to discriminate against proper football fans? And your neighborhood Sewing club, how will it continue to meet without an ability to take federal money while discriminating against that damn Mrs. Thoraday and her radical cross-stitchings?
Don’t you see the community-less anarchy that would be created in that nightmare world?
Please support the Religious Right’s right to fleece non-members of its religion. It’s the right thing to do. (Paid for by an anonymous PAC that is totally not the Koch Brothers and their newly founded religion Graftism).
The Catholic Church’s position on contraception is not widely appreciated, to put it mildly
Yes, trying to force every citizen of America to do without contraception because of the precepts of a Mad Pope who has been blocking any investigation to the continued rape of children as an attempt to end-run around a decades-long settled public debate about the issue was indeed “not widely appreciated”, “to put it mildly”.
Let’s make it a game and cite other events that are “not widely appreciated, to put it mildly.”
For instance, Ross Douchehat’s hiring at the Times was “not widely appreciated, to put it mildly.”
and many liberals are inclined to see the White House’s decision as a blow for the progressive cause. They should think again. Once claimed, such powers tend to be used in ways that nobody quite anticipated, and the logic behind these regulations could be applied in equally punitive ways by administrations with very different values from this one.
The more the federal government becomes an instrument of culture war, the greater the incentive for both conservatives and liberals to expand its powers and turn them to ideological ends. It is Catholics hospitals today; it will be someone else tomorrow.
Are you fucking serious?
After 50 years of nothing but non-stop Culture War all the time by you greasy retrobates, you now want us on the abused and battered side to surrender our arms and stop because we are mildly resisting your attempt to continue a culture war you lost by other means.
I’ve got a song by Lily Allen for you on that.
The White House attack on conscience is a vindication of health care reform’s critics, who saw exactly this kind of overreach coming. But it’s also an intimation of a darker American future, in which our voluntary communities wither away and government becomes the only word we have for the things we do together.
Well, that’s fair.
I mean, not your complaint, your slippery slope horseshit, or the way your flaccid attempt to call secular community groups to your cause after you’ve spent decades trying to eliminate them off the face of the planet reminded you of how your latent homosexuality and lack of self awareness prevents you from any satisfying amorous encounters.
But why you needed to pull out this pile of weak sauce. When the Big Bad Health Care came to pass and it turned out that the sky didn’t fall and it ended up just being a naked giveaway to the Insurance companies that doesn’t really change much at all for the better, you fuckers ended up needing something, anything to grasp onto.
After all, you pinned so much of your 2012 campaign chances on your resistance to the mild attempt at a Health Care Bill, so there needs to be something catastrophic about it to get the scared grandmas and soccer moms to piss themselves and fill in the R U INSANE? box.
But hey, it’s okay that this failed, I’m sure, the community spirit of Mother Church will be there for you when the Times moves on to the next Affirmative Action hire.