Modern liberalism is willfulness writ large — a godless
ideology that rests upon the caprice of central planners. Under it,
the fluctuating and often frightening desires of corrupt men,
rather than the changeless will of a caring God, form the shaky
measure of “good government.” As the grim chapters of recent
history show — chapters written in the blood of millions of unborn
children and other “undesirables” — taking God out of “goodness”
drains the term of any coherent meaning, leaving mankind at the
mercy of power-seeking ideologues.
Pope Benedict XVI calls modern liberalism the
“dictatorship of relativism,” a phrase that neatly summarizes the
Obama administration as it moves to crush the freedom of Americans
through such monstrosities as the HHS mandate.
On one level, Obama is nothing more than a glib and empty
pol, who careens from focus group to pollster. But on another
level, buried deep within his cold and rootless personality, he is
a man of perverse tenacity, a convinced socialist and secularist
who was trained long ago to run the ball into the end zone for
radicalism.
For all his joshing and superficial charm, he remains the
creepy child of post-Enlightenment liberalism — the infant demigod
presented between sets of oversized and plastic Greek columns at
the Democratic National Convention in 2008, who as the proceedings
concluded crawled back into the shadows to watch mutely the adoring
crowds below.
Such a deluded Democratic president was bound to overreach
disastrously. Obamacare is a “big f — king deal,” Joe Biden
whispered into his ear. And it is — an unconstitutional coup
disguised as altruistic legislation that was rammed through
Congress by reckless partisan hacks who hadn’t even read
it.
But the central planners and social engineers from Planned
Parenthood had pored over the bill carefully. The passage of the
legislation left them giddy with excitement, as they knew its
unread provisions would soon turn into nooses for their religious
enemies on the right.
The future casts its shadow backwards, said the late
British writer Malcolm Muggeridge. Obama, red in tooth and clause,
saw the devilish flicker of those shadows in his triumph of social
engineering. “Darn tooting,” he declared to his most militant
supporters — pro-abortion feminists who demanded to know from him
during a campaign stop last fall if he was going to make good on
his promise to manhandle the Catholic Church over contraception and
abortifacients.
The raffish Greg Gutfeld, who, despite his screwing around
on the set, remains Fox’s deepest and most perceptive observer of
politics and culture, made the valuable point on “The Five”
recently that one of the sick motivations behind the HHS mandate is
a form of eugenics and ironic class warfare: Obama does not want
the poor to procreate.
To put the point even more directly, Obama does not want
the Catholic poor to procreate. Like Planned Parenthood’s twisted
foundress, Margaret Sanger, Obama is a chilly eugenicist at heart
who fears a backwards America “punished” by the babies of
unenlightened breeders. China boasts a one-child policy; Obama’s is
more like a zero-child one. Without a universally subsidized right
to sterilization, contraception, and abortion via Obamacare, his
Brave New World would falter and fail to materialize.
The brutal logic of these bogus rights, as Obama hints in
his mumbles about “access” as the trumping value in this debate, is
that everyone must recognize them. Who cares if the Church objects
to financing the sins of her employees? The Church is wrong, and
error has no rights, hiss feminists. The dogmatism of which Obama
routinely accuses the religious is on far starker display in his
own ideology, a species of raw social engineering that depends for
its fulfillment upon bullying conscientious objectors at the point
of a government gun.
This is a historic moment in the culture war — a
crystallizing flashpoint in which the totalitarianism and bigotry
long implicit in secularism rises to the surface and becomes
explicit for all to see.
In the Senate, it is still the “Year of the Womyn.”
Barbara Boxer, barreling up to the cameras on Wednesday, unloaded
all of the despicable propaganda of Planned Parenthood. At once
rude and kittenish, Boxer purred that Obama deeply respects
religious freedom. That’s why he established a religious exemption
for wholly sectarian organizations, she said. Never mind that
feminist colleagues across the way on the House side were openly
complaining about that “compromise.” In other words, left to their
own unchecked secularist devices, they wouldn’t even grant that
insultingly narrow exemption to the Church.
Here’s how the Hill
put it: “Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said there’s
no need for the White House to adopt a wider religious exemption.
Carving out churches and other strictly religious employers ‘was in
itself a compromise,’ she said, noting that eight states have
contraception mandates without religious exemptions.”
The essential character of secularism is totalitarian. For
all of its chatter about religion as a “private” matter, for all of
its nonsense about the “privacy of the bedroom,” nothing under
secularism in the end is actually private. The social
engineers of Obamacare will determine the birth control methods of
the unwashed. They will dictate the terms of man’s beginning
through eugenic abortion and his end through death panels. And to
gratify the bloodlust of bigots, they will leave the stained bill
for the reviled religious to pay.
