[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 45 (Monday, March 19, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1787-S1789]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
BIG GOVERNMENT
Mr. KYL. Madam President, Mark Steyn is one of the most gifted
writers of our time. His trenchant analysis appears regularly in
National Review. Steyn writes with biting humor and personal experience
with government censorship and has chronicled the concomitant growth in
government power and loss of freedom in Europe and North America.
In the March 5, 2012, issue of National Review he warns that America,
which he calls the ``last religious Nation in the Western world,'' is
in danger of going the way of European nations in replacing faith and
family with the all powerful national government as the source of
everything we need. He calls his piece ``The Church of Big
Government.'' It reminds me of Barry Goldwater's warning that ``a
government big enough to give you everything you want is a government
that is big enough to take away everything you have.''
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed
in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the National Review, Mar. 5, 2012]
The Church of Big Government
Leviathan is nibbling your religious freedom away
(By Mark Steyn)
Discussing the constitutionality of Obamacare's
``preventive health'' measures on MSNBC, Melinda Henneberger
of the Washington Post told Chris Matthews that she reasons
thus with her liberal friends: ``Maybe the Founders were
wrong to guarantee free exercise of religion in the First
Amendment, but they did.''
Maybe. A lot of other constitutional types in the Western
world have grown increasingly comfortable with circumscribing
religious liberty. In 2002, the Swedish constitution was
amended to criminalize criticism of homosexuality.
``Disrespect'' of the differently orientated became
punishable by up to two years in jail, and ``especially
offensive'' disrespect by up to four years. Shortly
thereafter, Pastor Ake Green preached a sermon referencing
the more robust verses of scripture, and was convicted of
``hate crimes'' for doing so.
Conversely, the 1937 Irish Constitution recognized ``the
special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman
Church as the guardian of the Faith.'' But times change. In
2003, the Vatican issued a ruminative document on homosexual
unions. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties warned Catholic
bishops that merely distributing the statement could lead to
prosecution under the 1989 Incitement to Hatred Act, and six
months in the slammer.
In Canada, Hugh Owens took out an advertisement in the
Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, and he and the paper wound up getting
fined $9,000 for ``exposing homosexuals to hatred or
ridicule.'' Here is the entire text of the offending
advertisement:
Romans 1:26
Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13
I Corinthians 6:9
That's it. Mr. Owens cited chapter and verse--and nothing
but. Yet it was enough for the Saskatchewan ``Human Rights''
Tribunal. The newspaper accepted the fine; Mr. Owens
appealed. That was in 1997. In 2002, the Court of Queen's
Bench upheld the conviction. Mr. Owens appealed again. In
2006, the Court of Appeal reversed the decision. This time
the ``Human Rights'' Commission appealed. The supreme court
of Canada heard the case last autumn, and will issue its
judgment sometime this year--or a decade and a half after Mr.
Owens's original conviction. It doesn't really matter which
way their Lordships rule. If you were to attempt to place the
same advertisement with the Star-Phoenix or any other
Canadian paper today, they would all politely decline. So, in
practical terms, the ``Human Rights'' Tribunal has achieved
its goal: It has successfully shriveled the public space for
religious expression--and, ultimately, for ``exercise of
religion.''
In the modern era, America has been different. It is the
last religious nation in the Western world, the last in which
a majority of the population are (kinda) practicing believers
and (sorta) regular attenders of church. The ``free
exercise''--or free market--enabled religion to thrive.
Elsewhere, the established church, whether de jure (the
Church of England, the Church of Denmark) or de facto (as in
Catholic Italy and Spain), did for religion what the state
monopoly did for the British car industry. As the Episcopal
and Congregational churches degenerated into a bunch of mushy
doubt-ridden wimps, Americans went elsewhere. As the Lutheran
Church of Sweden underwent similar institutional decay,
Swedes gave up on God entirely.
Nevertheless, this distinction shouldn't obscure an
important truth--that, in America as in Europe, the
mainstream churches were cheerleaders for the rise of their
usurper: the Church of Big Government. Instead of the Old
World's state church or the New World's separation of church
and state, most of the West now believes in the state as
church--an all-powerful deity who provides day-care for your
babies and takes your aged parents off your hands. America's
Catholic hierarchy, in particular, colluded in the
redefinition of the tiresome individual obligation to
Christian charity as the painless universal guarantee of
state welfare. Barack Obama himself provided the neatest
distillation of this convenient transformation when he
declared, in a TV infomercial a few days before his election,
that his ``fundamental belief'' was that ``I am my brother's
keeper.''
Back in Kenya, his brother lived in a shack on $12 a year.
If Barack is his brother's keeper, why can't he shove a
sawbuck and a couple singles in an envelope and double the
guy's income? Ah, well: When the president claims that ``I am
my brother's keeper,'' what he means is that the government
should be his brother's keeper. And, for the most part, the
Catholic Church agreed. They were gung ho for Obamacare. It
never seemed to occur to them that, if you agitate for state
health care, the state gets to define what health care is.
According to that spurious bon mot of Chesterton's, when
men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing;
they believe in anything. But, in practice, the anything most
of the West now believes in is government. As Tocqueville saw
it, what prevents the ``state popular'' from declining into a
``state despotic'' is the strength of the intermediary
institutions between the sovereign and the individual. But in
the course of the 20th century, the intermediary
institutions, the independent pillars of a free society, were
gradually chopped away--from church to civic associations to
family. Very little now stands between the individual and the
sovereign, which is why the latter assumes the right to
insert himself into every aspect of daily life, including the
provisions a Catholic college president makes for his
secretary's IUD.
Seven years ago, George Weigel published a book called
``The Cube and the Cathedral,'' whose title contrasts two
Parisian landmarks--the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the giant
modernist cube of La Grande Arche de la Defense, commissioned
by President Mitterrand to mark the bicentenary of the French
Revolution. As La Grande Arche boasts, the entire cathedral,
including its spires and tower, would fit easily inside the
cold geometry of Mitterrand's cube. In Europe, the cube--the
state--has swallowed the cathedral--the church. I've had
conversations with a handful of senior EU officials in recent
years in which all five casually deployed the phrase ``post-
Christian Europe'' or ``post-Christian future,'' and meant
both approvingly. These men hold that religious faith is
incompatible with progressive society. Or as Alastair
Campbell, Tony Blair's control-freak spin doctor, once put
it, cutting short the prime minister before he could answer
an interviewer's question about his religious faith: ``We
don't do God.''
[[Page S1788]]
For the moment, American politicians still do God, and
indeed not being seen to do him remains something of a
disadvantage on the national stage. But in private many
Democrats agree with those ``post-Christian'' Europeans, and
in public they legislate that way. Words matter, as then-
senator Barack Obama informed us in 2008. And, as president,
his choice of words has been revealing: He prefers, one
notes, the formulation ``freedom of worship'' to ``freedom of
religion.'' Example: ``We're a nation that guarantees the
freedom to worship as one chooses.'' (The president after the
Fort Hood murders in 2009.) Er, no, ``we're a nation that
guarantees'' rather more than that. But Obama's rhetorical
sleight prefigured Commissar Sebelius's edict, under which
``religious liberty''--i.e., the freedom to decline to
facilitate condom dispensing, sterilization, and
pharmacological abortion--is confined to those institutions
engaged in religious instruction for card-carrying believers.
This is a very Euro-secularist view of religion: It's
tolerated as a private members' club for consenting adults.
But don't confuse ``freedom to worship'' for an hour or so on
Sunday morning with any kind of license to carry on the rest
of the week. You can be a practicing Godomite just so long as
you don't (per Mrs. Patrick Campbell) do it in the street and
frighten the horses. The American bishops are not the most
impressive body of men even if one discounts the explicitly
Obamaphile rubes among them, and they have unwittingly
endorsed this attenuated view of religious ``liberty.''
The Catholic Church is the oldest continuously operating
entity in the Western world. The earliest recorded use of the
brand first appears in Saint Ignatius's letter to the
Smyrnaeans of circa a.d. 110--that's 1,902 years ago:
``Wherever Jesus Christ is,'' wrote Ignatius, ``there is the
Catholic Church,'' a usage that suggests his readers were
already familiar with the term. Obama's ``freedom to
worship'' inverts Ignatius: Wherever there is a Catholic
church, there Jesus Christ is--in a quaint-looking building
with a bit of choral music, a psalm or two, and a light
homily on the need for ``social justice'' and action on
``climate change.'' The bishops plead, No, no, don't forget
our colleges and hospitals, too. In a garden of sexual Eden,
the last guys not chowing down on once-forbidden fruits are
the ones begging for the fig leaf. But neither is a
definition of ``religion'' that Ignatius would have
recognized. ``Katholikos'' means ``universal'': The Church
cannot agree to the confines Obama wishes to impose and still
be, in any sense, catholic.
If you think a Catholic owner of a sawmill or software
business should be as free of state coercion as a Catholic
college, the term ``freedom of conscience'' is more relevant
than ``freedom of religion.'' For one thing, it makes it less
easy for a secular media to present the issue as one of a
recalcitrant institution out of step with popular
progressivism. NPR dispatched its reporter Allison Keyes to a
``typical'' Catholic church in Washington, D.C., where she
found congregants disinclined to follow their bishops. To a
man (or, more often, woman), they disliked ``the way the
Church injects itself into political debates.'' But, if
contraceptives and abortion and conception and birth and
chastity and fidelity and sexual morality are now
``politics,'' then what's left for religion? Back in the late
first century, Ignatius injected himself into enough
``political debates'' that he wound up getting eaten by lions
at the Coliseum. But no doubt tut-tutting NPR listeners would
have deplored the way the Church had injected itself into
live theater.
Ignatius's successor bishops have opted for an ignobler
end, agreeing to be nibbled to death by Leviathan. Even in
their objections to the Obama administration, the bishops
endorse the state's view of the church--as something separate
and segregated from society, albeit ever more nominally. At
the airport recently, I fell into conversation with a lady
whose employer, a Catholic college, had paid for her to get
her tubes tied. Why not accept that this is just one of those
areas where one has to render under Caesar? Especially when
Caesar sees ``health care'' as a state-funded toga party.
But once government starts (in Commissar Sebelius's phrase)
``striking a balance,'' it never stops. What's next? How
about a religious test for public office? In the old days,
England's Test Acts required holders of office to forswear
Catholic teaching on matters such as transubstantiation and
the invocation of saints. Today in the European Union holders
of office are required to forswear Catholic teaching on more
pressing matters such as abortion and homosexuality. Rocco
Buttiglione's views on these subjects would have been utterly
unremarkable for an Italian Catholic of half a century ago.
By 2004, they were enough to render him ineligible to serve
as a European commissioner. To the college of Eurocardinals,
a man such as Signor Buttiglione can have no place in public
life. The Catholic hierarchy's fawning indulgence of the
Beltway's abortion zealots and serial annullers is not
reciprocated: The Church of Government punishes apostasy ever
more zealously.
The state no longer criminalizes a belief in
transubstantiation, mainly because most people have no idea
what that is. But they know what sex is, and, if the price of
Pierre Trudeau's assertion that ``the state has no place in
the bedrooms of the nation'' is that the state has to take an
ever larger place in the churches and colleges and hospitals
and insurance agencies and small businesses of the nation,
they're cool with that. The developed world's massive
expansion of sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for
the shriveling of almost every other kind. Free speech,
property rights, economic liberty, and the right to self-
defense are under continuous assault by Big Government. In
New York and California and many other places, sexual license
is about the only thing you don't need a license for.
Even if you profoundly disagree with Pope Paul VI's
predictions that artificial birth control would lead to
``conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality,''
the objectification of women, and governments' ``imposing
upon their peoples'' state-approved methods of contraception,
or even if you think he was pretty much on the money but that
the collective damage they have done does not outweigh the
individual freedom they have brought to many, it ought to
bother you that in the cause of delegitimizing two millennia
of moral teaching the state is willing to intrude on core
rights--rights to property, rights of association, even
rights to private conversation. In 2009, David Booker was
suspended from his job at a hostel for the homeless run by
the Church of England's Society of St James after a late-
night chit-chat with a colleague, Fiona Vardy, in which he
chanced to mention that he did not believe that vicars should
be allowed to wed their gay partners. Miss Vardy raised no
objection at the time, but the following day mentioned the
private conversation to her superiors. They recognized the
gravity of the situation and acted immediately, suspending
Mr. Booker from his job and announcing that ``action has been
taken to safeguard both residents and staff.'' If you let
private citizens run around engaging in free exercise of
religion in private conversation, there's no telling where it
might end.
And so the peoples of the West are enlightened enough to
have cast off the stultifying oppressiveness of religion for
a world in which the state regulates every aspect of life. In
1944, at a terrible moment of the most terrible century,
Henri de Lubac wrote a reflection on Europe's civilizational
crisis, Le drame de l'humanisme athee. By ``atheistic
humanism,'' he meant the organized rejection of God--not the
freelance atheism of individual skeptics but atheism as an
ideology and political project in its own right. As M. de
Lubac wrote, ``It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man
cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that,
without God, he can only organize it against man.''
``Atheistic humanism'' became inhumanism in the hands of the
Nazis and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's
European Union, a kind of dehumanism in which a present-tense
culture amuses itself to extinction. ``Post-Christian
Europe'' is a bubble of 50-year-old retirees, 30-year-old
students, empty maternity wards . . . and a surging successor
population already restive to move beyond its Muslim
ghettoes.
Already, Islam commands more respect in the public square.
In Britain, police sniffer dogs wear booties to search the
homes of suspected Muslim terrorists. Government health care?
The Scottish NHS enjoined its employees not to be seen eating
in their offices during Ramadan. In the United Kingdom's
disease-ridden hospitals, staff were told to wear short
sleeves in the interests of better hygiene. Muslim nurses
said this was disrespectful and were granted leave to retain
their long sleeves as long as they rolled them up and
scrubbed carefully. But mandatory scrubbing is also
disrespectful on the grounds that it requires women to bare
their arms. So the bureaucracy mulled it over and issued them
with disposable over-sleeves. A deference to conscience
survives, at least for certain approved identity groups.
The irrationalism of the hyper-rational state ought by now
to be evident in everything from the euro-zone crisis to the
latest CBO projections: The paradox of the Church of Big
Government is that it weans people away from both the
conventional family impulse and the traditional transcendent
purpose necessary to sustain it. So what is the future of the
American Catholic Church if it accepts the straitjacket of
Obama's ``freedom to worship''? North of the border, motoring
around the once-Catholic bastion of Quebec, you'll pass every
couple of miles one of the province's many, many churches,
and invariably out front you'll see a prominent billboard
bearing the slogan ``Notre patrimoine religieux--c'est
sacre!'' ``Our religious heritage--it's sacred!'' Which
translated from the statist code-speak means: ``Our religious
heritage--it's over!'' But it's left every Quebec community
with a lot of big, prominently positioned buildings, and not
all of them can be, as Montreal's Saint-Jean de la Croix and
Couvent de Marie Reparatrice were, converted into luxury
three-quarter-million-dollar condos. So to prevent them from
decaying into downtown eyesores, there's a government-funded
program to preserve them as spiffy-looking husks.
The Obama administration's ``freedom to worship'' leads to
the same soulless destination: a church whose moral teachings
must be first subordinated to the caprices of the hyper-
regulatory Leviathan, and then, as on the Continent, rendered
incompatible with public office, and finally, as in that
Southampton homeless shelter, hounded even from private
utterance. This is the world the ``social justice'' bishops
have made. What's left are hymns and stained glass, and then,
in the emptiness, the mere echo:
[[Page S1789]]
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar . . .
____________________