[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Pages 3581-3583]
[From the U.S. 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

[[Page 3582]]

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.''
       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

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     ``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:
       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 . . .

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