Hope on Sunday ?

By Donna Cole


 I would put Ross Douthat pretty high on the list of the most ideological liberal opinion writers at the New York Times. Perhaps fourth or fifth. So, there is no doubt Mr. Douthat is a big time lefty, which is why his, dare I say brilliant, Sunday opinion column, "Government and Its Rivals" so surprised me.


 In Mr. Douthat's piece, he discusses the Obama administration's decision to exempt churches from the Obamacare contraceptive mandate but not hospitals run by those churches. He takes it further though, into the larger idea that the purpose of government is to do things that individuals cannot do themselves and how government can abuse this.


 If I didn't know Douthat's history and the fact liberal writers love to disguise their real purpose inside another, I'd swear he was is becoming a Conservative. Of course though, it is just in the nature of N.Y. Times' liberals to take shots at right wingers and Ross proves he cannot control this impulse either. Let's look at a few of his thoughts, but first we will get his shots at right wingers out of the way;

"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."

 OK, good one Ross. You got me, I just can't put "The Fountainhead" down. I would remind you that in the whole, "it takes a village" thing, every village has it's idiots. The problems arise when the idiots are in charge of the village and sometimes we need a John Wayne to run the idiots out of town. Now that is out of the way, we can move along. Here he points out one of the ideological differences in the purpose of government;

"To borrow a line attributed to Representative Barney Frank, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

"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."

  Here, Douthat seemingly begins to channel his inner right winger;

"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."

"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."

"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."

 Douthat goes on to discuss the absurdity of the contraceptive mandate rules for church run hospitals;

"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.”

 Ross even gives us this rather harsh line; "The regulations are a particularly cruel betrayal of Catholic Democrats." Cruel betrayal ? They won't like that at the White House, it could bring an end to Chris Matthews' tingles. Douthat continues;

"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."

 Now, we are getting to the core of Mr. Douthat's problem, his liberal problem, he worries that in the future Conservatives could be in power and turn this power of government against liberal interests;

"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."

"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."

 BRAVO, Mr. Douthat ! BRAVO ! A liberal argument against big government. Through this one issue, the contraceptive mandate, this liberal has suddenly realized something that we Conservatives and Libertarians have warned of forever, the dangers of government expansion and it's continuous intrusion into citizen's lives.


 So, is there hope on this Sunday ?


 What Douthat really worries about here is Conservatives using this same government regulatory power to ban or greatly curtail abortion in the future. He is sending the message to other liberals, do not set this precedent because the political right will use it against us pro-abortion liberals.


 This is what Mr. Douthat's whole piece is really about, and Ross never had to use the "A" word once. He implies it with the term "culture war". It is funny how liberals, who find the genocide of the unborn so dear to their hearts, shy away from the use of the word abortion. As I said before, liberals love to wrap their real motivations in seemingly higher minded ideas with greater purpose.


 While it is nice to hear a liberal argue against big government, really Ross is not, he is arguing against this one regulation for his own ideological, pro-abortion reasons. So, don't get your hopes up too high for Mr. Douthat's Conservative conversion anytime soon.