The Intersection of the Gospel and Politics: Key Points I
Posted: Mon Apr 01, 2013 4:09 pm
The interface then, between the gospel and politics, would in my estimation fall along the following perimeters:
1. Those aspects of political life where gospel informed moral and ethical principles are either supported or compromised by public policy or aspects of a political ideology. This is more complex a principle than it may appear at first glance. For example, while I do not support smoking or drinking as a Latter Day Saint, and would exercise all of my persuasive abilities to steer someone away from such behavior, I do not support the present attempts of an aggressive special interest legal community and, what have come to be termed “lifestyle Nazis” to destroy a legal industry and demonize cigarette smokers.
The reason is not that I have any love or sympathy for tobacco or alcohol use (indeed, as a recovered alcoholic, there is no love lost between me and alcohol whatsoever), but that in a freedom and personal responsibility based society (and these two concepts can never be disassociated from each other) grounded in the concept of the rule of law, the attempt to both control and abrogate free personal choice, while at the same time relieving individuals of personal responsibility for their choices (though the knowledge that cigarette smoking could be quite harmful to human health, and indeed fatal for many, and the fact that clear health warnings have been placed on cigarette packages for upwards of forty years now, has been pervasive in our society, this has not prevented claimants in personal and class action lawsuits from claiming ignorance of the health risks, and blaming the tobacco companies for “lying” about such risks) through legal/judicial/police power, while attacking and punishing legal industries for producing and selling its products, creates an atmosphere of lawless grievance litigation – a kind of lawsuit lottery – in which, since tort lawyers bear no costs or consequences for bringing even the most frivolous lawsuits to court, there is little risk in making a play for a big payoff. It also encourages a kind of legislation and social change through litigation mentality that circumvents accountable, deliberative legislative bodies for courtroom fiat.
It is never, however, the case that this kind of politically correct lifestyle fascism has a rational end point at which the dictators of virtue see any boundaries to their desire to save others from themselves. Ever more aspects of personal choice, beginning yes, with truly unlikable things like cigarettes, but moving ever onward to everything from soda pop, ice cream, potato chips, fast food of all kinds (and to ever more shrilly preposterous claims that such food is addictive, or in some sense toxic and unhealthy, even in the most modest quantities), transfats, meat per se, the quantity of even good, healthy food we eat; everything becomes the focus of the power of the state to regulate, control and dictate proper behavior.
The problem here is not that some things are healthier than others, or that some things are not, indeed, harmful, in one sense or another, for some people, more or less. The problem is deploying the force of the state to determine for others how they will live and the choices they will make, even in the minutest areas of their lives.
The anti-tobacco movement began with a most reasonable focus on banning cigarette smoking from commercial airliners. Since then, it has moved to banning smoking in virtually any public space, including restaurants, nightclubs and bars, and has now moved to banning smoking in one’s own vehicle, and in one’s own home (the junk science of “second hand smoke” having been used as the ace in the hole in the political arena). This movement on the Left has spawned its usual brood of ideological pop intellectuals such as, for a prime example in one area, Morgan Spurlock and Eric Schlosser, who have succeeded in demonizing an entire industry that produces what is in essence utterly benign foodstuffs that, in moderation, are harmless and basically healthy looked at as separate components.
This is a more subtle question than that posed by the ERA, abortion, homosexual marriage, or other similar clear moral incursions into the gospel from the secular political sphere. As a Latter Day Saint and a libertarian conservative, I do not support smoking or drinking, but I do not support the destruction of both personal liberty and personal responsibility inherent in the coercive nanny/prohibition model inherent within the cultural Left to an even greater degree. With fast food, the items themselves are not inherently harmful (and are, in fact, quite the opposite, in and of themselves) and hence, the almost visceral desire to deny them to others and persecute those who produce them bespeaks an interesting mentality, one that we will encounter again and again in Western political culture.
1. Those aspects of political life where gospel informed moral and ethical principles are either supported or compromised by public policy or aspects of a political ideology. This is more complex a principle than it may appear at first glance. For example, while I do not support smoking or drinking as a Latter Day Saint, and would exercise all of my persuasive abilities to steer someone away from such behavior, I do not support the present attempts of an aggressive special interest legal community and, what have come to be termed “lifestyle Nazis” to destroy a legal industry and demonize cigarette smokers.
The reason is not that I have any love or sympathy for tobacco or alcohol use (indeed, as a recovered alcoholic, there is no love lost between me and alcohol whatsoever), but that in a freedom and personal responsibility based society (and these two concepts can never be disassociated from each other) grounded in the concept of the rule of law, the attempt to both control and abrogate free personal choice, while at the same time relieving individuals of personal responsibility for their choices (though the knowledge that cigarette smoking could be quite harmful to human health, and indeed fatal for many, and the fact that clear health warnings have been placed on cigarette packages for upwards of forty years now, has been pervasive in our society, this has not prevented claimants in personal and class action lawsuits from claiming ignorance of the health risks, and blaming the tobacco companies for “lying” about such risks) through legal/judicial/police power, while attacking and punishing legal industries for producing and selling its products, creates an atmosphere of lawless grievance litigation – a kind of lawsuit lottery – in which, since tort lawyers bear no costs or consequences for bringing even the most frivolous lawsuits to court, there is little risk in making a play for a big payoff. It also encourages a kind of legislation and social change through litigation mentality that circumvents accountable, deliberative legislative bodies for courtroom fiat.
It is never, however, the case that this kind of politically correct lifestyle fascism has a rational end point at which the dictators of virtue see any boundaries to their desire to save others from themselves. Ever more aspects of personal choice, beginning yes, with truly unlikable things like cigarettes, but moving ever onward to everything from soda pop, ice cream, potato chips, fast food of all kinds (and to ever more shrilly preposterous claims that such food is addictive, or in some sense toxic and unhealthy, even in the most modest quantities), transfats, meat per se, the quantity of even good, healthy food we eat; everything becomes the focus of the power of the state to regulate, control and dictate proper behavior.
The problem here is not that some things are healthier than others, or that some things are not, indeed, harmful, in one sense or another, for some people, more or less. The problem is deploying the force of the state to determine for others how they will live and the choices they will make, even in the minutest areas of their lives.
The anti-tobacco movement began with a most reasonable focus on banning cigarette smoking from commercial airliners. Since then, it has moved to banning smoking in virtually any public space, including restaurants, nightclubs and bars, and has now moved to banning smoking in one’s own vehicle, and in one’s own home (the junk science of “second hand smoke” having been used as the ace in the hole in the political arena). This movement on the Left has spawned its usual brood of ideological pop intellectuals such as, for a prime example in one area, Morgan Spurlock and Eric Schlosser, who have succeeded in demonizing an entire industry that produces what is in essence utterly benign foodstuffs that, in moderation, are harmless and basically healthy looked at as separate components.
This is a more subtle question than that posed by the ERA, abortion, homosexual marriage, or other similar clear moral incursions into the gospel from the secular political sphere. As a Latter Day Saint and a libertarian conservative, I do not support smoking or drinking, but I do not support the destruction of both personal liberty and personal responsibility inherent in the coercive nanny/prohibition model inherent within the cultural Left to an even greater degree. With fast food, the items themselves are not inherently harmful (and are, in fact, quite the opposite, in and of themselves) and hence, the almost visceral desire to deny them to others and persecute those who produce them bespeaks an interesting mentality, one that we will encounter again and again in Western political culture.