Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shall Support the Welfare State

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

As a candidate for the presidency, George W. Bush took heat for supposedly saying something like, “God wanted me to become president.” He never said that. But no matter. Here comes another yet another Bible-banging religious conservative “taking his marching orders from God.” Apparently, if you feel God endorses a particular path, God wants you to keep the news to yourself.

Religion, to many liberals, is a sign of weakness, a demonstration of the inability to reason for oneself. With the Bible telling him what to do, how to think, what to believe — why, such a person is downright scary. Recall Obama explaining how small-town Midwesterners deal with difficult economic times: “They get bitter,” as the then-presidential candidate put it. “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them … as a way to explain their frustrations.”

When, however, the left uses religion to justify expanding the Welfare State, well, invoking God becomes perfectly acceptable. During the last National Prayer Breakfast, for example, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer praised how “movingly” Obama spoke about the way his religion informs his policies.

 

Take Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus. In a recent column, he uses religion to denounce those who oppose ObamaCare: “These critics seldom acknowledge other aspects of the law aimed at helping insure some of the roughly 50 million people in this country who now lack coverage. That’s an act of pure selfishness. … It’s also a display of heartlessness unbefitting a country that claims to define itself by love-thy-neighbor Judeo-Christian values.” (Emphasis added.)

Judeo-Christian values? In caring for the needy, scripture dictates that The State supplant individuals, community, houses of worship and other nonprofits in helping care for the needy?

Tell this to the Rev. Robert Sirico, of the free-market think tank Acton Institute. Whether arguing for government programs like Medicare, Medicaid or even Social Security, the first question to ask is a moral one: Does turning the business of compassion over to the state harm us as a society and damage us in ways proponents fail to consider?

In his 1999 piece “Morality and Social Security,” Sirico says Social Security’s biggest failing is that it creates a culture of dependency: