I also felt misgivings about the way in which orthodox Catholics, finding common ground with Evangelical Christians on the question of abortion, seemed to bundle it together with other right-wing positions on purely political issues. There was a palpable hatred of Obama not just because he was "pro-choice" but because he was "a socialist" and in favour of gun control.
But then:
Also coinciding with my four-week book tour in the US was an issue of the Economist with a special report on business in America. The view taken was that American business, though battered by the recession, would bounce back because it had an inherently optimistic propensity to take risks. This was unquestionably true of the Ignatius Press. It is a non-profit-making enterprise, an apostolate as much as a business. Most who work in its office in an old fire station in San Francisco pray together three times a day.
But they saw an opportunity with The Death of a Pope to reach out into the secular market and made a major investment to bring this about. It is inconceivable that a religious publishing house in the UK would take the same risk. It may not turn out to have been cost effective but, like Mother Angelica's EWTN, it shows how the entrepreneurial energy found in the US can be harnessed to evangelisation and the propagation of the faith.
Hatred of the President - or of anyone - is deserving of condemnation. Period. No if's, and's, or but's. (Let's not replace Bush Derangement Syndrome with Obama Derangement Syndrome. You can disagree heartily with someone without getting personal over it, or attributing evil motives where simple error will serve as an explanation.)
But the connection between that spirit of entrepreneurship and opposition to socialism is hardly inconsistent. I think, by the way, that, like many Europeans, Piers does not understand that the U.S. Constitution does not grant any rights to American citizens; it acknowledges their God-given rights, one of which is the right to bear arms in one's own self-defense. As the Supreme Court recently explained: "[t]he Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home." By the way, have I ever mentioned that I am a member of the NRA?
And wasn't the Constitution intended as a protection from government usurpation of the natural rights of American citizens? (I would emphasize and highlight the key words: "protection from government," "natural rights," and "citizens.") Somewhere along the way during the past two centuries (and more particularly in the 20th century and the last several years), those who have amended and distorted the basic Constitution and the Bill of Rights have chosen to forget and abandon the original concept of protection from government. It does not mean that a person has to be a Harvard trained Constitutional scholar (for example) to understand the basic precepts involved here, but too many Americans are deaf, dumb, and blind to the ways in which government usurpation has been steadily, shamelessly, and deceitfully marching "forward" (in the name of Progressivism and liberalism, just to name two perversions of the Constitution). The fashionable notion of legislating "rights" continues unabated without any branch of the government having either the will or the ability to challenge the pernicious distortion of the Constitutional promise of protection from the government. Look ahead on the horizon to when people in power propose a 21st century Constitutional Convention for purposes of overhauling and modernizing the 18th century document. When that happens, God help us all. Now, all of that might sound like some sort of drivel from a paranoid conspiracy-theorist; however, I suggest that it is simply an objective assessment of past, present, and--in so far as past its prologue--future.
ReplyDeleteCORRECTION to final sentence:
ReplyDelete"past its prologue" should read "past is prologue"