Chesterton on Pete Stark

This sort of debate is what makes me think “The Middle Ages are dead”.

On the one one hand you’ve got people saying crazy things like “Health care is not a right”. News flash: If life is a right, then so is the maintenance of life by normal means. Hey! That’s not me talking:

2288 Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We must take reasonable care of them, taking into account the needs of others and the common good.

Concern for the health of its citizens requires that society help in the attainment of living-conditions that allow them to grow and reach maturity: food and clothing, housing, health care, basic education, employment, and social assistance.

The notion that ensuring that each human being has adequate access to health care is ipso facto “slavery” is as insane as saying that firemen are “slaves” because they have to respond to fires, or police are “slaves” because they have to respond to crimes.

However, in the spirit of C.S. Lewis, who said that “Opposite evils, so far from balancing, aggravate one another”, you get the equally insane Pete Stark, one of Americas rare openly atheistic paper pushing pols (there are lots of functionally atheistic pols in both parties, but they have to observe American Civil Religion pieties or we voters will get upset). Stark fulfills, to an exacting degree, Chesterton’s insightful observation: “Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.”

In the land where there are only two sides to every opinion, we are (insanely) forced to choose between those who support the right to life, but only up until birth, and those who deny the right to life up until birth. The first group imagines the government can do most anything in other countries, establishing the Great Society at gunpoint in Iraq and Afghanistan. The second group imagines the government can do most anything in this country, by eradicating subsidiarity and putting the state in charge of the health care system.