Nanny State Waxes … While Our Representative Government Wanes

Nanny State Waxes … While Our Representative Government Wanes

            Today in our national life there is a growing number of things that are very hard to take.  I’ll be specific and name three.  These three trends illustrate the direction toward which the country has been heading for some time.  I don’t believe for a second that they reflect the will of the people.  In fact, they are being forced on us.

            For starters, it is hard to take that our federal system is fading slowly into a national system.  Federalism spreads power to the states and local communities; nationalism centers power in a nation’s capital.  In the last half century, America has not strayed but has bolted from its historical, prosperity-producing spread of power.  When power is centralized, freedom and creativity are diminished.  Currently the enterprise most sought by the nationalists is education.  We need only to pick up a newspaper to see this.

            Secondly, consider the nation’s First Lady and her initiative to dictate what our children will eat at school.  Why do First Ladies need a “cause” in the first place?  Seems to me that just being First Lady and exemplifying grace, intelligence and concern for others through, say, volunteerism would be “cause” enough.   But no, our current First Lady, though not the first to do so, has taken on policy.  Through the Department of Agriculture and regulatory law (the most egregious kind), she has dictated what children may and may not eat at school. 

            Countless reports have come from local school systems saying students won’t eat the school meals the government now requires.  But so what?  Our nanny government knows better than parents.  If the government can actually require us to purchase certain things, it’s not a great leap to dictate our diet.  This school lunch issue is one of the best examples of regulatory law’s naked power.

            Most onerous, however, is the breakdown of the co-equal branches of government.  We all know that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but what is Congress doing while their own authority is being stripped by both the executive and the judicial branches?  The President’s executive orders and the unelected judiciary’s strike down of state-passed laws are almost a weekly occurrence.    

One case in point is the strike down of state marriage laws.  No silver-tongued devil will ever convince me that a majority of Americans now think it’s ok, or even truly possible, for a man to “marry” a man or for a woman to “marry” a woman. Forget polls.  Look at what duly elected state legislatures do.

 Yet, defying the will of voters in state after state, federal judges are changing an institution that has served the human race for millennia.  And still nobody has answered the obvious slippery slope question, “Why, then, can’t I have four wives if I wish, or two wives and two husbands?  Why should the government not adjust laws to favor any arrangement I can conjure?”

            Yes, the transformation of marriage is being forced on us.  It’s hard to take, one reason being that the co-equal branches of government are now whop-sided with the judicial branch ruling the roost.  Another reason is that the entire same-sex marriage issue defies logic and nature.  If a homosexual couple, for instance, wants to raise a child, what must they do to get one?  They must yield to the laws of nature, against which they have rebelled, and call on one of those old-fashioned, behind the times heterosexual couples to produce a baby.  

            There is no seismic shift in America in favor of so-called “marriage equality,” but there does exist an epidemic of judicial tyranny that would appall Jefferson and Madison. 

            So what do we tell our children?  Well, schools in quite a few states are already telling them: gender is a social construct, not a fact of nature; we can change our gender; “male and female created He them” is out; androgyny is in; one of our state governors is bisexual, so that too is just dandy.

            Accepting this New Sexuality, we are told, is just joining the 21^st century.  No, no, no.  Accepting it is returning to ancient Rome (partially to Greece) where in their last days of empire families disintegrated and “sexual liberty” was rampant.  The most secular of historians chronicle this.

            If our new Congress, that promised much, doesn’t help us with presidential overreach, judicial tyranny, and the slide of our federal system, then it’s time to create new coalitions and gather together people who still view things as did the signers of the U.S. Constitution.

            Those signers weren’t dumb, and neither was their admirer de Tocqueville who wrote, “The chief concern of good government should be to get people accustomed to managing without it.”

           

Roger Hines

2/18/15