...it is precisely [Obama's] zealousness to realize religious values through politics that makes him so dangerous. Don’t misunderstand me here: the problem is not that Obama has religious values to impose, for all law-making is an inescapably religious endeavour if ‘religion’ can be used broadly to include a person’s worldview. Rather, the problem is that Obama’s particular religious perspective orients him to view government as a vehicle to proactively transform society for the better, to bring equality, moral consciousness and values back to the American people. In short, Obama wants to make us good. That is what makes Obama and all utopian endeavours appealing, but it is also what makes them so perilous. As C.S. Lewis remarked, “The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good – anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.”
For Barack Obama and his utopian aspirations, our whole lives become government’s business. Hence, his words which I have already quoted from his acceptance speech at the democratic national convention: “[government] should...protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.... Our government should work for us...That’s the promise of America...the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.”
To many, this does not seem a very revolutionary comment to make and it pails into insignificance next to his views on abortions. After all, we already live in a society where the air we breathe, the water we drink, the size of our toilet tank, what medicines we may take, the water pressure in our shower, the words we can speak under oath and in private, how our physician treats our illnesses, what our children study in school, what risks we are permitted to run in our own businesses, how fast we can drive our car, what wealth we may retain are all regulated by federal law. We take it for granted that the government should be working, like a good parent, to direct out every move and meet our every need. Only when a law goes against one of our cherished freedoms do we sit up and cry “tyranny”, while never challenging the basic underlying paraidgm of government. We tend to focus on whether we agree with the actual policies, plans and goals in questions that someone like Obama may be proposing, rather than asking the prior and more fundamental question, "Is it government's job to even be legislating in these areas?
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