As the political Left continues what can only be characterized as invidious harassment against the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Left’s own hostility to basics of the American creed becomes apparent.
The order of Catholic nuns was in two different courtrooms this week trying to protect its religious freedom from destruction by “progressive” state attorneys general. Democratic attorneys general Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Xavier Bacerra of California are in effect ignoring a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year by trying again to force the Sisters to provide abortifacient drugs through their healthcare plans.
Nicole Russell eloquently wrote in these pages yesterday that she is “tired of seeing … the omnipotent authoritarian reach of government” used to bully “a group of selfless nuns” who “devote their lives to God and the poor.” All of us should be tired of what Russell called this “asinine cause” of harassing the nuns and be infuriated by it.
This treatment of the nuns, though, isn’t occurring in a vacuum. It’s part of a larger movement on the Left to use government not just to prohibit bad behavior, but to compel individuals and groups into actions and expressions against their wills, consciences, or (especially) faith. It is the attempt to use government not merely in a limited but crucial role of protector of life and liberty — limits which are the very heart of the American experiment — but in a proto-authoritarian fashion as the ruler of subjects who must bow to its will.
So, nuns must provide abortion-inducing drugs. Cake artists and art photographers must use their creative expression to celebrate homosexuality. Individuals must be forced to buy health insurance whether they want it or not, and the insurance must cover all sorts of lesser treatments an individual either might never need or might prefer to pay for in direct, as-needed transactions. College mental-health counselors must accept patients whose issues contradict the faith of the counselors, even if the counselors could otherwise provide referrals to colleagues better able to understand and give advice on the particular patients’ plights.
The Left’s agenda is one of state coercion — which is exactly what our nation was founded to protect against. It also is an agenda openly hostile to faith, even going so far as to claim that the First Amendment protects not faith or religion but merely “worship.” Soup kitchens, retirement homes, schools, homeless shelters: The Left sees none of those things as faith ministries but as mere “social services” to be placed under the government’s thumb. Worse, some “progressives” seem to see faith-based services as absolute intruders, interfering with the state’s role as all-encompassing social provider and surrogate parent.
The Left is obsessed with diversity (and a distorted idea of it, at that) but hostile to real pluralism.
Consider: James Madison’s seminal idea, applicable to the private sector as well as to government, was that a multiplicity of largely unregulated interests, groups, methods and beliefs — pluralism — allows the fullest flourishing of rights, prosperity, and human happiness. The entire Constitution, and attendant American political system, was rooted in this idea. Hence, the abundance of the voluntary, “intermediary institutions” so celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville.
The Left sees most of those voluntary associations not as civic boons but as threats to efficiency, order, and uniformity of result. That view, it seems, is what is really behind the continuing harassment of the Little Sisters. The Left sees them not as saintly servants who (in Nicole Russell’s words) “rescue babies and the lost,” but as competitors who undermine the government’s overarching wisdom.
The Left is dead wrong; pray God most Americans still understand this.
