OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Big Bad Government Is Coming To Get You

Is that concern about big government why they want it to decide which substances people can imbibe?

Is that why they want the government to prevent doctors from prescribing medical marijuana to help retching chemotherapy patients stay alive?

Is the conservative commitment to freedom from an all-powerful government the reason why they've spent the last decade gutting the Fourth Amendment protection against searches and seizures without a warrant?

Is the commitment to small government the reason our regressive friends favor laws controlling who consenting adults are allowed to sleep with?

Or who they're allowed to marry?

Or if they can use birth control?

Is this what they meant when they demanded that the Republican Congress pass legislation intervening in Terri Schiavo's family medical tragedy? Is this the freedom from a repressive nanny-state they had in mind when they applauded George Bush for flying across the country in the middle of the night to sign that bill?

It all seems a little confusing to me. I hear the regressive right talking tough and thumping their chests, all about the big bad government which takes away our liberty, and enslaves us. You know, like the French. Those people who are always out on the streets protesting their government, en masse. Because, as slaves, they've been forced to... protest... their... own... government... Er, somethin' like that...

Yep, somehow, these kooks have decided that they're the small government people. And yet when I think about what the right favors with respect to anything involving personal liberties, sexuality, freedom from repressive government intrusion, even the decision to end one's own life -- it's always just the opposite story. More government intrusion and regulation, in the very most personal aspects of our lives. Hmmm. It just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

Here's the deal. There are basically two categories of government interference in people's affairs we can distinguish, the economic and the social.

When it comes to the economic side of the equation, old-fashioned real conservatives always did favor less government. Less taxation, less spending, less regulation and less government ownership of industries. Today's regressives, however, are really just kleptocrats. When Republicans like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush come to power, they actually spend more than Democrats (who aren't terribly liberal, but leave that aside), by far. Reagan tripled the national debt in eight years, and Bush doubled it again, from $5.5 trillion to $11 trillion. The only real difference these days is that so-called conservatives use big spending for purposes of funneling money to cronies like Halliburton or Exxon-Mobil, while so-called liberals do a bit less of the same, and maybe also throw a bone or two to the middle class every once in a while.

On the social side, however, the conservative trope about theirs being the ideology of freedom is a total joke and an ugly lie. These are the people who want the government in your underpants, who want the government reading your mail without a warrant, who want to control who you sleep with and who you marry, and who even want to force you to live in agony when you just want to crawl off and die. These are the people who stood in the doorways blocking the movements for racial and sexual equality.

I'm sorry, I can't really think of freedoms more personal and more crucial than these. And every time I turn around, I see sickening demands from sickened regressives to take these away from all of us. (What they then do themselves, privately, of course, is another matter entirely. Just ask Larry Craig. Or Mark Foley. Or David Vitter. Or Jimmy Swaggart. Or Ted Haggard. Or Mark Sanford... Or...) As if that isn't bad enough, then we have to be lectured on how they're protecting us from the big bad nanny state, come to deprive us of the very freedom they are in fact trying to get the big bad state to deprive us of.

Nor is their ultimate vision of freedom from governmental intrusion particularly appealing, to put it gently.

Call me crazy, but I don't want my neighbor on the right to have the freedom to build an abattoir on his land, and my neighbor on the left to be able to construct a sulfur processing factory.

Call me nutty, but I don't want parents to be free to deny their children an education, or to prevent them from seeing a doctor when they're seriously ill.

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