Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

July 1, 2012

Obamacare Upheld: Civil Disobedience For THIS?

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 2:03 am

Every so often, someone with a soapbox — usually a privileged, white mouthpiece of the Religious Right — says something so astoundingly bizarre in its overreaction and under-coherence that I’m rendered speechless with dismay.

This one lasted about a day or so. 

But then I get over it, and I’m getting better at my rebound, which argues against the prevailing view that I’m getting more curmudgeonly as I settle comfortably into my early 50s and also suggests that when the element of surprise is missing, my recovery time is shortened.

The thing is, I’m just not very often all that surprised any more.

As I live on the Palouse longer and longer, I’m less and less shocked that the font of the foulest utterances is so very often — all together now! — the ineffably hateful and imprudent Doug Wilson.  While celebrating, along with virtually everyone else with burdensome health insurance premiums, chronic illness, limited income with no fabulously rich uncle in sight, and those concerned with social justice, the Supreme Court’s upholding of the meat of Obamacare, I decided to risk horror and check in with the Bloviator.

Oh, my.  Wilson believes that the decision was thrust him and all Bible-believing, Christ-loving, covenant-keeping Christians into a hell of Obama’s making — a hell so insidious, so viciously evil, so far-reaching in its attempt to deny the sovereignty of the Almighty One that it requires us to drop out — to just say no to Obamacarapostasy.  How does the extension of consumer-paid health insurance, the mandatory purchase thereof not terribly unlike that of the mandatory purchase of car insurance and a solution so tepid compared to the single-payer system adopted by every other industrialized nation, propel all of us into the very blood-drenched, life-snatching clutches of Satan?

Well, by virtue of the upholding of a plan whose centerpiece — the individual health insurance-purchase mandate — was originally a GOP plan, and which will protect millions of chronically ill, suddenly ill, and trying-desperately-to-not-become-ill Americans now held hostage by the profit-drivien vagaries of insurance companies.  Oh, and it means insurance companies will get less filthy rich if yesterday’s mammogram comes back with a lump (owing to my 2003 brush with breast cancer, which, God be praised, turned out to be a benign pair of lumps the size of peas), and it robs the populace of the “freedom” to opt out of the healthcare game until they get terribly sick, thus driving up costs for those of us who paid our dues — our premiums — as part of our participation in the social covenant Wilson despises.

You think I’m kidding — that I’m using a simple political disagreement to score unfair points against a man I clearly don’t like.  But the entire post, written yesterday, June 29, is still up; read it in its entirety.  For starters, though, here’s his conclusion, wherein he tops off seven points of — ahem — political analysis with a final appeal to John Calvin’s views of “the lesser magistrate,” which, as Wilson posits it, looks nothing like the magisterium of the Master:

“There is now, in principle, no limiting principle on the congressional power to tax, and the absence of such a limiting principle has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Even if Obamacare is repealed (as I now believe to be likely), this is now just a policy decision — the constitutional green light has been given. If Congress is deemed to have the constitutional authority to tax you for not doing whatever it is they dictate (eating brocoli, wearing blue tee-shirts, whatever), there is no other name for this than despotism. The fact that it is a nanny despotism helps not at all. The fact that their exercise of this authority is currently in abeyance matters not at all.

And so this means that we should resort to Calvin’s doctrine of the lesser magistrate, and call upon our state governors and legislatures to simply refuse to comply with Obamacare. The time has come to just say no. This is because there is no form of government more fundamentally anti-Christian than a government that recognizes, in principle, no limit to what it can require. Absolute claims are the prerogative of Deity. If this decision is allowed to stand, there is no longer any limiting principle inside the Beltway whatever. It is time for the ruling class to discover that there is still a limiting principle outside the Beltway, enforced by those who believe that the only real limiting principle is at the right hand of the Father.”  (Blog and Mablog, June 29, 2012, Douglas Wilson)

In calling on Christ’s disciples to act as the needed “limiting principle outside the Beltway,” this man invites study of his justice priorities, a survey of what else he finds so abhorrent that it requires the Christian to take a stand by breaking the law.  Presumably, anything that he finds so hideous, so unjust, that Christians must make a stand for the Lordship of Christ over the specific, egregious sinfulness of an “overreaching” government must be worse than other things we should just vote, pray, or speak out against.  Unfortunately, a survey of Wilson’s stands on other areas that most sentient beings, even sentient Christian beings, find to be a gross offense to a holy God reveals that it’s the taxation nature and limitation of his “rights” that set our local hysteric’s head a-spinning.

Wilson, who co-wrote a book defending Antebellum slavery and defended the patriarchial “Christian” slaveholders and the Confederate Army as the most “Godly” Christian fighting force and population ever amassed, clearly didn’t believe slavery was an evil worthy of the believer’s civilly-disobedient opposition.  Almost as bad was his branding of evangelical Abolitionists, who did find the buying, beating, and selling of humans as an evil worthy of their active opposition, as God-haters who despised the Word of God.  But clearly, he finds no need, much less right, for Christians then to “just say no” to the despicable practice of kidnapping, buying, keeping and beating other human beings for profit — or so suggests Wilson’s unabashedly slave-defending past. 

And Wilson’s buddies in the despicable League of the South, which calls for an “Anglo-Celtic” homeland in the American South, were conspicuous in their absence during the protests that marked the Civil Rights movement — although they were quite conspicuous in their presence in upholding racial segregation.  The movement, during which protests were most often legal, and the instances of civil disobedience for the protection and full inclusion in society of our Black sisters and brothers were undertaken by Christians of color and the many brave white men and women who in many cases sacrificed their lives to stand with the poor and oppressed, was derided, at best, by his neo- and paleo-Confederate, Constitutionalist pals.  No, Wilson and his ilk didn’t find racial discrimination worthy of a civilly disobedient “no,” and in many cases were shrill in their “yes” to the “rights” of whites to treat Black people like dogs.

(continued . . . I mean, how much can you take in one post???)

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