To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (5 page)

As Wayne Oliver, leader of the Health Justice Project at the Center for Health Transformation, has noted, an estimated $151-210 billion is wasted annually in defensive medicine, as doctors follow unnecessary procedures and conduct needless tests and services solely to avoid malpractice lawsuits.

In preparing for health reform in 2009, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that litigation reform in medical malpractice
would save the federal government $53 billion over ten years. Yet, even though Obama, Pelosi, and Reid needed money to pay for their government health program; even though doctors made malpractice reform their number one reform goal; and even though a significant majority of the American people supported litigation reform, it was impossible for the Democrats to support it.

For the Left, this isn’t about ideology; it’s about raw power. The simple fact is that trial lawyers are one of the primary components of the secular-socialist machine and major financiers of the Democratic Party. The lawyers understand their income directly depends on their ability to sue. And the Democrats will never cross such important supporters on such a crucial issue.

For most doctors and businesses, litigation reform is important but it’s not dire. But for the trial lawyers—the reactionary defenders of the old order—this is a life-or-death issue. Their status, their incomes, their ambitions to someday own a large private plane and a baseball or football team, or to buy a Senate seat or a governorship—all these dreams could be destroyed if litigation reform led to fewer lawsuits and smaller awards.

Anyone who doubts how tough this fight will be should talk with a colleague of mine at the Center for Health Transformation, Dr. John Gill, who helped lead the Texas malpractice reform effort. After winning a seven-year fight to get the Texas legislature to approve malpractice reform, he and his colleagues came to a dramatic conclusion: the only way to ensure trial lawyers didn’t undermine the law was to get it written into the Texas state constitution. And that’s just what they did; the people of Texas approved tort reform in a public referendum.

Secularism is the heart of the secular-socialist movement. I’m not talking about secularism simply as a lack of religious conviction. I
mean secularism as an explicitly anti-religious outlook expressed in policies designed to ban all religious expression from the public square.

Seeking to create a man-centered world, leftist elites invoke secularism as a pleasant-sounding term to disguise their egocentric worldview. In their minds, there are no God-given rules for us to follow. There are no Ten Commandments, or really any commandments of any kind.

Secular elites, particularly in academia, the media, and the courts, are engaged in a steady assault on religious belief. They believe religious expression should be private, marginal, and irrelevant. It’s okay to be religious as long as the religion has no meaning. It’s fine to be vaguely spiritual as long as you don’t try to translate it into some kind of historic religion, especially Christianity.

The Left originally appealed for tolerance for minority views. Now they demand obedience to these minority views.

The secularizing pattern, beginning with the 1963 Supreme Court decision outlawing school prayer, has built such momentum that two Connecticut Democratic legislators introduced a bill that would have effectively driven the Catholic Church out of their state.

Furthermore, in the 2010 U.S. Senate special election in Massachusetts (a colony founded by Puritans searching for religious liberty), Democratic nominee and state attorney general Martha Coakley suggested Catholics shouldn’t serve in emergency rooms because they might hold unacceptable pro-life views. In a similar attempt at exclusion, the Left are trying to restrict the activities of faith-based social service agencies that believe marriage is between a man and a woman.

Religious expression is also under attack in our courts: a plaintiff in Southern California has filed a lawsuit seeking to knock down a cross erected in 1934 in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Other lawsuits are trying to stop us from uttering the phrase “one nation under God” as part of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Traditionally, America has been a religious society based on the fundamental belief that there is something out there larger than ourselves. Our subordination to God sets boundaries for what we can or should do to ourselves and others. It also creates expectations for us to live up to; a belief in God turns a wasted life into a betrayal of God’s gifts.

If we are endowed by our Creator with the right to pursue happiness, we also have a responsibility to use God’s gifts to pursue happiness (remembering that happiness in this context means wisdom and virtue).

There is a profound reason Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step program stresses the importance of God. Simply read the twelve steps and imagine what little would be left if God were removed from this process of saving and rebuilding lives.

 

 

 

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God
as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God,
as we understood Him
, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

A federal official once proposed that a federal anti-addiction program be developed based on Alcoholics Anonymous—but “without all the God stuff.” That shows the depth of anti-religious antipathy in elite circles: AA may be the world’s most successful addiction recovery program, but the government apparently could improve it by banishing God.

Chuck Colson, with his extraordinarily effective prison ministry, faces similar opposition from secular elites. The prison ministry system undoubtedly works; it has enabled thousands of people to leave prison as profoundly changed men and women, able to lead decent, productive lives. But many elites would rather condemn prisoners to hopeless lives of secular despair than risk saving them through religious faith. Sadly, simply due to this kind of prejudice, there is significant resistance to prison ministry activities.

Chasing religion from the public square inevitably lowers public morality. That’s because a belief in God limits our tendencies
toward hedonism, exploiting others, and abusing power. If you are subordinate to God then by definition you are subordinate to rules that transcend your own ego and your own personal appetites.

The Founding Fathers overwhelmingly agreed that religion was crucial in sustaining the culture of responsibility needed to keep the country free.
^b
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 says, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

Note the order: first comes religion. Then comes morality. Knowledge is the last goal.

The move toward secularism has harmed American society. Look at the problems affecting today’s teenagers, compared to the same data for 1963, the year the Supreme Court banned school prayer.

Did the elimination of school prayer help our schools? No. To the contrary, the decline of morality in school and in society overall has given rise to a destructive pattern that the late Senator Pat Moynihan captured perfectly in his article, “Defining Deviancy Down.”

The secular-socialist effort to drive God and morality to one hour a week in Church, Synagogue, Mosque, or Temple, but to preserve
the other 167 hours a week for secularism, has deeply weakened our capacity to distinguish right from wrong and to sacrifice short-term gratification for a commitment to permanent moral principles.

Perhaps more than any other area, the Left will fight any rise in religious expression. Secularism is their guiding philosophy, which they enforce with ruthless intolerance. If they find a cross in the middle of the Mojave Desert unacceptable, imagine how they will fight the restoration of God to the public square.

Through any means necessary, from violent street protests to the insidious expansion of bureaucratic power, the Left have spent the last four decades tightening their grasp over America and its most important institutions—the federal bureaucracy, academia, Hollywood, Big Labor, and even big business. From that dominating position, they have propagated a completely foreign set of secular-socialist values. Rejecting American traditions of hard work, self-sufficiency, and honesty, they encourage Americans to learn how to game the system—sucking the maximum resources out of our country while contributing the minimum.

Once people accept this outlook, they quickly realize the bigger government gets, the more opportunity there is to game it. A small government with relatively few resources and strict oversight is difficult to cheat. In a leviathan like the Left want to create, however, with more bureaucrats controlling more money, it’s much easier to buy favors and abuse programs. This is a lesson we should learn from Europe, where the massive, largely unaccountable EU bureaucracy is mired in waste, fraud, and inefficiency.

The struggle between America’s historic value system and that of secular socialism will be intense. The Left did not fight this long just to give up when they’re so close to victory: creating a socialist system where a voting majority, dependent on the state’s largess, will
permanently vote for the party of big government. And so Americans who prefer traditional America to the socialist vision are left with one option: to stand up and fight.

In the following chapters, I’ll explain the goals and methods of the secular-socialist machine in more detail, and propose policies and strategies to help save America from its manipulations.

 

 

 

W
hile it may sound alarmist, the best way to describe the opponents of American liberty is this: they are a secular-socialist machine.

Many people, especially on the Left, will reject this term. So let me explain why it’s the only honest description of the way Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the many left-wing power figures and organizations operate.

The “Left” is a term stemming from the seating of political parties in the National Assembly during the French Revolution. The radicals were seated on the left and the conservatives on the right. Today, the Left comprise a range of opinion favoring various levels of state control over society and over the economy. So the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda is indeed leftist, but it is also a unique collection of policies and attitudes that deserves a more specific description.

“Liberalism” also fails to capture the values and beliefs that animate this agenda. Originally describing the nineteenth-century movement for free markets and limited government, liberalism later came to signify President Roosevelt’s New Deal. FDR’s liberalism, however, was so much more accepting of God (see his national radio prayer on D-Day, for example), so much more pro-work, and so much more concerned with defending America (FDR tried German saboteurs by military tribunal and executed them within six weeks of their capture), that the modern Left can honestly be characterized as a radical break from FDR’s worldview.

Today, it’s not liberalism but secular socialism that drives the Left’s policies, which are enacted through a political machine. Because defining the Left in these terms will be controversial, we should briefly examine the interlocking relationship of secularism, socialism, and machine politics.