The Pendragon's Hall

It was recently drawn to the Pendragon's attention that the contents of an Easter basket can be purchased with food stamps. The writer bemoaned "the Bush administration’s bald assertion regarding the capabilities of the federal government to transform human life, including marriage. The state has taken over the role of God. Government employs us, feeds us, regulates us, and now claims to be able to solve our problems, including gambling (is Bill Bennett listening?). " The Pendragon could not be more in agreement that candy and sweets should not be purchaseable by food stamps. They are not needs and their burden should not be imposed on the taxpayers of any given state. But the right-wing is beginning to live up to the adage that they are the only ones who regularly shoot their wounded and leave their leaders to die on the battlefield. This is not a problem with the Bush administration. Yes, he has not curbed spending and yes, I for one would be glad if he would do so. But we live in this mythical world where we think Ronald Reagan trimmed the size and power of the government and the fact of the matter is, he did not. For all his anti-government rhetoric he could not do without big government. Unfortunately, it is here to stay. We saw Bush try to privatize a certain aspect of it and the furies broke loose. What Bush is doing, indeed what Reagan did, was use the tool of liberalism (big government) to accomplish conservative ends: defense of the sanctity of marriage; lower taxes; more individual responsibility for health care, social security and education. What president in recent history trimmed the power of government? Bill Clinton, pressured by the oh-so-astute Newt Gingrich and his cronies in Congress. Clinton did an anti-Bush: he used the tool of conservatism to accomplish liberal ends. Suddenly, marriage was up to each state, meaning whatever weird decision one of their courts handed down; abortion became a private right...the list could go on and on. Romans 13 dictates that the government's mission is to do good and punish evil--this is something Bush agrees with. Unfortunately, many conservatives have grown up under the Enlightenment mantra that "the government governs best who governs least." Even more worrying, we have forgotten that the idea of self-government only works on a people moral enough to do the right thing without being forced. First Supreme Court justice John Jay warned that all nations must be governed either "by the Bible or the bayonet." You will either control your own more destructive impulses or everyone better learn to carry a baseball bat with them because you're going to have to beat it into people from the outside. When you live in a country where a woman can be callously starved to death by her own husband and this is allowable because we don't want the Federal government to "interfere" with our daily lives, when a majority of 4-3 on one state's supreme court can tell the entire state how to live because God forbid the federal government intervene to correct it, then you have a situation where, as much as I don't want to admit it, you live in a society that must be ruled from above. My solution: work on getting the people, the real power in this country, back into the kind of moral worldview they once held--that's the only long-run solution. But in the meantime it is up to Christians in the government, like Bush, to make sure the United States government does not become one that actually practices evil.