Blessed John Paul II and the Demise of Communism

"We want God!"

HHS and Soft Totalitarianism: Defining Religious Freedom Down

George Weigel makes the argument at First Things about Obama's push against the institutional pluralism of civil society.  The administration's drive to foist its agenda on the world has been called "moral imperialism."  At home it involves destroying the heart of the American democratic republic, squeezing out the space between state and individual, the mediating structures that are the heart of social justice and the key bulwark against totalitarianism.  

HHS and Soft Totalitarianism

Feb 15, 2012

George Weigel

The Obama administration’s recently-announced HHS regulations, which would require Catholic institutions to subsidize health insurance coverage that provides sterilization, abortifacient drugs, and contraceptives, should be located within the context of the administration’s three-year long effort to define religious freedom down.

As the administration has demonstrated in its international human rights policy, it regards religious freedom as a kind of privacy right: the right to freedom of worship, which the administration seems to regard as analogous to any other optional, recreational activity. No serious student of religious freedom, however, takes the redefinition of religious freedom as freedom-to-worship seriously. For if that redefinition were true, there would be “religious freedom” in Saudi Arabia, so long as the “worship” in question were conducted behind closed doors. And that is manifestly absurd.

The HHS regulations announced on January 20 are one domestic expression of defining-religious-freedom-down.   READ MORE

What's Really Wrong with WikiLeaks by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal 2 December 2010

What's Really Wrong with WikiLeaks by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal 2 December 2010
Dalrymple argues, in part:

The actual effect of WikiLeaks is likely to be profound and precisely the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to achieve. Far from making for a more open world, it could make for a much more closed one. Secrecy, or rather the possibility of secrecy, is not the enemy but the precondition of frankness. WikiLeaks will sow distrust and fear, indeed paranoia; people will be increasingly unwilling to express themselves openly in case what they say is taken down by their interlocutor and used in evidence against them, not necessarily by the interlocutor himself. This could happen not in the official sphere alone, but also in the private sphere, which it works to destroy. An Iron Curtain could descend, not just on Eastern Europe, but over the whole world. A reign of assumed virtue would be imposed, in which people would say only what they do not think and think only what they do not say.

The dissolution of the distinction between the private and public spheres was one of the great aims of totalitarianism. Opening and reading other people’s e-mails is not different in principle from opening and reading other people’s letters....

May I speak frankly? No, not any more.