After every media sensationalized incident of racism, gun violence, or fill in the blank, we are told by our betters that it’s time for a “national conversation” on the subject. This usually seems less about actually having a conversation and more about giving them a sense of moral superiority.
But if information is power and, as Lord Acton put it, “power corrupts”, we need to think very carefully about the power that we are handing over to government without demanding a national conversation on liberty.
It should be a conversation with Americans making informed decisions about what’s important to them, not secret edicts by politicians and bureaucrats who are quick to create systems that grow out of control and prove impossible to stop once in motion.
Each day seems to bring new stories of abuse.
A Washington Post report detailed how the government has secretly been paying tens of millions of dollars to tech and internet companies to underwrite the ability of the government to use these services to spy on everyone – not just terrorists.
The Wall Street Journal reported that employees and contractors of the NSA have been found to use the agency’s capabilities to spy on their own potential “love interests” and former spouses. Call if cyber-stalking on steroids. And just a week ago we found out that the government’s own secret reports document that the NSA had broken privacy rules nearly three-thousand times in the last year alone.
A recent CNET story details how the FBI has developed new custom “port reader” software that it is trying to force all Internet service providers to install in order to give them access to Internet data in real time. (Who needs the NSA when you can wiretap the whole Internet yourself?)
To add insult to injury, the administration is petitioning the Supreme Court to review a case that could give government the right to search your mobile phone without a warrant. When you consider that most mobile phones are now linked to the same data and applications of the average computer, the government’s ability to go through it without a warrant is effectively no different than being able to walk into someone’s home or office and go through their computer files at will.
This isn’t what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Fourth Amendment’s language about being “secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects”.
As a result of the growing scandal, Obama has done what folks in Washington usually do when they want to defuse a political problem: appoint a committee. The new panel is comprised of leaders from the intelligence community as well as White House staffers, and will take a look at how the NSA spies on Americans and then let us know if there is anything to be worked up about. Fox, meet hen-house.
Of course all of these new revelations come several weeks after a coalition of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats in the US House came within twelve votes of passing a resolution to prohibit the NSA’s collection of “bulk data” on Americans unless they were under suspicion of terrorism.
Clearly it’s time for another vote on the subject.
Why is it illegal for the CIA to operate domestically (a wise precaution), but not for the NSA to spy on Americans domestically and share that information with other government agencies? And who’s to say these programs can’t be focused on something other than potential lovers and be used for blackmail, or to spy out financial secrets and make big bets in the markets? The list of potential abuses is endless.
There needs to be someone in this process whose job is to protect the privacy and liberty of the very people who are paying the tab. Some sort of congressionally appointed special counsel who can review all activities, report to Congress and even prosecute abuses. The current “trust us” arrangement doesn’t cut it.
Whatever reforms and restrictions are put in place need to be imaginative and lay down clear principles that apply no matter what the technology of the day may be. To set out in certain terms that it is illegal for any agency of our government to spy on us (individually or collectively) or to collect personal information on Americans without their consent or a specific, individualized warrant from a judge – which was the exact intent of the Fourth Amendment.
Anything less is not only an invitation but an admission that this is exactly what will happen.
It’s time that we start having that national conversation.
Culture war becoming a war over religious liberty
When liberals talk about opposing the “legislating of morality”, what they really mean is that they oppose policies that are supported by people whose morality is based on religious beliefs – and that they want to force everyone else to comply with their own secular based version of morality.
And since fewer liberals believe in God anyway, destroying religious liberty isn’t something they worry about.
In the wake of new gay marriage laws we’ve seen Christian photographers, Christian bakers and Christian owned venues sued for refusing to provide services to same-sex weddings. We’re now seeing lawsuits against states that don’t recognize gay marriage by homosexuals who have been “married” in other states.
We’ve seen Catholic adoption agencies run out of business for refusing to violate their faith and place children with homosexual couples; and seen a Christian school get sued for expelling two students that were involved in a lesbian relationship on the grounds of its religious views.
In San Diego a fertility doctor was sued for refusing to artificially inseminate an unmarried lesbian because of his beliefs. Meanwhile, the state of California is considering legislation mandating insurance coverage for gay and lesbian “infertility”, (yes, you read that right).
In the area of healthcare, the government is trying to force religious institutions to pay for insurance coverage that includes not just birth control, but drugs that are designed to induce abortions.
As one Catholic Bishop put it, the state is trying to use the “rule of law to force a church institution, in violation of its own self-identify and constitution, to pay for something in its own workplace that the institution holds and teaches to be sinful.”
To paraphrase another church official, does the state have the right to tell citizens how to practice their religion? Many liberals would emphatically answer “yes”.
According to the Obama administration, once you start a business you don’t have First Amendment rights anymore. In its response to Hobby Lobby’s lawsuit against Obamacare’s abortion coverage mandates, the administration wrote: “Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular employer…and a secular entity by definition does not exercise religion.” Got that?
In our military, the Air Force censored a video created by a chaplain simply because it included the word “God”; another chaplain was removed for not allowing a military chapel to be used for a same-sex wedding; and another service member received a potentially career ending reprimand for expressing his religious beliefs about homosexuality on a personal religious blog.
Senior officials at Fort Campbell sent out emails informing the ranks that “the religious right in America” is a “domestic hate group” because of its opposition to homosexuality. And this is the same military that recently produced training materials that lumped Tea Party supporters in with terrorists.
As instances like these came to light, a Republican US House member introduced an amendment to a military funding bill that would have “required the Armed Forces to accommodate actions and speech reflecting the conscience, moral, principles or religious beliefs” of service members.
The Obama administration “strongly objected”.
Add all of this to the recent Supreme Court decision on gay marriage in California which, as Justice Scalia put it in his dissent, formally declared “anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency” and that “any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement”.
That’s par for the course. The diversity and tolerance crowd doesn’t give a rip about diversity of thought or tolerate values that are different from their own, (such as they have them).
Gay marriage is the biggest weapon in this war simply because refusal to accommodate or sanction it can potentially leave you open to massive lawsuits in the conduct of normal business.
As former US Senator Sam Brownback put it, “…in states with same-sex marriage, religiously affiliated schools, adoption agencies, psychological clinics, social workers, marital counselors, etc. will be forced to choose between violating their own deeply held beliefs and giving up government contracts, tax-exempt status, or even being denied the right to operate at all.”
In short, the active practice of one’s faith in everyday life would no longer be legal.
These are the kind of problems you run into when government becomes so large that it covers virtually every type of human interaction. Inevitably it crosses the line from the secular to the realm of religious conscience.
All of which is kind of ironic for a country created by people looking for religious liberty.