Santorum’s Crusade Against Freedom
Posted by Anthony Gregory on June 6, 2011
Rick Santorum says he’s in the presidential race to win. In typical campaign-season Republican fashion, he has condemned Obama for having “wrecked our economy, and centralized power in Washington, DC, and robbed people of their freedom.”
Of course it is true that Obama has been a disaster for American liberty. It doesn’t take a genius to see this. But one might wonder, what is the alternative Santorum represents?
Santorum’s War Against Contractual Liberty: Central to a free society is the concept of freedom of association. People should be free to disassociate from others as well, for any reason. One application of this principle would be the right of employers (and employees) to end their employment relationship at will—only with the caveat that premature termination in violation of an employment contract be remedied through damages. Certainly, no boss should be forced to hire anyone against his will.
This principle has been eroded severely through Civil Rights and anti-discrimination laws. This is a tragic abandonment of the cornerstone of a free society. But Santorum has proposed, with the support of such Democratic stalwarts as John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Ted Kennedy, to gut this principle even further, by forcing employers to accommodate the religious practices of their workers. This is an egregious attack on economic liberty. It means that a boss would have to make “reasonable” provisions for his employees’ prayers and religious rituals, even if these are at odds with his own values. In a society of religious and contractual liberty, employers wouldn’t have to hire people of any religious persuasion that they didn’t want to, much less support religious practices they did not support. Of course, customers could boycott companies if they found the discrimination or lack of accommodation unfair. But this should be up to free individuals working in the market, never the state.
Santorum’s Attack on the Constitution: Santorum has argued that the federal government should build a wall and use national guards to enforce border security—a usurpation of the proper authority of the states under the Tenth Amendment. He has been an enthusiastic defender of torture, despite the Eighth Amendment, due process rights, and every single standard of human decency. He also voted in support of making warrantless wiretapping easier, in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment; the flag-burning amendment—not actually in violation of the Constitution, but with the opinion, apparently, that the First Amendment needs changing; harsher penalties for drugs, when there is absolutely no authority in the Constitution for the feds to be involved in this at all; draconian penalties for gun violations so long as drugs are involved; federal abstinence education programs, when in fact education is the proper province of the states; a presidential line-item veto, when this is clearly an unconstitutional deprivation of Congress’s legislative authority; the Patriot Act and the evisceration of habeas corpus for detainees in the war on terror. And if you think he only supports cruel measures against those deemed by the government to be “terrorists,” keep in mind that this is the man who callously said that victims who didn’t successfully flee New Orleans in the midst of Hurricane Katrina should have been burdened by “tougher penalties.”
Santorum’s Battle Against Rationality in Foreign Affairs: Santorum has voted to expand NATO, an outdated Cold War relic; supported stronger sanctions against Syria, Cuba, Iran and even Japan in direct tension with the human right to free trade and the interests of the United States; and backed Clinton’s unconstitutional and unnecessary war with Kosovo, despite the better judgment of many other Republicans. But what else is to be expected from a man so deluded he thought as late as 2006 that Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq—even as the Bush administration insisted this was not so—and has seriously argued, even in a time when political correctness threatens freedom of inquiry and academic liberty at our universities, that criticism of Israel on college campuses should be federally punished?
Is He Good on Anything? Some will insist that at least Santorum is a fiscal conservative, but he voted for Bush’s deficit-enlarging budgets and does not support abolition of the huge unconstitutional, wasteful and counterproductive federal programs that are drowning this nation in debt—the empire, Social Security, Medicare, and all the rest. He might be marginally less spendthrift than Obama, but wait until you see him in power. He has no compunctions about using the force of the federal government and tax dollars to impose his vision on America—a vision in which employers have to accommodate workers’ religions against their will, a vision in which Washington teaches kids what kind of sexual values to embrace, a vision in which campus criticism of America’s closest Middle East ally is socially engineered out of existence, a vision of social conservatism not nurtured in a humane and virtuous manner by families, churches, and communities, but by the largest political body in the history of the world—the U.S. government. He has no respect for free speech, the Fourth Amendment, or Constitutional limits on the federal police power. Like so many other politicians, he thinks Americans have all too much liberty in many areas, and yet has the temerity to criticize his ideological mirror image, Barack Obama.
Obama has been a nightmare for liberty across the board. So was Bush. If Americans want to finally awake to a future of liberty, they will reject the authoritarian right-wing socialism of Rick Santorum.
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Shysnassi
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http://profiles.google.com/richard.carpenter7 Richard Carpenter
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Anonymous
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Bobfuckingsaggot
