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31

A More Competitive United States Means Better Lives

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One never knows how much weight to put on these sorts of indexes, but this is good to see:

The U.S. dethroned Hong Kong to retake first place among the world’s most competitive economies, thanks to faster economic growth and a supportive atmosphere for scientific and technological innovation, according to annual rankings by the Switzerland-based IMD World Competitiveness Center. . . . The renewed top ranking aligns with the positive U.S. growth narrative over the past year. Growth averaged 2.9 percent in the four quarters through March, versus 2 percent in the prior period.

The mind boggles at the notion that Americans would be content to give up that title.  Of course, the complexities of our electoral system mean it’s never that straightforward, and to the extent that there is such a choice, a fair people will often accept a little bit less competitiveness in the name of helping others.

The missing piece, therefore, is awareness that this is a false choice.  A more competitive economy is one in which there is more opportunity and more churn in who is on top.  It’s one with higher prosperity, which means more money flowing around and a greater capacity for charity, too.

32

Conscientious Versus Issue-Conscious

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I wouldn’t claim that I help this curve much, but it certainly has the ring of truth:

Do our behaviors really reflect our beliefs? New research suggests that, when it comes to climate change, the answer is no. And that goes for both skeptics and believers.

Participants in a year-long study who doubted the scientific consensus on the issue “opposed policy solutions,” but at the same time, they “were most likely to report engaging in individual-level, pro-environmental behaviors,” writes a research team led by University of Michigan psychologist Michael Hall.

Conversely, those who expressed the greatest belief in, and concern about, the warming environment “were most supportive of government climate policies, but least likely to report individual-level actions.”

This applies to other issues, like charity.  Big-government types who want to use tax dollars to solve every problem sometimes behave as if that’s their contribution, so they don’t have to use any of their own money additionally.

The central consideration, here, is probably that concern about an issue is a different thing from agreement with a certain approach to solving the problem (especially in the balance of other issues), and “conservatives” tend to be more comfortable with this distinction. The lesson of the above findings may not be that self-identified environmentalists are more likely to be hypocrites, but that people who are willing to take individual action are more likely to see that as a solution.

I do think, though, that there’s something to the idea of “moral licensing”:

Previous research has found doing something altruistic—even buying organic foods—gives us license to engage in selfish activity. We’ve “earned” points in our own mind. So if you’ve pledged some money to Greenpeace, you feel entitled to enjoying the convenience of a plastic bag.

(Via Eric Worrall.)

34

No Surprise on Who Benefits from Legislative Grants

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The year is still young, but this headline for a Tim White article on WPRI is an early candidate in the nobody-should-find-this-surprising category: “RI’s top Democratic lawmakers lead list in handing out taxpayer-funded grants.”

More than $500,000 of the taxpayer money handed out through the $2 million legislative grant program goes to organizations hand-picked by the General Assembly’s top Democrats, a Target 12 review has found.

We should go farther, though.  Every dollar goes to legislators hand-picked by leadership to give out these vote-buying grants.

Whether it’s at the state level or the local level, charity shouldn’t be the business of government, and it certainly shouldn’t become an excuse for taxpayer-funded campaign promotion.

38

Not Really a Gotcha on Charitable Giving

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Something in this headline from Politico raises a meta question:

Even putting aside the distinction between the president’s budget and the private donations of one of his secretaries, anybody who’s vaguely familiar with political philosophy would see that the implied gotcha of this headline is bogus.  Giving one’s own money to a charity is not at all inconsistent with reducing the compulsory charity of taxpayer funding to the same group.  (Yes, it’s deliberate that “compulsory charity” is any oxymoron.)

So here’s the meta question:  Do the journalists who publish this sort of story not foresee this obvious response, indicating that they are reporting on subject matter without understanding how about half of their potential audience will see it, or are they framing stories mainly as an opposition party would, with the goal of hurting an elected official with whom they disagree?

39

The Value of Money Earned

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At least here in the West, our political discourse too often devolves to mutual assumptions of bad intentions.  In this regard, the cliché about what each side thinks of the other holds some truth; conservatives think progressives are dumb, and progressives think conservatives are evil.  In other words, those on the Left tend more often to believe that their ideological opponents are either recklessly cavalier or outright hostile toward their fellow human beings.

Comments from Nigerian Roman Catholic Archbishop Augustine Akubeze, while certainly not providing cover for every economic policy of the Right, give a good starting point from which one can see how conservatives consider even their economic policies to be the most moral course:

“The leaders of our future must be formed with a mentality that only the truth sets a people free,”  said Archbishop Augustine Akubeze, during remarks at the conference.

“Corruption will be eradicated if the students begin to learn that only money that accrues to a person as a result of hard work can be enjoyed.”

Given the setting in which those suggestions were made and the theme of the conference (“Peace and National Development”), one can infer that the archbishop was applying the principle on a national scale.  That is, developing countries should find their own wealth within, not rely on wealth donated from other countries.  As with any economy that relies on a massive influx of money from a limited number of sources, the charity model enables corruption by creating distribution choke points.

But the principle applies more broadly.  Only money freely given in exchange for something — money earned — is truly rewarding.  Moreover, it contributes to a sense of mutual value in human relationships.

Charity is good and necessary, but it can’t become the basis of an economic system.

40

To Lift All Boats, the Tide Has to Come In

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What’s your first thought upon reading the following, from a Linda Borg article in the Providence Journal?

The rising tide of economic recovery has not lifted Rhode Island’s poor, the 2017 Report on Hunger in Rhode Island found.

Rhode Island, at 12.8 percent, has the highest rate of poverty in New England, with 130,000 people living in households with incomes below the poverty line. One-third of the jobs created in Rhode Island last year have an annual wage of $26,529, the study says.

Unless you believe the politicians’ rhetoric that our state’s economy is strong — in which case, you’ll see these 130,000 as inexplicably slipping through the cracks — you’ll probably conclude that Rhode Island’s economy needs to improve so the tide actually is rising.  As the RI Center for Freedom and Prosperity’s Jobs & Opportunity Index (JOI) shows, it’s not.

But Borg’s article, which is essentially promotion of a Rhode Island Community Food Bank report, never challenges our state’s approach to economic development.  Rather, it advocates against Republican policy proposals in Washington and spares a word to chide the state government for the UHIP debacle.

Charity is an important part of the equation when it comes to helping our fellow human beings, but the higher goal — mentioned whenever the topic comes up — should always be to get folks on their own feet and in a condition to be charitable toward others.  That is how the rising tide works, and too much reliance on government suppresses it.

43

Work Requirements for Medicaid in Maine

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The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Levitz reports that the GOP-governed state of Maine is looking to add work requirements to the Medicaid program for those enrollees who are able-bodied adults.  When the state did the same with the food stamp (SNAP) program, enrollees dropped 90% and analysis suggested that the group of people who had been on food stamps actually saw an increase in wages.

The argument against such reforms shows the completely different starting point of each side:

But Maine’s approach is drawing criticism from advocates for the poor, who say jobs, volunteer positions and transportation to either of them can be hard to come by in rural pockets​with persistent unemployment. They say those losing the assistance turn to charities instead, increasing demand at food banks.

To which I would ask:  So?  Whether society provides food for the poor through a government program or private charity, we’re still supporting our neighbors.

The implied difference is that private charity has the feel of relying on the goodness of others while government programs have the feel of society’s handing over what it owes — an entitlement, in other words.  That difference is critical, and right in line with the work requirement.

What we owe each other is the chance of personal development and fulfillment, which comes from working, including being part of a self-supporting family team, even if not everybody within it works.  For those who really can’t work and who aren’t part of family that can address the greater challenges it faces, we should offer help in a way that shows genuine concern and community, not forced entitlement.

The attitudes and mechanics of welfare affect each other.  There’s a difference between the obligation to care for other people and a right to be cared for.  When a third party — government — asserts the authority to impose the obligation and bestow the right, it harms those who face adversity and deprives those who contribute of the benefits of being charitable.

44

RIGOP Blessing and Curse: Straight Line from Nowhere to the Top

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The first thing one sees upon picking up the Newport Daily News today is a stock photo of me next to the quotation:

You can go straight from doing nothing to running for U.S. Senate on the Republican side because there are so few people involved.

I was one of a half-dozen Republicans and conservatives whom Derek Gomes interviewed for an article about Republicans in the state, to complement a recent one about Democrats.  (Unfortunately, the article isn’t online for non-subscribers.)

One part of my extended statement to Gomes that I wish had made the cut was a benefit to being out of power:  The RIGOP has no influence to sell, so people tend to be involved for the right reasons, and the odds of corruption are lower.

I also wish the article had gone into some of the other topics Gomes asked me about.  He quotes Young Republican Barbara Ann Fenton as saying that Rhode Island Republicans are socially liberal, compared to the party nationally.  I’d suggested in my interview that that might be part of the problem.  The unanimous support for same-sex marriage, for example, is why I am (as Gomes notes) “a conservative but not a registered Republican.”

As a worldview, socially liberal and fiscally conservative is untenable, at least inasmuch as we acknowledge a responsibility to help the less fortunate.  Part of our solution for those folks must be to help build a healthier society overall.  If (for example) the “fiscally conservative” solution is simply to rely on private charity, it’s difficult to make the case that we shouldn’t just make our charity compulsory through taxation.

47

The Key Paragraph of the ACLU UHIP Settlement

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You may have read that the state government settled the lawsuit that the ACLU filed over the debacle of the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP; aka RI Bridges, if it ever works).  As I’ve asked before, was this necessary?  Even assuming the state wouldn’t have taken the same steps that it has promised in the settlement once negative attention forced action, couldn’t a push from a few activist groups have produced the same result?

Well, mostly.  This part of the settlement probably wouldn’t have been in the outcome of a simple petition:

Plaintiffs shall be entitled to recover their reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1988. Within sixty (60) days of the Court’s entry of this Order as an order of the Court, Plaintiffs shall file a bill of costs and motion for attorneys’ fees and costs with the Court pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1988, unless such time is extended by agreement of the Parties or order of the Court or unless such motion is rendered unnecessary by agreement of the Parties. Prior to filing such motion, 13 Plaintiffs shall present a bill of costs and fees to Defendant and within fifteen (15) business days thereafter, or at such time as the Parties mutually agree upon, the Parties shall confer by telephone or in-person in a good faith effort to agree to an amount in settlement of fees and costs. If the Parties are unable to agree to a fee amount, Plaintiffs may file a motion for attorneys’ fees and costs with the Court.

Indeed, if a petition-driven resolution had included language promising money to the activists, it would have seemed shady.  But in this case, to recap, the state is having trouble providing money and services to needy people, and some activist lawyers managed to make a payday of it while appearing to be warriors of charity.  That’s government under a progressive regime, I guess.

48

Government Coercion by Another Means

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Here’s the article I mentioned in this week’s podcast, about tax deals for corporate charity:

A bipartisan group of congressmen recently introduced a new bill intended to reinvigorate America’s poorest communities. The Investing in Opportunity Act (IOA) will allow investors to temporarily delay paying capital-gains taxes on their investments if they choose to reinvest the money into “opportunity zones” or distressed communities across the country.

The legislation was cosponsored in the Senate by Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina and Democrat Cory Booker of New Jersey, and in the House by Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio) and Ron Kind (D-Wisc.).  These congressmen report that their bill has garnered bipartisan support in both chambers, and they believe that its provisions will allow for tremendous economic growth in some of the country’s most underserved communities.

I might have misspoken in the podcast and attributed the article to the legislator.  The legislator is Tim Scott; the writer is Alexandra Desanctis. Whatever the case, this isn’t a direction in which we should go.

There’s a push among conservatives, recently, to rephrase policies in terms more amenable to the themes in which the Left has caught up the public conversation.  On one end, this is an obvious thing to do — to explain why conservative policies are the ones that will actually help individuals and families come to their full fruition.

Less obvious are policies that accomplish some of the Left’s goals (like making government central to charity), but that have potential to start to reshape thinking.  In that way, for example, taking the step suggested by Representative Scott could lead, in the future, to the additional step of questioning why government’s picking charitable causes at all.

I think this proposal goes a little too far over that line.

49

The Poster Hairdresser for How Government Interferes with Civil Society

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Rhode Islanders may have noticed that Providence Democrat Representative Anastasia Williams has submitted legislation to allow people to braid hair for pay without requiring a license.  This is actually a subject that the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has raised in the past (although I can’t find a link, just now) and is consistent with both our long-running insistence that the state government is strangling our economy with regulations and our more-recent emphasis on shifting policy in favor of helping Rhode Island families and facilitating non-government civil society.

Via Instapundit, however, comes an entry by Eric Boehm of Reason, who may very well have spotted the poster child for the government’s overreach in directing our lives and preventing us from serving one another as human beings:

The Arizona State Board of Cosmetology is investigating Juan Carlos Montesdeoca after receiving complaints that he was cutting hair without a license, Tucson News Now reported Monday. According to the complaint, which Montesdeoca shared with the TV station, the board received an anonymous complaint alleging that Montesdeoca was “requesting local businesses and local stylists to help out with free haircuts (unlicensed individuals) to the homeless.”

This morning, the Tiverton Budget Committee (of which I’m a member) toured the town’s Senior Center, and the new director related some of the anecdotes that she’s heard about the 100-year-old building.  Back when it was a school, apparently doctors would open weekend clinics for various procedures, including the removal of tonsils.

Now, given advancements in knowledge, we can surely agree on a role for government in requiring sanitary conditions and licensed professionals to perform such surgeries.  At the same time, we should be able to agree that rules against hair braiding and charity trims don’t really protect anybody but established practitioners who are able to charge more money the less competition they have.

52

UHIP and a Picture of Rhode Island’s Feudalism

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UHIP waiting lines illustrate state government’s harvesting of human beings and prove how low the minimum wage really is in a system of government dependency (even as elites throw awards at an unpopular governor).

53

Sticking with Principles Isn’t Retreat

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With an eye on the moral-legal weather vane, Wesley Smith notes the move afoot in Canada to force Catholic hospitals to kill people who want to be killed.  Quoting the Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms provision on “conscience and religion,” he writes (emphasis his):

That’s an explicit and enumerated right.

If that right is to retain any heft, Catholic and other religiously-affiliated institutions should promise to close their doors before buckling under to the boot of the state.

That would leave Canadians with a choice: Do they want more good hospitals available, some of which won’t allow euthanasia, or would they prefer fewer facilities all of which willingly allow homicide.

Progressives’ political calculation on such matters puts morally traditional institutions in a difficult position.  The progressives rightly understand that Catholics (for instance) engage in these activities because we feel called to do so in order to help others and because we understand that only a visible light can attract wanderers (i.e., only public behavior can attract converts).

As a strategy, therefore, the Left seeks to corrupt those activities or to drive Catholics out.  We can keep doing them, but only if we continue to shrink the observable difference between our practices and those of the secular world.  As Smith’s example illustrates, the preferred method is to further make Catholics do things that seem to prove some teaching or other of the Church’s negotiable.

The other option is for traditionalists to do as Smith suggests and close up shop.  Such an action, while powerful as a threat, also opens us to the accusation that we care about some controversial social policy more than helping people, including clients, employees, and communities.

Unfortunately, we’re getting to the point that this is the better option.  The tests will become harder and the demands for compromise more thorough and more forceful.  If we’re to salvage the principles that define us, moving sooner is better than waiting for resistance to become even more difficult.

That doesn’t mean going about our lives, though.  It means moving back a step and making the charitable activities more fundamental.  Take the lesson of Saint Teresa of Calcutta.  If Catholics can’t operate a hospital, per se, then we should find some way to help those whom hospitals won’t take or for whom they can’t do anything.  We should go out in the community and help people to do such things as keep them out of hospitals, and so on.

That is, if we don’t replace charitable occupations with some other activity of life, but with more charity, it will be clear that we didn’t choose our pro-life, pro-marriage, or pro-whatever stance over helping people, but were pushed away from doing more good because progressives have made society into a moral trap.

54

Social Services & Negotiating How Much to Take from Others

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Sometimes it’s helpful to put stories in chronological order, rather than news-report order, as with this one, from today’s Providence Journal, concerning panhandling and homelessness in Providence:

Complaints about vagrancy, open drug-dealing and drinking exploded after Mayor Jorge O. Elorza decided months ago to stop enforcing ordinances against aggressive panhandling and loitering.

And now the news is that we’ve got Democrat Joseph Paolino getting the heartless 1% treatment because he’s only looking to get $100,000 from the Downtown Improvement District for social workers, along with jobs for two panhandlers, a free apartment for use of a homeless shelter, and up to $5 million in state taxpayer money, in combination with a whole new ordinance that would be even broader than the ones the mayor isn’t enforcing (stopping all transactions through a car window).  The activists protesting Paolino’s PR event have a more comprehensive list:

Less enforcement of minor criminal offenses against people who are poor; more jobs for panhandlers; funding for 150 housing vouchers; drug and alcohol treatment; and amenities such as a day center, public bathrooms and free food distribution. They want the Rhode Island Public Transportation Authority bus terminal to remain.

The core of this proposal is to double down on the policy approach that created the controversy (non-enforcement) and to add into the mix amenities that will draw even more vagrants, dealers, and loiterers to the area.  The protesters chanted, “Whose city? Our city!,” and they sure want it to be evident in the public square each and every day.

In short, the only solutions on the table, apparently, involve a negotiation over how much taxpayers have to pay for how much additional imposition.  Both parts of the plan are sure to exacerbate the underlying problem: namely, a domineering government that strangles the private sector and creates incentives not to work or bring behavior within a tolerable range.

We need another approach that doesn’t treat people as categories or as social-workers’ statistics, but as free individuals (from independent families) who can determine their own destinies in a community of mutual respect and charity.  The longer we deny this necessary change of perspective, the more the government plaque will build up in society’s arteries, making it more and more difficult to clear them.

55

Compassion of the Progressive State

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Here’s one of those stories that might just provide what we writer types call “foreshadowing”:

A mother who pleaded guilty to fraudulently enrolling her six-year-old son in the wrong school district has been sentenced to five years in prison….

McDowell told police she was living in a van and occasionally slept at a Norwalk shelter or a friend’s Bridgeport apartment when she enrolled her son Norwalk’s Brookside Elementary School.

Police said McDowell stole $15,686 worth of ‘free’ educational services from Norwalk.

Of course, this story may not include the sorts of details that lead conservatives to suggest that laws and judgments ought to be made and enforced at the most local level possible.  Although McDowell’s drug prosecution appears to have produced an entirely separate sentence, prosecutors, juries, and judges rightly take the individual into consideration when assessing penalties.  Racial tensions during the Obama Era provide ample evidence of the danger inherent in elevating local stories to the national level in the service of a narrative.

Still, with all of the lip service New England progressives give to helping the disadvantaged and all of the millions of dollars they spend developing ways to ensure an easy on ramp to the easy street of government dependency, we’re in need of reminders that the mission is all about control, not charity.  We can be sure that the government of Connecticut is happy to give McDowell much more than $16,000 in taxpayer-funded benefits and free services, provided she doesn’t try to exercise the parental prerogative of school choice.

56

Reed, Whitehouse Hope Rhode Islanders Don’t Pay Attention

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Leave it to our own Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to weigh in on the recent price increase of the EpiPen in a way that is both blindingly insidious and enlightening:

The sky-rocketing cost increase of the EpiPen is just the latest evidence that our regulation of prescription drug pricing is broken. (The) system is rigged by the pharmaceutical industry to allow this price-gouging, and that is what needs to be corrected.

Drug pricing doesn’t have to be regulated; it’s regulation of drug production that’s the problem.  Everybody from The Guardian to the Wall Street Journal knows that the pricing of the EpiPen is made possible by the government’s enabling of Mylan’s “near monopoly” (as Whitehouse and other senators characterize the company). A Wall Street Journal editorial explains:

… the steady Mylan rise is hard to read as anything other than inevitable when a billion-dollar market is cornered by one supplier. Epinephrine is a basic and super-cheap medicine, and the EpiPen auto-injector device has been around since the 1970s.

Thus EpiPen should be open to generic competition, which cuts prices dramatically for most other old medicines. Competitors have been trying for years to challenge Mylan’s EpiPen franchise with low-cost alternatives—only to become entangled in the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory afflatus.

Of course, when I write “everybody,” I’m limiting my set to those who are modestly well informed.  A little economic understanding helps, too.  Let me repeat something I write regularly: Prices are measurements of value.  If a price goes up a great deal, especially if it does so quickly, that means people want more of the product than they’re able to get, and it’s a signal to other producers that they should enter the market, even at great expense.

Immediately after a devastating hurricane, it may seem predatory for people with chainsaws and water bottles to charge super-high prices, but their doing so not only forces affected families to weigh the value of the assistance, but also sends a signal far and wide that it’s worth people’s time to invest in tools, supplies, and gasoline and travel to the affected spot.  Of course, as a moral matter, we should all approach such situations in a spirit of charity, but by the same principle, we shouldn’t stroke our own moral vanity by insisting that only those with the right intentions can help.

In the case of pharmaceutical gouging, the focus of Congress should really be on creating laws that require smarter, lighter handed, less capricious regulation and therefore allow more companies to offer comparable products at competitive prices.  Unfortunately, it’s so much more profitable for progressive politicians to empower unaccountable bureaucracies to manipulate the market and create “near monopolies” that make the politicians’ corporate friends and donors rich and allow the politicians to posture in meaningless poses while grabbing more power to repeat the process.

58

Taking the “Predatory” Out of Lending

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Although I can’t find the offending essay, just now, some years back, I upset some people by suggesting that the attack on payday loans was taking the wrong direction by using government to shut the practice down.  As I’ve also noted, such approaches tend to address what activists see as a problem without addressing (or even seeking) the underlying incentives.  As a result they can make things worse by, for example, denying opportunity to somebody whose specific interests might actually be served by a short-term loan at very high interest.

I noticed, in particular, that while all of the activists were sure that the terms of such loans were unfair, none of them appeared interested in providing high-risk, short-term loans at better rates, whether as a better business model or by writing off any losses as charity.  If the argument is that lenders are abusing people and charging them unfair rates, given the risk, then it ought to be easy for more moral people to make a healthy profit at the same occupation; otherwise, we can’t really say that the lenders are being abusive.

I was intrigued to see, therefore, a Los Angeles Times article reprinted in the Providence Journal, this weekend, about employers setting up such programs as a benefit:

[Doug] Farry isn’t trying to shame employers into boosting wages. He’s trying to persuade them to sign up with his company, Employee Loan Solutions, a San Diego startup that works with a Minnesota bank to offer short-term loans. They carry a relatively high interest rate but are still cheaper than typical payday loans. …

That there are multiple firms in the market illustrates the size of the opportunity and the dire financial straits many workers experience. An estimated 12 million Americans use payday loans, borrowing tens of billions of dollars annually.

Even with this approach, activists are worried that the loans don’t come with enough investigation about borrowers’ ability to pay, to which the entrepreneurs point out that they’re serving customers’ needs for high-risk loans made on short notice at the lowest possible cost.  Paying for reviews of their credit will either take longer than they have to wait or cost more than they can afford to pay.

Whether any of these products is the ideal solution, I don’t know.  But in a recurring theme, of late, solutions have to begin by acknowledging that everybody involved in a transaction is a human being in unique circumstances that can’t be addressed well when activists use government to make judgments for people whom they don’t know.

59

RI Foundation’s Sneak-Attack on Free-Speech

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Should Rhode Islanders silently accept the corrupt political climate that has failed so many of us? Or should we, as free citizens in our uniquely American democracy, be encouraged to freely speak-out and engage in a battle of ideas so as to help make our state a safer and more prosperous place to live, to raise a family, and to build a career?

It is the Center’s primary mission to stimulate such rigorous public debate about important policy issues. However, the most powerful and wealthy nonprofit organization in our state is asking you to shut up.

As part of its own 100th year celebration, the Rhode Island Foundation this week published and promoted a video, which, in essence, encourages people to remain silent and to accept that the political elite know best about what’s in your and my best interests.

In what initially seems to be a video for kids, it is shameful that the Foundation hides its adult message behind children. With the frequent backdrop of our State House, it is obvious that the video is intended to be political. Under the pretense of “be nice or be quiet”, the Foundation is clear in its message that is directed to all of us – that we should just “stop complaining”.

Stop complaining about Rhode Island’s 48th place ranking on the national Family Prosperity Index?
Stop complaining that so many of our neighbors cannot find or have given up looking for meaningful work?
Stop complaining about the political corruption that continues to embarrass our state?
Stop complaining about the lack of bold and decisive action to do anything significant about it?

I don’t think so.

It is also despicable that the Foundation forces these children to read text that has to be bleeped.

60

“Tolerance” Means You Have to Do What They Want

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This is not the sort of thing the government does in a free society:

A California court ruled last week that ChristianMingle and it’s affiliate faith-based dating websites must allow LGBT singles to search and be matched with people of the same gender.

The ruling comes at the end of a 2.5 year legal battle after two gay men noticed in 2013 that new members to the popular dating site, which boasts over 15 million users, could only search for dates of the opposite sex.

In brief, this means that it is illegal for a company in California to set up a business that seeks explicitly to provide services to people with Christian values.  I almost made that a more-generic “particular values,” but it would be counterproductive to pretend that the progressive government in California has any intention of applying this principle equally.

When it comes to the government’s demands on Christians, the call of “tolerance” is not answered simply by letting other people live their lives as they see fit.  No, we have to facilitate and serve behaviors that we find immoral — now not only through government, but through our own private businesses, too.  This isn’t even a matter of our seeking to exclude a class of people; if we wish to provide services that we want but progressives’ favored classes do not, we must provide their closest comparable service, as well.

One cannot avoid the conclusion that all Christians should leave California unless they see themselves as missionaries in a hostile land.  More and more, of course, that describes the view we have to take within the United States as a whole, now that progressives have abandoned any pretense of valuing real diversity or true civil rights, which means we are unlike missionaries in that we’ll have no home base to which to return in a land that actively supports our beliefs.

The era of comfortable Christianity is ending, and we should not expect Christian charity and tolerance from people who have explicitly rejected our values.

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