An Excerpt From An Essay By Wendell Berry - Which Pretty Well Summarizes My Own Position
"The government is not in charge of our personal lives, our private affections, our prayers or our political opinions. It is not in charge of our souls. Those who formed our government also limited it
“"Depending on the issues, I am often in disagreement with both of the current political sides. I am especially in disagreement with them when they invoke the power and authority of government to enforce the moral responsibilities of persons. The appeal to government is made, whether or not it is defensible, when families and communities fail to meet their moral responsibilities. Between the two moralities now contending for political dominance, the middle ground is so shaken as to be almost no ground at all. The middle ground is the ground once occupied by communities and families whose coherence and authority have now been destroyed, with the connivance of both sides, by the economic determinism of the corporate industrialists. The fault of both sides is that, after accepting and abetting the dissolution of the necessary structures of family and community as an acceptable “price of progress,” they turn to government to fill the vacancy, or they allow government to be sucked into the vacuum. This, I think, explains both Prohibition and the war on drugs, to name two failed government remedies.
To believe, as I do, that families and communities are necessary despite their present decrepitude is to be in the middle and to be most uncomfortable there. My stand nevertheless is practical. I do not think a government should be asked or expected to do what a government cannot do. A government cannot effectively exercise familial authority, nor can it effectively enforce communal or personal standards of moral conduct.
The collapse of families and communities—so far, more or less disguisable as “mobility” or “growth” or “progress” or “liberation”—is in fact a social catastrophe. It leaves individuals subject to no requirements or restraints except those imposed by government. The liberal individual desires freedom from restraints upon personal choices and acts, which often has extended to freedom from familial and communal responsibilities. The conservative individual desires freedom from restraints upon economic choices and acts, which often extends to freedom from social, ecological and even economic responsibilities. Preoccupied with these degraded freedoms, both sides have refused to look straight at the dangers and the failures of government-by-corporations.
The Christian or social conservatives who wish for government protection of their version of family values have been seduced by the conservatives of corporate finance who wish for government protection of their religion of personal wealth earned in contempt for families. The liberals, calling for some restraints upon incorporated wealth, wish for government enlargement of their semireligion of personal rights and liberties. One side espouses family values pertaining to homes that are empty all day every day. The other promotes liberation that vouchsafes little actual freedom and no particular responsibility. And so we are talking about a populace in which nearly everybody is needy, greedy, envious, angry and alone. We are talking therefore about a politics of mutual estrangement, in which the two sides go at each other with the fervor of extreme righteousness in defense of rickety absolutes that cannot be compromised.
Nowhere has this callow politics asserted itself more thoughtlessly and noisily than on the so-called rights of abortion and homosexual marriage. The real issue here is the politicization of personal or private life, and inevitably, given the absence of authentic political discourse or dialogue, the reduction of the issues to two absolute positions. In addition to distracting from interests authentically public and political, the politicization of personal life, involving as it must the publicization of privacy, is inhumane and inherently tyrannical.
After Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was published in the West and Pasternak received the Nobel Prize in 1958, thus earning the Soviet government’s reprisal, Thomas Merton wrote:
“Communism is not at home with nonpolitical categories, and it cannot deal with a phenomenon which is not in some way political. It is characteristic of the singular logic of Stalinist-Marxism that when it incorrectly diagnoses some phenomenon as “political,” it corrects the error by forcing the thing to become political.” (Disputed Questions)
Now, after many decades of anticommunism, Merton’s sentences have come remarkably to be descriptive of our own politics. Maybe people who focus their minds for a long time upon enmity finally begin to resemble their enemies. This has happened before. It is deeply embedded in the logic of warfare.
Whatever the cause, we seem to have become as adept as the old Soviet Union at politicizing the nonpolitical. Most notably, by the connivances of both political sides, we have invented a politics of sexuality, which, by the standards of our own political tradition, is a contradiction in terms. Or it is if there is to be a continuing political distinction between public life and private life. This distinction, after all, is the basis of the freedoms affirmed by the First Amendment, which holds essentially that people’s thoughts and beliefs are of no legitimate interest to the government. The government is not in charge of our personal lives, our private affections, our prayers or our political opinions. It is not in charge of our souls. Those who formed our government also limited it, forbidding it any freehold in our homes or in our minds." https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2013-03/caught-middle