If only all citizens could be made vigilant informants in the service of a watchful militarized police state, as our Dear Leader desires when he asks the citizens of a free nation to stop acting like free people and start regimenting themselves like members of the military:

“At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach.”

This is a vision of a fascist America, articulated by a man who has already granted himself the power to strip us of habeas corpus, detain us indefinitely and kill us if he decides to declare us enemies of the state. Military discipline is for the military. Liberty is for a free people. A society conscripted to carry out “the mission” of the Dear Leader is not a free society.

The quote from our Dear Leader above articulates *exactly* the idea behind this poster:

Caption: This poster links the German Labor Front (the DAF) to World War I. The point is that just as soldiers were comrades regardless of their standing in civil life, so too all German workers were comrades in the DAF, regardless of whether they were white or blue collar. This appeared in 1933.

I don’t want to become part of a collective enacting the Dear Leader’s mission. Indeed, I will do what I can to oppose the Dear Leader’s mission insofar as it involves crushing liberty, killing innocents, and sucking up to corporate greed.

I prefer the freedom of the Catholic faith to the tyranny and injustice of the things that used to be liberalism and conservatism.  Never forget that it was the GOP that pushed to give us the NDAA, the Dems who jumped in to support it and Obama who signed it.  The issue is no longer left vs. right.  It is our Ruling Class vs. the rest of us.

Similarly, I will happily lock arms with a Protestant who opposes abortion or torture, or who argues for theism, the Trinity or the reliability of Scripture, while not watering down my commitment to the Catholic Faith.

And, for the same reason, given a choice between arrogant atheists with personality disorders whose spite prompts them to desecrate the Eucharist for the delectation of their fanboys, and atheists who are decent, thoughtful, interesting people who treat believers with respect and not contempt and vilification, I will support the good atheist. Which reminds me, Leah Libresco writes:

About.com is doing their annual nominations for favorite blogs in various categories, and I’m trying to get mine on the list for Favorite Atheist blog. A lot of the ones I’ll be competing with (like P.Z. Myers’s Pharyngula) have bigger readerships than mine and will pull a lot more nominations. But I figured what’s the point of being a blog with crossover appeal if I can’t get some support from Christian readers? I’d love for mine to make it through to the next round so it’s not too much of an epistemic closure-fest.

I’ve outlined how to vote here: and this might make a good pullquote if you decide to link to it:

Some atheist blogs speak mainly to people who are already atheists. That’s an incredibly valuable service; it’s a way to promote activism, aggregate news, and provide a safe space for people who may have been thrown out of their families and communities because of their views.

I’m going for something a little different here. This blog is meant to be a place for productive arguments and strange alliances between atheists and theists. In these comment threads, I can make common cause with a gnostic Christian while the atheists and Catholics have to team up to call him a heretic and me a lunatic [in the most respectful possible way]. And all of us are expected to defend the beliefs we hold, not just attack the beliefs we’ve rejected.

So if you’d prefer to see fewer belligerent jerks with personality disorders get rewarded for their appalling behavior and more civil conversations between good and decent atheists and Catholics (which can only be a win since the Faith has nothing to fear from atheist arguments, but plenty to fear from demagogue whipping surly mobs into an ignorant fury), I’d suggest you go support Leah, my favorite internet atheist.

What would a civilization do about something like this if it really and truly believed, rather than reluctantly and tepidly grunts at the fact, that “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me”? What would a civilization look like if it marshalled as much energy and creativity to deal with this as it does to prepare for war and amass mammon? What if it was as afraid of hell and as eager for heaven as it is afraid of discomfort and eager for power?

HT: Caelum et Terra

Sad.

Some liberalism.

Update:  Komen may not have exactly reversed course, so now they appear to be alienating everybody. The Mafiosi at PP have demanded to extort what is, after all, free money from them, while they seem to be willing to put up with it to save face.  Rod Dreher notes, “A wise friend observes that Nancy Brinker, the Dallas socialite who founded and runs Komen, could have withstood the pressure from the media, but she folded under pressure from her social class.”  Someday, I hope it will occur to these people that an organization that uses these kinds of tactics to extract cash from their wallets is to be resisted, not caved to.

Some liberalism.

Meanwhile, in the reality-based community, Israel is just another secular nation-state, not a royal priesthood or a holy nation somehow immune from the corrupting forces that afflict all other secular nation states. To believe otherwise is a particularly dangerous human tradition.