The Religious Left does not like budget proposals from Congressman Paul Ryan because they don’t raise taxes or eliminate the U.S. Defense Department. One activist even denounces his plan as “moral cowardice.”
“Not only does his budget fail to meet the basic teachings of Ryan’s religious tradition [i.e. Roman Catholic], the plan shows moral cowardice,” recently explained Lisa Sharon Harper, who directs “mobilizing” for Jim Wallis’ Sojourners. “I don’t know any world in which a “tough choice” is piling benefits on the already rich and powerful while asking people who are already struggling to pay for it.”
Ostensibly Ryan is a bad Catholic because true Christian faith, as the Religious Left defines it, mandates massive, coercive redistributions of wealth by the federal government, according to political calculations, no matter their overall impact on the national economy. As evidence for her charge that Ryan’s plan violates Catholic teaching, Harper quoted the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, which in early March urged federal budget choice that “protect” human life and “promote the common good.” For the Religious Left, the “common good” means chiefly more Big Government.
No matter how many decades illustrate the failures of the Welfare State to ameliorate poverty, and its propensity to create dependency and family disintegration, the Religious Left mindlessly worships at its jealous altar, unwilling ever to admit that Big Government is a failed and cruel deity. Sanctimoniously, the Sojourners mobilizer bewailed that the “vulnerable” may lack super PACs and “gangs of lobbyists,” but they do have “people of faith,” whom God has summoned to fight Ryan’s “immoral budget.” She didn’t mention that most active church goers in America routinely vote against the Religious Left’s priorities. And the Welfare State she invests with such divine majesty is in fact not without political counsel or influence. Government unions and wealthy left-wing lobbies faithfully expend many millions in defense of the “vulnerable,” i.e. Big Government.
A federal budget vision doubtlessly far more to Sojourners’ liking was unveiled on Capitol Hill on March 22 on the lawn of the historic United Methodist Building. It was unveiled by the Islamic Society of North America, United Methodist and Presbyterian Church (USA) lobbyists, and a leftist nun, with backing from the wider Religious Left, as part of its “Faithful Budget Campaign.”
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