
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 20, 1994                   TAG: 9404230002
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DAVID W. GARLAND
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

PRIVATE LIVES/PUBLIC MATTERS

INCREASING attempts by the Christian right to affect public policy trouble many, including myself. Yet modern liberals who are most concerned are largely to blame. Modern liberals promoting an omnipresent government have all but destroyed the traditional distinction between politics and private life with their inspiration that "everything is political." The Christian right has been forced into the political arena and is not likely to leave unless we breathe new life into the privacy rights of poverty and freedom of association.

Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Jefferson distinguished between private life and public matters. They distrusted the government and saw the state's role as the protection of citizens from force and fraud. Though the state has always held power to regulate conduct to protect the "health, safety, welfare and morals" of the public, this power was narrowly applied. In the 20th century, authoritarian thinkers aligned with the left promoted virtually unlimited intrusions by the state into economic and social activity. They argue that since individuals are part of society, what they do privately affects (however negligibly) other members of society, and thus everything is political.

Unlike their predecessors, who viewed government as at best a necessary evil, they trust government to be an unbiased voice of democratic will and a solver of problems. They believe all values (including property rules) are subjective. Therefore, the only way to define values is through democratic political processes in a no-holds-barred contest in which the winner takes all by virtue of the government's uniform implementation of laws.

They favor broad legislative responses that cross the boundaries of property and association, and shun private, diverse, voluntary arrangements. Not surprisingly, the scope of state intervention has grown enormously at the expense of the privacy once woven from the individual rights of property and contract.

By preventing people from ordering their lives privately, and instead centralizing everything from education and the arts to abortion funding, health care and housing, the secular statists make it impossible for the religious devotees and secularists to peacefully exist. Both sides must bargain with a state that taxes all, but favors only one set of prevailing interests. Fundamentalist Christians want to protect their space from the secular values they see imposed in the name of democracy. Deprived of their own space, they promote their beliefs in the political arena in a war for "the soul of America" which is eerily reminiscent of Weimar Germany.

Left-liberals lobby for extensive, centralized public educational spending and oversight of a secular curriculum of sexual freedom and evolution, while erecting hurdles to home schooling and condemning privatization/voucher plans or tax credits for those privately educating their children. What choice is left for Christians but to try to take over the curriculum in toto?

Another winner-takes-all debate erupts when the government commands health plans at state universities (or nationwide). The provision of coverage for homosexual partners turns from a market issue of meeting the demand of a market segment into a political tug-of-war. Leaders such as Gov. George Allen, who are not hostile to gays per se, are placed in the awkward position of having to take sides based on political considerations, when free-market arrangements could accommodate a variety of interests.

The left responds that the Constitution disallows mixing politics and religion. Their disingenuous assertion now falls on deaf ears, since it was they who insisted long ago that everything is political and that political values are subjective - two ideas most certainly not found in the Constitution. The Christian right can gleefully say it is merely voicing its subjective values in a democratic setting.

When private matters are made into political wars, we all lose, regardless of whose policy passes. Sadly, when someone suggests a property-based solution, such as privatization, or nondiscrimination on public property and freedom of association on private property, he is criticized by the left for "rolling back the clock on civil rights" and by the right for starting the country down a slippery slope to moral decay. They are wrong. It is ad hoc policies on both sides that are rolling back our rights and compromising private moral life.

Ironically, it is the now-radical notions of private property, freedom of association and limited government (the true rights of privacy) that present the path of resolution between two otherwise irreconcilable sides. To have a peaceful society, we must limit the scope of politics. Only a few matters such as national defense, diplomacy and police protection truly require collective political action. People should otherwise remain free to control their lives, associations and property as they see fit without the political approval of others to the extent they do not use force or fraud against others.

David W. Garland, a George Mason University law student from Roanoke, works in Republican and Libertarian politics.

by CNB