Potential American president Rick Santorum isn't even pretending to make sense anymore: "When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is the government that gives you right, what’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine."
To question the divine right of kings would be to rock the very foundations of our society!
This is a ridiculous thing to say, for sure, but it's not terribly uncommon among Evangelicals to point to the French revolution and Communist Russia as evidence that state interference with/outlawing of religion leads to totalitarianism.
Madame Defarge watches the scene, knitting the entire time.
The guillotine is actually a cul-de-sac. Not a road or path.
@zidaane You have the clarity of vision and casual ease with French of a young Mitt Romney.
what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it
So, a government that dictates that you are either a Patriot or a Traitor, a government that dictates what you can do with your own body, a government that dictates that you are less important than a corporation, a government that dictates who you can and cannot marry?
He's remarkably on message as a Republican, then.
If he were in college his professor would have written on his paper "Voice: re-write."
Honestly, this isn't that incoherent an argument (though he's not making it particularly coherently here). Just take many religious people's inability (or refusal) to understand why atheists aren't all murderers and sex maniacs (because they've internalized the equivalence between religious rules and ethics and don't understand how the two can be separated) and extend it to the political sphere.
Though the religiosity of the Founding Fathers is notoriously overstated by the religious right, there genuinely was a strand in Enlightenment philosophy that saw human rights as God given. Most secular people today would probably think of them more as "inherent to the individual" but even Deists like Jefferson believed that somewhere, on several planes of existence above us, there was creator deity. Conveniently, this creator deity was a check on the power of kings, who all professed to believe in him, and so it was a good way to talk about why people had rights that kings couldn't violate or take away just because they had power.
Thus, there's a genuine strand of belief among religious politicians that the divinely-backed nature of our human rights are all that prevents a human government from violating them, and that official secularism leads inevitably to mass purges, because if our rights only come from the agreement of human society, what's to stop the human-run government from taking them away? For the religious, this has the added benefit of making it possible to reject new rights that aren't Godly (the right to nonmarital and nonprocreative sex being at the top of the list).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13L6sjk080c
@jfruh As a sex maniac, I politely contest the implication that I am morally indistinguishable from a murderer.
haha j/k I totally skin my lovers after I'm done with them! (And guillotine them.)
@jfruh Whoa. That is a very good explanation for something I never understood about evangelical politicians. Thanks.
Santorum is channeling, or trying to channel, the thinking of Sir Edmund Burke who is the patron saint of conservatism, classical conservatism, which was arose in reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution. Burke supported a classical concept of liberty, but only one that was rooted in strong protection of property rights, the royalty and religion. Without the moral restrictions of tradition and religious morality, Burke believed liberty degraded into arbitrary violence and moral corruption.
See also, The Jersey Shore.
So what's Right comes from God, and what's Left is evil? I think I get the message, Rick.
He's crazy and he's right.