In recent days, Attorney General Bill Barr addressed the national convention of the National Religious Broadcasters association, and with his remarks, he proved that he is a cultishly devoted partisan slaving away at the altar of far right ideology — and somehow, he still wants observers to trust him as some kind of fair arbiter of U.S. law anyway. He went so far that he described the straightforward ideology of progressivism as “totalitarian democracy,” NPR notes, and more directly, he explicitly derided the idea that government is supposed to do much good for people. Perhaps, he’d rather that people just be left to suffer, so that he can use the government for errands for his powerful friends like Donald Trump.
He commented:
‘The mission is not to make new men or transform the world through the use of government power. On the contrary, the central idea is that the right way to transform the world is for each of us to focus on morally transforming ourselves.’
In other words — forget trying to make other peoples’ lives better, and forget trying to use government power to do so. Barr would evidently prefer that Americans stick to asceticism in their own respective little corners of the country, with government power only supporting that aim.
This gross prioritization of his backwards ideology certainly helps explain why he has no apparent problem with discarding the rule of law. He’s the one who’s both kept key information from Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation from the public and intervened to lower the government’s sentencing recommendation for Trump pal Roger Stone, no matter the ample, well-documented evidence against him.
Now, in his recent speech, Barr explicitly insisted that religion must be forced on the American people — which, of course, flies in the face of the principles of freedom that the U.S. government is supposed to operate on.
Quoting John Adams, Barr claimed:
‘We have no government armed with the power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.’
He added that supposedly, the kind of morality that is so necessary to U.S. politics “must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.”
And he added:
‘While most everyone agrees that we must have separation of Church and State, this does not require that we drive religion from the public square and affirmatively use government power to promote a culture of disbelief.’
The only two options are not having religion front and center in the public square or promoting a “culture of disbelief,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. Neither are the only two options morality with Barr’s particular version of religion or no morality at all.
In fact, Barr seems to be attempting to simply steamroll over the possibility for viewpoints different than his own, and he’s masking the whole operation in the same benevolently authoritarian guise that he uses for his daily duties as Attorney General of the United States.
