{"id":4082,"date":"2013-03-15T20:46:50","date_gmt":"2013-03-16T01:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4082"},"modified":"2013-03-15T20:46:50","modified_gmt":"2013-03-16T01:46:50","slug":"welcome-to-the-secular-theocracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4082","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the Secular Theocracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeffrey Lord’s post<\/a> at The American Spectator<\/em> about the “Theocratic” bent of “The Left’s” obsession with bans on things that are bad for us or are bad for the environment ends with a great flourish.\u00c2\u00a0 Lord’s analogy is to the theocracies of old that banned things like subversive books for theological reasons.\u00c2\u00a0 But since liberals ban things, they must be like the theocrats, too:<\/p>\n

The very people who shriek the loudest about the danger of an American theocracy based on religion \u00e2\u20ac\u201d something that has never happened under the Constitution, nor can it \u00e2\u20ac\u201d are well on their way to creating the secular version of just that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lord’s case:\u00c2\u00a0 liberals want to ban sugary drinks, fracking, excessive use of salt in pre-prepared foods and restaurant fare, plastic bags, and the Bible.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s weird about the case is that the reasons liberals use to ban these things are reasons that all in the debates can understand as reasons: public health and the shared costs of obesity, environmental health and clean water, more public health, plastic waste and environmental destruction with plastic bags, and separation of church and state.\u00c2\u00a0 Those are all bans that benefit all by protecting us from consequences.\u00c2\u00a0 Banning books doesn’t do that.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s why we use ‘theocracy’ as a bad word for a government.<\/p>\n

So Lord’s analogy is silly to begin with.\u00c2\u00a0 But to call a secular order committed to public reasons a ‘theocracy’ is simply a manifest contradiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeffrey Lord’s post at The American Spectator about the “Theocratic” bent of “The Left’s” obsession with bans on things that are bad for us or are bad for the environment ends with a great flourish.\u00c2\u00a0 Lord’s analogy is to the theocracies of old that banned things like subversive books for theological reasons.\u00c2\u00a0 But since liberals … Continue reading Welcome to the Secular Theocracy<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[1612],"class_list":["post-4082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weak-analogy","tag-theocracy-watch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4083,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4082\/revisions\/4083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}