| Here's a typically sensationalist story from the English paper, The Daily Mail, about how parents are not allowed to play with their own children in some parks, because they haven't been vetted by police to make sure they're not pedophiles. Pretty crazy stuff, I guess, but then I'm not crazy about a lot of England's public security measures, like its system of cameras on public streets.
Whatever. That's England. Who cares, right?
No the interesting thing is the reaction from the American right to this kind of news. Check it out. Hot Air says the UK made "domestic surveillance into an art form." Over at the Corner, Mark Steyn writes, "increasingly in Britain, the state's basic assumption is that everyone's a pedophile until proven otherwise," and hints darkly that this is the way "free societies...retreat incrementally...into a totalitarian hell." Jill at Pundit & Pundette is more explicit, and links England's park problem as a natural progression of other stories involving President Obama. Moonbattery dubs the incidents in England as "classic moonbat logic."
Uh...doesn't this kind of thing actually stem out of conservative policies? I mean, it wasn't long ago that Mark Steyn was advocating for absolute state power in monitoring its citizens - here in the US - in his defense of the Bush administration's unconstitutional domestic spying program. In that case, Steyn argued that it was better to preserve Americans' safety than their freedom from unwarranted government monitoring. And it was Mitt Romney who famously said, "our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive."
And the whole pedophilia fear mongering stems from the right, too. Congress' first attempt to censor the Internet - in the name of children - came in the mid-1990s, as a group of conservative Senators - including Orrin Hatch, James Exon, and Slade Gordon introduced, and pushed through Congress, the "Communications Decency Act," which was later declared unconstitutional. The CDA was the brainchild of the US Christian right; the Christian Coalition's "Contract with the American Family" listed enacting legislation to censor the Internet in the name of protecting children from obscenity as one of its major goals. Conservative and notorious anti-obscenity Ed Meese DoJ appointee, Bruce Taylor, drafted the CDA for Senator Exon.
And conservatives have in the past tried to get government to assume that certain adults are pedophiles, without evidence, without convictions. I'm talking about, of course, conservative opposition to adoption by gay parents based on the claim that gay men are inherent pedophiles.
The right has never shied from intrusive government intervention in the name of safety. And safety in the name of our children has been conservative Christians' calling-card since...well, my whole lifetime. If the US adopts the ridiculous playground policies reported in the English newspaper, it'll be because of conservative pressure, not liberal.
I know this is an old theme, but the same folks crying "totalitarianism" now, during the Obama administration for a slew of policies and programs that are distinctly un-totalitarian, were the biggest supporters of Bush policies - the politicization of the DoJ, torture, domestic spying, manufacturing evidence to lead the country into war - that actually did invest the White House with extralegal powers. |
