Judge Not, Harold Ford

We have ringside seats to what is without a doubt the ugliest race this election cycle: the race between Harold Ford and Bob Corker for the U.S. Senate seat from Tennessee.

It doesn’t surprise us that Harold Ford has tried to play to religious voters. In Tennessee, it’s almost a necessity; there aren’t enough secularists here to carry the day. Now Ford informs us that Republicans only fear God while Democrats fear and love God, and he tells us not to judge.

We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there are two truisms in government that make such statements absurd.

The first is that government is all about judging. Government gets things done by exerting its coercive powers on people. It’s that simple. That involves judgement. Anyone who watches any television show about courts–real or fictionalised–knows that. You decide, for example, that speech against certain groups of people are “hate crimes,” then people who do these things are deprived of their liberty because you thought such things were wrong. Tax increases? You judged that the government needed to take the people’s money (and thus their substance and life) because you wanted to do with it what you pleased and not let them keep it. Divide up Iraq, like you want? That’s a judgement too, Harold.

That leads us to the second point: government and love don’t go together. That’s one of the things that’s wrong with gay marriage: homosexuals want the government to affirm their love for each other, but love isn’t what the government is all about. Government is about power and control. We love our country, not our government.

We should also point out that the Democrat party is in fact the home of the “God-hating liberal,” as we learned the hard way growing up in a place where there were a good number of them. This may be hard to see from Tennessee, which is what Harold Ford is hoping for. That’s one reason why we wrote Electing the Unelected, which bears repeating at this stage.