Not a Franciscan, but Rather a San Franciscan

Michael Phillips calls out the new authoritarians for what they have become.

The Liberal mantra used to be: 'Capitalism created too much change, inequality and poverty; that we need bigger government to redistribute wealth and control the 'means of production'.

A forced meagerness which they tried to associate with a materialist view has evolved into a different sort of asceticism-based meagerness:

It is an attack on our right to the pursuit of happiness.

It’s very nearly evolving into a kind of code associated in the past with religious adherence, and a firmly established one at that (in the traditional legal sense.)

The New liberalism tells us what kind of light bulbs we have to use, when we have to use helmets, what weight and size our children must be before they can stop using 5-point auto harnesses, when and where we can smoke, what we can smoke, how we can talk on the phone in a car, what kinds of foods we can't eat at all (horse, whale, dolphin etc),

And in that strange little world, PETA will be left to bless the animals. Like “meatless Mondays”, they are likely to take care to avoid meatless Fridays, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, or any other virtue larger than nanny’s desire to control others.