Yesterday, I mentioned in passing the absurdity of the Flower Children of the We Are Greatest Generation imposing mandatory volunteerism on behalf of The Man on my children’s generation.  Now comes more news on what this entails, via Gateway Pundit:

SEC. 1304. PROHIBITED ACTIVITIES AND INELIGIBLE ORGANIZATIONS.

Section 125 (42 U.S.C. 12575) is amended to read as follows:

SEC. 125. PROHIBITED ACTIVITIES AND INELIGIBLE ORGANIZATIONS.

(a) Prohibited Activities- A participant in an approved national service position under this subtitle may not engage in the following activities:

(1) Attempting to influence legislation.

(2) Organizing or engaging in protests, petitions, boycotts, or strikes.
…

(7) Engaging in religious instruction, conducting worship services, providing instruction as part of a program that includes mandatory religious instruction or worship, constructing or operating facilities devoted to religious instruction or worship, maintaining facilities primarily or inherently devoted to religious instruction or worship, or engaging in any form of religious proselytization.

Now, whether this list of prohibitions includes attending church services or “witnessing” as it is interpreted by Gateway Pundit or not is, I think, an open question.  Still, it is possible for reasonable people to interpret it that way, and it doubtless contains within it the potential for unconstitutional abuse.  It is also certain that particular vested interests will attempt to wield it that way.  What it says, in effect, is that expressions of faith will be regarded as constituting a form of workplace harassment for those employed in the Obama Youth Brigades.

The idea, though, that my children’s generation will be deprived of the opportunity to organize and to demonstrate against government policies during the period that they are employed in this mandatory volunteerism by the very same people who have (ad nauseum) glorified their resistance to the eeeeevil US government and its impositions and intrusions is beyond grotesque. Fuck them.

George Packer, on the other hand, would see this unease as a representation of the right’s congenital disposition towards paranoia:

The modern American right, which is congenitally vulnerable to paranoia, gives into its own tendencies most readily when Democrats are in power and its own sense of dispossession is greatest. The John Birch Society thrived under Kennedy; talk-radio demagogues and the militia movement came into their own during the Clinton years; the prospect of a big Democratic win last year had a lot of conservative pundits and some Republican candidates describing Obama as a radical, a socialist, or worse. In some quarters the language has gotten more intemperate since he took office and started governing like the center-left politician that he’s always been. It isn’t just language that’s symptomatic of the paranoid style. It’s the certainty of a conspiratorial hand behind every decision; the evangelical fervor that sees every political dispute as an ultimate contest of good against evil.

The trootherism of the past eight years, the birtherism of Sullivan and Maher, the bizarre ramblings of Sy Hersh on the very pages of the New Yorker, the fact that the Sorosphere would be screaming bloody murder were this a proposal that came from a Republican, none of that registers with him.

And here, in the spectacle of a Tory MP ripping Gordon Brown a redundant orifice, we have previews of coming attractions in our own Congress (though likely much less articulate), that no doubt amount to paranoia.

And at Stop the ACLU, John Ray points out who the Statists in this argument are, quoting Mark Levin:

Some resist the idea of a Natural Law’s relationship to Divine Providence, for fear it leads to intolerance or even theocracy,” writes Levin. “They have it backwards. If man is ‘endowed by (the) Creator with certain inalienable rights,’ he is endowed with these rights no matter his religion or whether he has allegiance to any religion. It is Natural Law, divined by God and discoverable by reason, that prescribes the inalienability of the most fundamental and eternal human rights — rights that are not conferred on man by man. It is the Divine nature of Natural Law that makes permanent man’s right to ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’”

Levin deftly isolates why modern liberal class warriors — those of President Obama’s ilk — must reject this understanding of the world. “The Statist cannot abide the existence of Natural Law and man’s discovery of ‘inalienable rights’ bestowed on all individuals by ‘their Creator,’” writes Levin. “In ideology and practice, the Statist believes rights are not a condition of man’s existence but only exist to the extent the Statist ratifies them. Furthermore, rights do not belong to all individuals. They are rationed by the state — conferred on those whom the Statist believes deserving of them, and denied to those whom the Statist believes undeserving of them.”

Oh, yes, I’m well endowed, and I don’t need anyone’s testimony to prove it.

I don’t think that I and my favorite Evil Giraffe really disagree as much as he thinks we might.