Will the so called “liberal media” ever wise up to the hypocrisy of the Randian Religious Right?
GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan said President Barack Obama’s administration “purged” mentions of God from the Democratic Party platform Wednesday.
“I think it’s rather peculiar,” Ryan said on “Fox & Friends.” “It’s not in keeping with our founding documents, our founding vision. I’d guess you’d have to ask the Obama administration why they purged all this language from their platform. There sure is a lot of mention of government. I guess I would just put the onus and the burden on them to explain why they did all this, these purges of God.”
A person with such devotion to a theocratic system could not possibly be a fan of atheist Ayn Rand, of course:
“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan said this year. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas…Don’t give me Ayn Rand.”
Unfortuantely, this turns out to be just for the the sake of politicial convenience.
In 2003, the Wisconsin Republican told The Weekly Standard’s writer Katherine Mangu-Ward, now at the libertarian Reason magazine, that he gave out Rand’s books as gifts and tried to make interns read it.
“I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ [by Ayn Rand] as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it,” he said.
However, even then, Ryan pointed out that while he “looked into” Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, he is a Christian and reads the bible often.
In 2005, he said before the Objectivist organization the Atlas Society that, “[T]he reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.”
In 2009, in a multi-part video series posted to Facebook, Paul Ryan said that “what’s unique about what’s happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.”
“Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and this to me is what matters most,” he said in the second part of the series.
As for the bit about reading the bible, it is interesting the the story of earliest Christian societies told in chapters 4 and 5 of Acts (which is about as anti-Randian as it can get) hasn’t made a dent in love affair with Rand. Neither has the admnonition of his own catholic church.
Religious Right: Forcing their religion on you while conveniently ignoring the teachings of the same religion.
