Kerry Frentrup says:

Olasky’s book shows nothing but his hatred of those who can’t survive when they can’t work or when they can on the low, low wages millions of people are expected to live on, not their oppression. Employers are those who are subsidized when they don’t pay enough for workers to survive on in order to work for them and taxpayers provide food stamps and other forms of assistance. Jesus himself said “The laborer is worthy of his hire” He had respect for the working person and his needs and valued his humanity. Olasky would rather disregard the importance of decent stable income as a stabilizer and incentive in personal and family life and try to fix people and problems piecemeal – those largely caused by Republican callousness and greed. Olasky is always righteous about abortion, but if you’re a poor working woman, Republicans are very much to blame if you can’t afford to keep your child. They say welfare encourages dependence. It’s not good, but a mother has to protect her child. Olasky and his cronies including George W. Bush, Jr., now, they’re great friends, will go to any lengths to deny that low wages encourage our dependence on the cheap labor of the poor. Capitalism is not evil in itself,it just needs more of a human context and the type of challenging Democrats do to protect the value of work and bring recognition that the people largely own the means of production – their labor – the Clinton administration hasn’t done so badly. They’ve beat the Republicans at their own game without big tax cuts, putting the taxpayers in more debt, and all of Olasky’s friend Gingrich’s nonsense. Olasky is primitive. Don’t let him make you feel dumb or unhcristian. People like him cause big problems from their churches and ivory towers and businesses and political offices. And they don’t have to suffer the consequences.
Rating: 1 / 5

Miss Poppy Dixon says:

Olasky’s facile solution to America’s problems lies in re-”sanctifying” the two-parent (read “heterosexual”) family and re-stigmatizing single-parent (read “women”) homes. He holds that the government, under pressure from feminists, offers “incentives” to women to set up their own households guaranteed to insure that children are raised in poverty and abuse.

Olasky blames it all on women “A poor woman is most likely to escape from poverty if she does not get pregnant. If she does have children, marriage is the leading way to escape poverty. The single best way for children to escape from poverty is to have their mothers marry or to be adopted; only two percent of adopted children are poor. The common factor in all of this is re-affiliation.” Although statistically all of this may be true, Olasky’s conclusions are self-serving. Is it the lack of a husband that makes a single mother poor, or the lack of adequate child care, equal pay, equal opportunity, and an increasing lack of access to reproductive technologies, including abortion? Olasky suggests that no one is more detrimental to a child’s wellbeing that her or his mother, unless she is sponsored by a Bible-banging male father figure, preferable her husband.

And if you enjoy Olasky’s views on women, you’ll positively love his views on the homeless, most of whom he compassionately dismisses as the “Mumbling Majority.”

H.L. Menken said “For every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it is always wrong”. Olasky’s solutions come at the expense of personal and societal freedom. The government is not meant to be Big Brother, snooping into private lives, legislating moral objectives clearly based on Fundamentalist Christian-Judeo ideals, and laundering all this extra government through the church.

Olasky, fluent in double-speak, proves that “compassionate conservatism” is double-plus good.
Rating: 1 / 5

D. Carter says:

When asked to give a blurb for a book that he obviously found deplorable, Lincoln shrewdly responded: “This is the kind of book that will appeal to the kind of people who like this kind of book.”

Well, this is the kind of book that will appeal to the kind of people who like this kind of book: i.e., anti-government Christian fundamentalists whose hearts are in the right place, but whose heads are in the clouds–more accurately, whose heads are in the sand.

We’ve had eight years–20 years if you count the Reagan and two Bush administrations–to test the notion that big government and secular humanists are the cause of all our problems–all our social ills–all that is wrong with America. And what do we have to show for it? More impoverished people than ever; a collapsing middle class, an economy in ruins. . . . Oh, but I forget. We do have a lot of very rich people who thrived on tax cuts and right-wing government policies, laughing all the way to the bank while good hearted middle-class and working-class Christians voted against their best interests because they were deluded by the kind of clueless ideology that Olasky peddles.

Like a stopped clock, Olasky and his supporters get things right occasionally, but they are a pathetic measure of where we need to go in the future.

And, oh yes, I do volunteer in community programs for the poor (including one day a week for Habitat for Humanity). I’m waiting for some of these anti-government fanatics to tell me how we’re going to do something about the 47 million people who are without health insurance, or–well–you get the point.

Rating: 1 / 5