There is a lot of controversy on the Hill and in state capitals about alleged obstructionist politics. Its no surprise that partisan politics is notoriously obstructionist. Like a ball game, when one teams objective is to get the ball across the goal line – the other team’s objective is to obstruct their progress. Voila! Party politics.

The problem with political obstructionism is that it has real consequences for people’s lives: this is true whether it is the party trying to get the bill passed, or the party blocking it. Whether the effect is good or bad depends on what the content of the legislation is.

When it comes to good and evil it is a far, far more serious matter. When an intrinsically evil action is being advanced, then it becomes the moral obligation of those who know and recognize it to be evil, to block its progress.

This was vividly displayed when Pro-Life Democrats in the House of Representatives successfully blocked the forward movement of health care legislation that would have permitted government sponsorship of abortion. That any government, which principal responsibility is to protect its citizens, attempts rather to kill or harm those citizens, that action must be impeded and ultimately stopped.

Whether or not those Democrats will be ultimately succesful remains to be seen, but Rep,. Stupak and others with him have done what emmbers of the government are supposed to do. In other words, they had a moral obligation to be obstructionist.

Throughout salvation history we see heroic acts of obstructionism. Moses obstructed Pharaoh’s progress toward destroying God’s people. Mordecai obstructed Haman’s intentions to commit genocide against the Jews. John the Baptist obstructed Herod’s evil machinations and our Lord Jesus obstructed Satan’s evil designs for the condemnation of the world!

So, obstructionism is not always bad – after all, more than half the world mobilized to obstruct Adolph Hitler’s advance on Europe. And we must obstruct Satan’s purpose to pervert human society and build a culture of death.

St. Augustine so aptly described evil as the absence of good. Evil advances when good people do nothing. That makes obstructionism a good thing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Abortion, Catholic and Protestant, Church Tradition, Church and state, Democrats, Faith and Politics, Health care reform medicine health insurance, International policy, Politics, Pro-Life Activism, Republicans, US Senate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.