My friend's father was pulling hard at my friend's leg when he suggested that his son, in town for Christmas, dine with me at a new poultry restaurant because "they don't have 'trans-fat.'" My friend lives in Albany, in the land of the north to where New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has exiled the offending unsaturated fat — along with nearly two dozen other properties or behaviors. Writing in National Review, Jonah Goldberg aptly condemned the practice as immediately fastidious and potentially destructive to liberty.
Today, a reader submitted to The Corner an excerpt from C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. "One of the marks of a certain type of bad man," it goes, "is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons — marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning."
Goldberg calls this "great." Is it great? There is a difference between expostulation and legal proscription, but removed from context Lewis doesn't seem to fuss over it. In fact, he is mid-stride through an explanation of sanctimony, the spiritual counterfeit. Taxes, for one, are accepted in word by Christ himself but the act of confiscation is not inherently righteous; filling state coffers in the name of the financial homogeneity of citizens is not apostles' work. Scorn is wrong but can be accomplished outside of the subject of abstention.
Taken too far, the three sentences from Lewis give themselves over to doubts of what makes one idle. Stating that isn't apprehension, not with the contemporary sway of libertine selfishness. We can't tell anybody, Don't? How does one evangelize? Mere Christianity itself impels men to give up willful disbelief and sin and, while they are at it, tell other men to do the same. Though Bloomberg provides us with "all sorts of things" doing no harm, and perhaps not the business of City Hall, among all sorts of things are those which rather should be avoided.