I do not "want my diaper changed by the government." I expect the government to be responsible and to actually tackle pressing issues which the government, being the sole legitimate arbiter of force, taxation and regulation, is uniquely situated to tackle. Wanting a strong, independent philanthropic and nonprofit sector is all well and good and I support it completely, but foundations cannot prevent companies from putting their employees at unnecessary physical risk, or polluting excessively. Governments can.
There is no such thing as a free lunch; by paying taxes for Medicare, Social Security and other programs, we are paying the government to work for the greater good. We pay the government so that the old, feeble and unable to work among us are able to scrape by, and so that when we grow old and feeble, or get in an accident and are paralyzed for life, we too are able to scrape by. How this concept gets twisted into the idea of "getting one's diaper changed by the government" baffles me. This is not demanding that the government give us free stuff, it's being socially responsible.
The sort of "diaper changing" I object to is the sort put forth by social conservatives: prioritization and subtle enforcement of a monolithic, repressive, religiously-based vision of culture that privileges more Christian, straight, cisgendered, white, patriarchal moneyed and "American" groups at the expense of out-groups: non-religious and non-Christians, people of color, women the poor, queer and trans people, and anyone else deemed scary, foreign or impure. It is a politics of fear and exclusion that posits preachers, pastors and moralizers as the more-or-less mandatory guideposts of society. It punishes adventurousness, pleasure, dissent, and free thought, and intimates that people are simply too stupid to be anything more than reactionary, fearful, angry creatures, lashing out at the world around them, responding to the slightest difference with militarism and anger, fearing their own bodies.
In this way, the ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists of Christianity and Islam are very similar indeed. John Hagee is not so different in his Catholic-bashing and homophobia from the antisemitic conspiracy theories of Hamas propaganda. Pat Robertson declares Islam a wicked cult of death and the governments of the Middle East evil; Sayyid Qutb, one of Osama bin Laden's inspirations, declared the West wicked, decadent and materialistic. If we speak of "Islamism," let us also speak of "Christianism," its counterpart, a movement just as dangerous and violent and just as intolerant. The evangelicals condemn the world-conquering/world-converting ambitions of Salafi Islamists, and then turn around and exhort Christians to go forth and convert the entire planet to their particular strain of religion.
Social responsibility is a blessing, not a problem. It is the religious right-wingers, hypocritically holding the torch of moral purity, who look to change the diapers of society, not the social justice activists who call for safety nets and universal healthcare.
