Nobody loves the nanny state quite as much as the Republican Party

Hypocrisy isn’t a unique trait to conservatives/Republicans, but exists in especially high quantities in conservative politicians and the Republican Party generally. You can count on them aggressively pursuing today anything and practically everything they criticized yesterday. The “nanny state” rhetoric is a favorite of many GOP hacks to decry invasions of personal liberty by government, and especially interference in private markets. Wikipedia defines it in modern American terms as “where the state is perceived as being excessive in its desire to protect, govern or control particular aspects of society.”

For example:

No normally functioning mind should be capable of making statements like that, only to do things like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or this scenario which is playing out in dozens of states across the nation in nearly identical form:

New Law in Kansas Seen as a Threat to Abortions

One in a series of abortion limits approved in Kansas since Republicans took full control of the state government this year – a new license law – is raising uncertainty about the future of all abortion providers in the state.

Opponents of abortion say that the licenses – which newly dictate requirements for the size of rooms at abortion clinics, the stocking of emergency equipment, medications and blood supplies, and ties to nearby hospitals – will ensure at least a modicum of safety standards in a state that Troy Newman, the leader of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, said “had been the Wild West for abortionists for as long as anyone can remember.”

But abortion rights supporters, here and nationally, say the rules, which take effect next week, are onerous, have been rushed into place too rapidly and are actually aimed at ending abortion services at the only three places in the state now providing them, perhaps as early as Friday.

The situation in Kansas has since deteriorated to the point where all three of the state’s abortion clinics were denied licenses, effectively outlawing abortions in the state, despite the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade that abortions were a constitutional right. While Republicans continually scream about burdensome regulations costing jobs and interfering in the business of private corporations — like safety regulations meant to prevent mining disasters — the GOP has no problem at all using such severe regulations that every business targeted by them is literally forced out of existence.

One could make arguments in favor and against each of these things individually and some of them warrant such debate, but is there really anyone in the country that takes the “nanny state” criticism seriously when coming from conservatives that want to use the power of not just the federal government, but the nearly immutable constitution, to tell people who they can and can’t marry? To tell them they can’t buy or even make pornography? Isn’t that type of interference in personal liberty precisely what the GOP is criticizing when it complains about the nanny state here at home and abroad in countries like China, that have laws dictating how many children a family can have? Is it not similar to conservative support for the FCC to censor network television for swearing, nudity, and their repeated attempts at the state level to censor games for violent content?

Isn’t it a nanny state when the government tells a person who they can and can’t even have sex with in the privacy of their own home, whether or not they can get an abortion, and what books they can read?

The issue of game violence is especially hypocritical since it means the government begins making choices about what video games children can buy and play, substituting the choices of parents. Is there any issue than the government regulating video games and free speech that better fits the truest definition of a nanny state than this, and yet is there a bigger constituent for such censorship laws than in the Republican Party?

Not so much.