...to decide whether the leaders of the Democratic Party should be classified as "persons" or "complex masses of organic tissue." If our president can't figure out when human life begins, then I certainly cannot. And while we're at it, who is to say for certain that homosexuals or Jews are real human beings? Or how about Joan Rivers? She is, at best, one third of a person, two-thirds plastic. Maybe we should let our doctors kill Joan, too.

As a staff member of a private Christian charity, I could not help but take notice when President Obama expressed interest in decreasing the tax deduction on private charitable donations from the wealthy.

Ostensibly, the rationale is that rich people make too much money, ergo they should be giving even more money to the federal government than they already do -- what a good socialist would call "paying their fair share." Of course, this argument never fails to completely ignore the fact that the rich are already taxed a higher percentage on their income, and that it should therefore come as no surprise when an across-the-board tax exemption is also higher in actual dollars (and sometimes, as in this case, in the percentage itself) for the wealthy than for the middle class.

In the case of charitable contributions, the idea is that American society has a vested interest in non-profit charities; thus, if you give a hundred dollars of your hard-earned money to a charity, it is sort of like a voluntary tax. And because our society values such contributions, the government has traditionally refrained from taxing that part of your income which goes toward charity. Logically, since the wealthy are paying a higher percentage in taxes on their $100 than I am on mine, it follows that the tax exemption will be higher for them than it is to me.

But that is neither here nor there.

My bigger concern is what Obama's plan reveals about his view of what makes a healthy society tick. The decrease of the tax exemption implies that individual Americans cannot be trusted to solve one another's problems, and that we must ultimately rely upon a federal bureacracy to save us -- not voluntarily, but by force. I once read an opinion column in which it was argued that private charities are a nuisance, because they interfere with the social work that is really the responsibility of the government.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd rather have the freedom to give my $100 to a private organization that shares my values and knows how to impact people's lives in a meaningful way, than be forced to give more of my hard-earned money to the folks at Foggy Bottom, where the money pit is truly bottomless and the creativity for new ways to waste money is limitless.

Voluntarily, a rich man can give of his fortune to a Baptist prison ministry that heals broken criminals with counseling, accountability and the message of the Gospel. Involuntarily, his money will go toward the promotion of abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, and a secular world-view that has no room for the sacred. Which would we rather have?