There is a new battle being waged between conservatives and right-wingers and it does not – thankfully – have anything to do with Rush Limbaugh. It concerns the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, or ‘GIVE’ (H.R. 1388) which has already made its way through the House and is moving to a vote in the Senate under the title of the Serve America Act, or ’SERVE’ (S.277).

In its present form, GIVE/SERVE would create a push (MSRP of nearly $6 billion over the next four years) for Americans to assist in making their country better through volunteerism by adding 175,000 participants in national community service programs, mostly in the form of additions to existing AmeriCorps rolls.  An indirect debate among columnists and bloggers has emerged about whether this legislation has its roots in the make-work New Deal policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or in the nationalist agendas of regimes like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

If we had an alert scheme for threats posed to American values similar to the one used by Homeland Security for terrorist threats, opinions from the right on GIVE/SERVE would range from yellow to red. Mega-blogger Gateway Pundit christened the plan the “Hitler Youth Bill”. Conservative writer Michelle Malkin went to alert level amber in calling it a “Trojan Horse”. All of this commentary did nothing to stop GIVE/SERVE from achieving cloture in the Senate without attention from the mainstream press.

Compared with the $160 billion bailout of AIG that has hogged so much oxygen over the last two weeks, GIVE/SERVE ranks low in terms of its sex appeal on nightly newscasts. In that way, the legislation may have been designed as a stealth weapon. Low cost (I’m speaking in Obama dollars) and written in the familiar obfuscating manner of all congressional text, the superficial purpose of the law seems fair enough in its stated goal of bringing more volunteers to bear in solving America’s many problems. A quick skim of the legislation exposes potential restrictions of free speech and expression as well as the handle for the federal government to provide punishment for schools that refuse to require compulsory service on students.

Aside from the creepy Orwellian impression that that “Clean Energy Corps” or “Healthy Futures Corps” makes, a more objective reading of GIVE/SERVE reveals sections that could remove religion and political expression from the public sphere.

From the House version, in a section detailing activities from which are prohibited for participants in the national civil service corps draw a red “X” around the following activities:

“Participating in, or endorsing, events or activities that are likely to include advocacy for or against political parties, political platforms, political candidates, proposed legislation, or elected officials.”

“Engaging in religious instruction, conducting worship services, providing mandatory religious instruction of worship, constructing or operating facilities devoted to religious instruction or worship, maintaining facilities primarily or inherently devoted to religious instruction or worship, or engaging in any form of religious proselytization (sic).”

The bill language is extremely vague in terms of when and how the restrictions are to apply, making it possible that many potential participants would simply be disqualified. Others desiring to become involved in government programs would be place in the untenable position of having to jettison their religious and political identity.

The bill should not, however, send shivers up your spine on those grounds. If left at the standing myopic interpretation of church and state separation, and barring the party in power from using government-paid volunteers for its personal benefit, this would be an annoying bill, a waste of taxpayer money, but a far cry from a totalitarian American Cultural Revolution. After all, the law only applies to volunteers; individuals can opt out and not get involved. The reality is that you and I will probably still have that choice, but the mechanism is in place within the legislation for a world in which our children could be stripped of those freedoms.

Something called ‘Youth Engagement Zones’ (I thought we were trying to get tough on that kind of thing) conceived in the legislation would be places in which “service-learning is a mandatory part of the curriculum in all of the secondary schools served by the local educational agency”. If schools engage the ‘youth engagement zone’ program, would they then be forcing students to follow the guidelines for prohibited activities? 

How simple would it be for President Obama, working through the Department of Education, to implement an incentive/punishment system tied to federal funding? This is typically how federal funding of education has been used to promote the liberal agenda. Why would we assume that this facet of executive authority would not be utilized to achieve broader goals?

During the campaign, President Obama spoke about creating a “civilian national security force” and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has previously given two interviews (here and here) in which he described a civilian force being “universal” for youth ages “18 to 25” for the purpose of promoting national unity. As reported by PrisonPlanet.com, the change.gov website changed the wording in its policy page for the ‘America Serves’ initiative from “requiring” to “setting a goal”.

Even so, worst case scenarios of what could be done with this legislation are just that. Are they not? The liberal view of our laws is that they are tools, implements, and their use is determined by the power that wields them. So, just as a machete is a weapon, it also is a useful tool. The same idea has permeated national education policy, the thought that classrooms can be useful in grooming generations of children who are all on the proper side of arguments relating to religion, economics or environmental issues. If that doesn’t make sense right away, just read the words of the godfather of totalitarianism, Josef Stalin. “Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

Unfortunately, President Obama’s recorded statements about universal compulsory service, combined with the stated goals of his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, leave less and less room for doubt about what may lay ahead if GIVE/SERVE passes. Although I still believe that any move toward totalitarianism is unlikely and would be ill-fated due to the love of freedom that is coded into the American DNA, the potential for abuse is extreme and there is every indication, based on the administration’s increasing boldness about overreaching, that abuse will occur.

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To track progress of this legislation, we recommend visting OpenCongress.org.

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