The Difference between God and Congress

In Letters to a Diminished Church, Dorothy Sayers writes about God’s incarnation as Jesus:

…for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he [God] had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted for himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

That is, when faced with the reality of the same brutal death by torture that His creatures suffered daily at the hands of their imperial rulers, God didn’t “opt out.”

Contrast that with our rulers in Washington, DC. Having habitually exempted themselves from legislation and regulations imposed on the rest of us—until “outed” and embarrassed into adherence to the laws they pass—they are at it again, passing a nice little ObamaCare Exemption for themselves:

To adapt H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the cynicism and self-dealing of the American political class. Witness their ad-libbed decision, at the 11th hour and on the basis of no legal authority, to create a special exemption for themselves from the ObamaCare health coverage that everybody else is mandated to buy.

Fearing that their having to pay the same high health insurance premiums as their constituents would result in a “brain drain” of their staffs, members of Congress begged President Obama for help. Which they will now receive in the form of additional payments to cover the additional cost of ObamaCare.

In God we trust. In Obama Congress trusts.