Showing posts with label contraception. Show all posts
Showing posts with label contraception. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Gov. Granholm Goes Wild With Her Claims Of A War On Women

What an utterly disgusting and intellectually dishonest person Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm is. She has taken to Politico to decry the "war on women" being carried out by evil Republicans. Granholm claims that Virginia's decision to require pre-abortion ultra-sounds, the defunding by some states of Planned Parenthood, and Rush's crass description of Sandra Fluke add up to an all out Republican War on "women's rights." Her arguments are disingenuous at best - and she omits any mention of the elephant in the room, Obama's HHS mandate that all employers fund free contraception and abortion plan B pills for all female employees.

Granholm first attacks Virginia's recent passage of a law requiring women to view an abdominal ultrasound before undergoing abortions. The sole purpose of the law is to insure that the women opting to undergo an abortion understand that they will be destroying a human life. For Granholm, this is exhibit one in the evil Republican "war on women." A 10 minute ultrasound hardly seems to be a "war on women," but to Granholm, who is apparently an advocate of abortion on demand without any moral considerations, any state action that would require nothing more than a woman face the morality of her actions is both "demeaning" and "unnecessary."

Granholm's next argument is that any state that acts to defund Planned Parenthood of our tax dollars is likewise conducting a war on "women's health." Granholm neglects to mention the fact that Planned Parenthood is a radical left wing organization pushing a far left social agenda of sex without physical consequence or moral considerations. Granholm likewise neglects to mention that Planned Parenthood, even though it receives vast tax dollars, is also our nation's largest provider of abortion services. They do so under the canard that the money used to provide abortions is separate and apart from taxpayer funding.

What is really going on is that the Obama administration shares the goals of Planned Parenthood and is intent on that organization receiving our tax dollars funneled through the states via Title X. Two recent examples paint this clearly. When New Hampshire voted to remove Planned Parenthood from the list of eligible recipients for Title X funds, the Obama Administration actually stepped in and gave a $1 million dollar no-bid contract with Planned Parenthood of New England. When Texas voted to provide Title X funds only to organizations that do not provide abortions, the Obama administration took the step of withholding all Title X funds for women's health from the state. What this dust up is about is not a war on women's health, it is a war being waged by the left to insure that one of their most sacred cows, one that fully pushes their social agenda, Planned Parenthood, continues to get fat on tax payer dollars. Yet Granholm, ignoring all of this, claims that this focus on Planned Parenthood amounts to "sexual McCarthyism." The reality is that this is Granholm and the Obama administration Komenizing the states that refuse to fund Planned Parenthood.

Lastly, Granholm claims:

Rush Limbaugh did more than insult a law student with his diatribe about Sandra Fluke; his words revealed a mind-set about women. Republicans have been chanting that they want to “take our country back.” Sure they do … back in time. Back to the good old days when women didn’t have the opportunities for personal and professional advancement that they do now.

What a disingenous ass this woman is. Not a single word has been mentioned by any Republican of reducing women's opportunities in any profession in any way. Not a single Republican has advanced the proposition that contraception should not be available to women under Title X. So how can Granholm make this outrageous charge?

Republicans are doing this by waging a war against contraceptive choice. Not just abortion, but birth control in general — the very thing that set women free to pursue equality in the first place. Studies have shown that since women have had access to the pill and family planning measures, they have made huge gains in both wages and in careers that were dominated by men. Which is why we’re seeing an outpouring of outrage from women. The legislation being advanced threatens those gains.

Granholm's last argument is cause and effect - that only access to the pill has made women able to succeed in the job market. That is ridiculous. The great societal change that began with "first wave feminism," then WWII with women working outside the home and finally the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act, are what have allowed women to achieve parity with men in the workforce. Without those changes, every pill in the world would be meaningless. Granholm's argument is akin to saying that because dew forms on the grass at about the time the sun rises, that one causes the other.

As to her other argument, how can Granholm possibly portray anything that anyone on the right has done as an attack on "contraceptive choice." If her problem is with limiting funding of Planned Parenthood, which it implicitly is, the only way that argument could be valid is if there were no other organizations that could meet the requirements of Title X - and that is an absurdity.

Granholm, like virtually all on the left, is an intellectually dishonest person. The only war going on here is the HHS mandate, which is a war on the First Amendment religious rights of all Americans, not merely the Catholic Church. It is a deeply cynical, election year war being waged by Obama to reduce religion in the public square and to create the illusion that he is championing "women's rights" against evil Republicans. Yet the HHS mandate is the one issue Granholm manages to ignore. That alone tells you all you need to know about this piece of partisan excreta.





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Thursday, February 16, 2012

Every Argument In Support Of The HHS Mandate

Gary Willis, in a blog on that noted theological site, the New York Review of Books, has opined that the uproar over Obama's HHS mandate is being caused by Republican con men and Catholic fanatics. Willis, to his credit, makes virtually every leftie argument in favor of Obama's HHS mandate that I have heard to this point, plus a few more:

- The conflict over the HHS mandate is really about contraception, not religion.

- If the issue is about religion, than the question is whether Catholics can force their views on everyone else.

- Obama has offered a reasonable accommodation, but the Bishops are fanatics acting unreasonably.

- The fact that the Bishops are even complaining about this shows their bad faith.

- Catholics want to impose a religious dictatorship on America.

- The Church got it wrong on contraception, and thus they should be ignored.

- The "religious freedom" argument is about whether we as a nation can disagree with the Bishops (stated while ignoring the HHS mandate)

- The polls are in, contraception is accepted by most Americans, and therefore this core doctrine of the Church is not entitled to be respected under the First Amendment.

- Contraception is not a valid religious issue since there is no mention of it made in the bible,

- Left wing interpretation of natural law is obviously superior to the Pope's. The Pope got it wrong on contraception, and so the Pope can and should be ignored.

- The Catholic Church thinks sex is dirty. Let's hear a cheer for free love!!!

- Catholic doctrine should be subordinate to polling.


What follows is an answer to those issues:

By a revolting combination of con men and fanatics, the current primary race has become a demonstration that the Republican party does not deserve serious consideration for public office. Take the controversy over contraceptives.

Willis begins with a patently false premise. There is no controversy over contraceptives - nor for that matter the plan-B abortion pill Willis ignores throughout his argument. Both contraceptives and plan-B abortion pills are unconditionally available in America to all women today. Indeed, there is nothing stopping the government from opening up kiosks to hand out contraceptives and Plan-B abortion pills like candy, free to any and all. The Catholic Church isn't contesting that. The sole issue is whether the federal government is violating the First Amendment when it forces religious institutions and individuals to pay for those items in violation of their core religious beliefs, with their only remaining alternatives being to pay a fine or dissolve.

American bishops at first opposed having hospitals and schools connected with them pay employee health costs for contraceptives. But when the President backed off from that requirement, saying insurance companies can pay the costs, the bishops doubled down and said no one should have to pay for anything so evil as contraception.

This is a cynical argument. Obama backed off nothing. He announced - without coordination with the bishops - an accounting trick as an accommodation. Contraceptives and abortion pills don't fall off trees. The only way a health insurer can make them available is to collect sufficient premiums to cover their costs. So all Obama is doing is telling insurers of Catholic institutions that they have to use some creative accounting. The costs are still going to be paid by the Catholic institutions for their employees regardless of how the accounting is done. Moreover, Obama has done nothing to address those Catholic institutions that self-insure.

And it is not just Catholic Church institutions that are at issue and that Obama does not address. Most Christian sects share the same doctrines regarding abortion and contraception. And then there are the individual devout believers in Catholicism who run secular businesses, but who will also be required to fund the HHS mandate contrary to their religious beliefs. Mr. Willis describes complaining about that as something radical. But the First Amendment Free Exercise clause is written to protect religious individuals every bit as much as institutions.

Some Republicans are using the bishops’ stupidity to hurt the supposed “moderate” candidate Mitt Romney, giving a temporary leg up to the faux naïf Rick Santorum; others are attacking Barack Obama as an “enemy of religion.”

I must admit, it has been so long since I have read or heard anyone called a "naif" (Ivanhoe?) that I had to look it up. I was prepared to give Willis kudos if it made sense, but "naif" merely means "naive." So Santorum is faux naive? That makes no sense. It does however mark Willis as a faux intellectual. At any rate, Obama is an enemy of religion - as has been virtually every honest socialist since the founding of socialism in the crucible of the French Revolution some two centuries ago.

Pusillanimous Catholics—Mark Shields and even, to a degree, the admirable E. J.Dionne—are saying that Catholics understandably resent an attack on “their” doctrine (even though they do not personally believe in it). Omnidirectional bad-faith arguments have clustered around what is falsely presented as a defense of “faith.” The layers of ignorance are equaled only by the willingness of people “of all faiths” to use them for their own purposes. Consider just some of the layers:

So for the Catholics and other religious in this country to mount a "defense of faith" is, according to Willis, a mark of ignorance and bad faith. I know the left does not like to have to justify their baseless assertions in argument, but this is ridiculous.

Far too many Catholics have fallen for the utopian belief of the left - that society can be perfected on earth under the benevolent hand of an omnipotent government - when we now have two centuries of historical evidence, much of it soaked in blood, and all showing to the contrary. Moreover, much of the Catholic "left wing" don't seem to understand that they have made a bargain with devil in the secular socialist left. These people want to see Christianity as a whole put to the dust-bin of history. It is almost like Stockholm syndrome.

The eyes of many of the Catholic left have apparently been opened on that score thanks to Obama and the HHS. But then again, Obama promised to be a uniter, not a divider.


The Phony Religious Freedom Argument

The bishops’ opposition to contraception is not an argument for a “conscience exemption.” It is a way of imposing Catholic requirements on non-Catholics. This is religious dictatorship, not religious freedom.

Oh, you lefties, you love turning arguments on their head and accusing an innocent opponent of doing what you yourselves are doing. The Bishops' argument is a moral one. It does not impose anything on non-Catholics. It does not stop a single person, Catholic or non-Catholic, from purchasing a contraceptive. The only imposition in this case is of course from Obama, who would impose the costs of contraceptives and abortion pills on the Catholic Church. I would say nice try, but it wasn't.

Contraception is not even a religious matter. Nowhere in Scripture or the Creed is it forbidden. Catholic authorities themselves say it is a matter of “natural law,” over which natural reason is the arbiter—and natural reason, even for Catholics, has long rejected the idea that contraception is evil. More of that later; what matters here is that contraception is legal, ordinary, and accepted even by most Catholics. To say that others must accept what Catholics themselves do not is bad enough. To say that President Obama is “trying to destroy the Catholic Church” if he does not accept it is much, much worse.

For Willis to claim that contraception is not a religious matter is akin to Sebelius ruling that a Catholic charity is not a religious organization. Sebelius and Willis are both applying ridiculously narrow definitions to meet their goals. It is risible. Simply because mention of the pill, the IUD, or abortion does not appear in in the New Testament does not mean that they are of no religious concern. Contraception and abortion directly raise the issue of the creation of life imbued with a soul by God. Maybe its just me, but that sounds kind of central to all of Christianity.

Natural law is not devoid of moral underpinnings, nor does it fall outside the competence of the Church to make binding moral judgments within the rubric of natural law. Thomas Aquinas wrote extensively on that issue. And indeed, Pope Paul VI, in Humanae Vitae, did in fact reason within the construct of natural law to find artificial contraception "immoral" and "evil." (H.V., Par. 14). Willis can have contrary opinions to Church doctrine, but in this case he is being wholly dishonest about the nature of those doctrines.

To disagree with Catholic bishops is called “disrespectful,” an offense against religious freedom. That is why there is a kind of taboo against bringing up Romney’s Mormonism. But if Romney sincerely believed in polygamy on religious grounds, as his grandfather did, he would not even be considered for the presidency—any more than a sincere Christian Scientist, who rejects the use of medicine, would be voted for to handle public health care. Yet a man who believes that contraception is evil is an aberrant from the American norm, like the polygamist or the faith healer.

Disagreeing with Catholic bishops is of course not an offense against "religious freedom" - it is a function of it. Willis nonetheless uses this construct as a means to obfuscate the real argument - that requiring a religious institution to act against the tenets of its faith is where the offense against religious freedom lies.

It is interesting that Willis brings up polygamy as an issue, because it was center stage in Reynolds v. U.S., the first Supreme Court case interpreting the 1st Amendment's Free Exercise of Religion clause. A Mormon man was prosecuted for polygamy and appealed on Free Exercise grounds. The Court resolved that case by looking at mainstream religious doctrine extant at the time of the signing of the Bill of Rights. Mormonism was an invention that preceded the adoption of the First Amendment, and polygamy was "odious" to then extant mainstream Christian traditions. Thus polygamy fell outside the ambit of Free Exercise protections. In the instant case, Catholic Church doctrine on contraception and abortion can be traced back to antiquity, and though reexamined by the Church in the 1960's, were certainly settled doctrines at the time of the inking of the First Amendment. This should qualify for protection under the Free Exercise clause.

Although Willis frames the issue cleverly, what Willis is arguing for in reality is that today, some two and a quarter centuries after the inking of the First Amendment, any religious tenet in conflict with modern secular left wing dogma should not be honored as legitimate and, thus, should fall outside First Amendment protection. Willis and the left would have the rock upon which Christ built his Church loosed into the quicksand of the modern secular socialist left.

The Phony Contraception Argument

The opposition to contraception has, as I said, no scriptural basis. Pope Pius XI once said that it did, citing in his encyclical Casti Connubii (1930) the condemnation of Onan for “spilling his seed” rather than impregnating a woman (Genesis 38.9). But later popes had to back off from this claim, since everyone agrees now that Onan’s sin was not carrying out his duty to give his brother an heir (Deuteronomy 25.5-6). Then the “natural law” was fallen back on, saying that the natural purpose of sex is procreation, and any use of it for other purposes is “unnatural.” But a primary natural purpose does not of necessity exclude ancillary advantages. The purpose of eating is to sustain life, but that does not make all eating that is not necessary to subsistence “unnatural.” One can eat, beyond the bare minimum to exist, to express fellowship, as one can have sex, beyond the begetting of a child with each act, to express love.

And Willis got his theology degree where? You can compare Willis's secular reasoning within the natural law sphere to that of the Pope in Humanae Vitae and perhaps glean a few differences in the moral thrust. That a leftie such as Willis ultimately comes to a different conclusion is hardly surprising, but it is also meaningless. Catholic religious doctrine has been decided by the Pope, sitting ex cathedra.

Willis can't abide that reality that it is only the Pope's view that matters, since to do so is to concede the argument that Obama and the left are in fact conducting an attack directly upon the religious freedom of the Church. Nor can Willis even concede that different people could arrive at different, yet valid conclusions, without likewise conceding the argument. Instead, he declares the Pope's encyclical a "phony" and thus, the modern left can impose their will on the Church, marginalizing it in American society.


The Roman authorities would not have fallen for such a silly argument but for a deep historical disrelish for sex itself. Early Fathers and medieval theologians considered sex unworthy when not actually sinful. That is why virgin saints and celibate priests were prized above married couples. Thomas Aquinas said that priests must not be married, since “those in holy orders handle the sacred vessels and the sacrament itself, and therefore it is proper (decens) that they preserve, by abstinences, a body undefiled (munditia corporalis) (Summa Theologiae, Part 3 Supplement, Question 53, article 3, Response). Marriage, you see, makes for defilement (immunditia). The ban on contraception is a hangover from the period when the body itself was considered unclean, as Peter Brown overwhelmingly proved in The Body and Society (1988).

It is hard to see what relevant point Willis is trying to make here. Pope Paul VI's reasoning in Humanae Vitae is in no way is prudish or implies that sex is "unclean." Is Willis suggesting that, since the modern left has been pushing a secular message of sex without consequence, moral or physical, in and out of marriage, that modern Christian sexual morality is thereby invalidated? Curious.

The Phony “Church Teaches” Argument

Catholics who do not accept the phony argument over contraception are said to be “going against the teachings of their church.” That is nonsense. They are their church. The Second Vatican Council defines the church as “the people of God.” Thinking that the pope is the church is a relic of the days when a monarch was said to be his realm. The king was “Denmark.” Catholics have long realized that their own grasp of certain things, especially sex, has a validity that is lost on the celibate male hierarchy. This is particularly true where celibacy is concerned.

So to restate Willis's argument, Catholicism is antiquated, the Catholic hierarchy cannot pass judgment on moral issues surrounding sex because they aren't out chasing skirt every night, and therefore it is only legitimate that questions of Church doctrine and sexual morality be determined by polling. Unfortunately, Willis neglected to site the biblical references supporting that argument. I have read most of the Bible, and I have yet to see reference to the Prophet Rasmussen or the Book of Pew.

Thus it seems Willis and the left would add an addendum to Mathew 18:18. That's the bit were Jesus told the soon to be First Pope, Peter, that "whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven." That is one of the biblical passages that gives the Pope the final authority to pronounce on matters of religious doctrine and morality. Willis would rewrite that bit to add "subject to majority approval." I can't wait to see Willis's rewrite of the Golden Rule. "Thou shalt love thy neighbor, but only when using HHS approved contraceptives."

There was broad disagreement with Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical on the matter. Pope Paul VI set up a study group of loyal and devout Catholics, lay and clerical, to make recommendations. The group overwhelmingly voted to change the teaching of PiusXI. But cardinals in the Roman Curia convinced Paul that any change would suggest that the church’s teachings are not eternal (though Casti Connubii had not been declared infallible, by the papacy’s own standards).

When Paul reaffirmed the ban on birth control in Humanae Vitae (1968) there was massive rejection of it. Some left the church. Some just ignored it. Paradoxically, the document formed to convey the idea that papal teaching is inerrant just convinced most people that it can be loony. The priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley said thatHumanae Vitae did more damage to the papacy than any of the so-called “liberal” movements in Catholicism. When Pius IX condemned democracy and modern science in his Syllabus of Errors (1864), the Catholic historian Lord Acton said that Catholics were too sensible to go crazy every time a pope does. The reaction toHumanae Vitae proves that. . . .

So let's see. The issues of contraception and abortion were given a second look by the Church with the advent of modern contraception, there were two sides to argument, and the Pope picked one. The left disagrees with the Pope's choice. And that matters the tiniest bit why?

The only person whose decision counts is the Pope's. Now, people who disagree with that on a fundamental level can leave the Church, or choose to live in sin. But none of that remotely gives the left in America the right to substitute their morality for Church doctrine. That is, according to Thomas Jefferson, what the Free Exercise clause was meant to prevent.

But to be clear, that is precisely what Willis is arguing for, with the goal of the replacing God with a socialist government as the final arbiter of morality in our society. As I quoted in A Historical Perspective On Religion & The HHS Mandate:

In any left revolution, be it progressive, bolshevik, socialist, fascist, maoist, or bolivaran, it is necessary to knock down organized religion. The Catholic Church competes for the hearts and minds of people and does so effectively, as do the evangelical Protestant churches, etc. Further, the Church is organized and so can put out a message of opposition. So at some point the revolution has to take the Church on, or lose.

And there it is in a nutshell. The left is the enemy of religion and Obama is their standard bearer in this attack on religion through the HHS. Mr. Willis's entire argument, replete with misstatements of fact and use of rhetorical devices, is used to hide that fundamental truth. The HHS mandate is not about contraception, it is about whether God or government will be the final arbiter of our nation's moral code.

On a final note, is it possible that Obama's decision to post the HHS mandate now is a cynical ploy right out of Wag The Dog. Is HHS mandate designed by Obama to create a social policy issue that would deflect from economic concerns going into the 2012 election. Certainly a lot of people are speculating about that, and not without some due cause. Given the apparent collusion on this issue between someone in the HHS decision chain and George Stephanopolous in his moderation of the 8 January Republican debate, it certainly leads one to suspect that this mandate is part of Obama's reelection year strategy. That suspicion gains a lot more life when one sees how the HHS pushed out this mandate long before it had finished what would be a normal review. HHS Sec. Sebelius, in her recent testimony before the Senate, admitted that, in the rush to announce the HHS mandate, she did not bother to float the mandate through the Justice Dept. for an opinion on its First Amendment legality, despite being asked to do so by 27 Senators, nor did HHS bother to studying how the mandate might impact on those 60% - i.e., the majority - of all companies and organizations that are self-insured.








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Sunday, February 12, 2012

A Historical Perspective On Religion & Obama's HHS Mandate



This is the third part of a three part essay. Part 1 examined the original intent of the Founders in passing the Free Exercise clause. Part 2 looked at the current state of the law surrounding that clause.

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The first thing to understand about the Department of Health and Human Services’ birth-control mandate, and the last, is that it is an assault on both faithful Christians and the Constitution by leftists who consider themselves at “war” — their word — with bourgeois America. It has nothing to do with guaranteeing access to contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients.

Andrew McCarthy, The Contraceptive Mandate’s Shaky Justification, NRO, 11 Feb. 2012

Virtually all laws, at least beyond those that are purely administrative or relating to health and safety, are moral choices of one sort or another. They set the outer bounds of what is morally acceptable or required in our society. So it is no surprise that when Obama speaks of his latest mandate to require all health care plans to provide free contraception, sterilization and plan-B abortion for women, he does so in the language of morality – to fail to force this mandate on religious employers will, he says, “discriminate against women.”

For most of the past two millenium, the moral source of our laws in Western civilization has been the Judeo-Christian ethic. It has provided a stable and immutable framework for morality at the heart of Western civilization - one that places the greatest importance on the sanctity of individual human life. And, as many have noted, it likewise provided the basis for our nation:

Nineteenth century historians wrote extensively on the United States of America having a distinctively Protestant character in its outlook and founding political philosophy. . . .

The notion of a distinctive religious basis for American democracy and culture was first described and popularized by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1840s, in his influential book, Democracy in America. In the second chapter, de Tocqueville describes America's unique religious heritage from the Puritans. His analysis showed the Puritans as providing the foundational values of America, based on their strong Hebrew Bible view of the world, which included fighting for earthly political justice, an emphasis on laws and education, and the "chosenness" which the Puritans identified with, giving them a sense of moral mission in founding America. As de Tocqueville observed, the Puritan's biblical outlook gave America a moral dimension which the Old World lacked. De Tocqueville believed these biblical values led to America's unique institutions of religious tolerance, public education, egalitarianism, and democracy.

And to the end of protecting religion in our country, our Founders wrote into the Bill of Rights that Congress could pass no law prohibiting the “free exercise” of religion. As Thomas Jefferson wrote at the time, that meant that Congress's legislative power did not extend to “rights of conscience,” only to affirmative acts taken under the color of religion that threatened the peace. And as I have noted here, the Catholic Church teachings on artificial birth control and abortion have been doctrinal matters of conscience that far predate the signing of our Bill of Rights and, indeed, extend back into antiquity.

Ironically, almost at the same time as Jefferson and Madison were crafting our First Amendment, half a world away, Christianity's mortal enemy, socialism, was being born in the crucible of the French Revolution. One of the first acts of the Revolutionary government was to initiate a systematic and brutal war on the Catholic Church and its clergy. As recounted at the American Spectator:

The secularists of the French Revolution regarded the Roman Catholic Church as the last obstacle to atheism's final triumph. Blurting this out, the French dilettante Denis Diderot proposed to his fellow revolutionaries that they strangle the last priest with the "guts of the last king."

Socialism is a radical ideology that sprang up largely in response to the ills of the industrial revolution. The goal of socialism is to deconstruct traditional Western society and remake it under the auspices of an omnipotent government that would use its police powers to create a new order of ostensible social and economic equality. Socialists replace God with government as the source of morality. As one particularly observant commentor at Legal Insurrection recently opined:

In any left revolution, be it progressive, bolshevik, socialist, fascist, maoist, or bolivaran, it is necessary to knock down organized religion. The Catholic Church competes for the hearts and minds of people and does so effectively, as do the evangelical Protestant churches, etc. Further, the Church is organized and so can put out a message of opposition. So at some point the revolution has to take the Church on, or lose.

And yet another immutable truth of history is that, as socialist governments fully consolidate power, they invariably devalue individual human life. Much of the 20th century's history is written in the blood of over 100 million people slaughtered as part of socialist experiments.

Sixty years after the French Revolution, Karl Marx, socialism's greatest philosopher, famously wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that religion is the "opium of the people" and that "[t]he abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." The British socialist party wrote in their 1911 manifesto that "it is a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion." Lenin, the father of the Soviet Union's bloody experiment in Communism, wrote in 1905, “The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth.” Lenin further noted that “every socialist is, as a rule” an “atheist.” And Hitler himself was of like mind - "“National Socialism and Christianity cannot co-exist together."

And lest there be any doubt, there was Dutch socialist philosopher, Anton Pannekoek, who wrote in a 1907 essay - interesting in part for its incredibly naive belief in an incipient socialist utopia:

The socialist teachings have inoculated the laboring class with an entirely new conception of the world. The realization, that society is in a process of continual transformation, and that misery, poverty, exploitation, and all the suffering of the present are only temporary and will soon yield to an order of society, to be inaugurated by his class, in which peace, abundance, and fraternity shall reign, this realization must revolutionize the whole world conception of the laborer from the ground up. The theory of socialism furnishes the scientific foundation for this world conception. Political economy teaches us to understand the internal laws, which move the capitalist process, while historical materialism lays bare the effects of the economic revolution upon the conceptions and actions of people. And this stands irreconcilably opposed, as a materialistic doctrine, to religion.

Socialism arrived on U.S. shores in the mid 1870's. One of its early adherents was the father of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Ms. Sanger, in a 1915 speech to the Fabian Society in London, described her father as “one of the early pioneers of Socialist thought” and noted that she herself was “rocked in the cradle of socialism.”

Sanger ultimately established Planned Parenthood to promote both contraception and abortion. As to abortion, Sanger, a nurse by training who worked among New York City's poor at the turn of the 20th century, saw many poor women suffering from “dangerous and illegal abortions.” In part motivated to help these women, and in part because she was a eugenicist who wanted to limit the birth rate of blacks, she became the leading advocate for abortion.

Sanger's motivation in pushing contraception overlapped with her motives for advocating abortion, but also went far beyond. She wanted to remove from sex any hindrance of ethical and moral limits, and, in order to promote sex among women, make sex free of the physical consequence of pregnancy.

[Sanger judged] the necessity of breaking down the "codes that have surrounded sexual behavior in the so-called Christian communities, the teachings of the churches concerning chastity and sexual purity, the prohibitions of the laws, and the hypocritical conventions of society."

As a consequence, Sanger became a direct opponent of Christianity, especially the Catholic faith, for the Church was the greatest obstacle opposing the release of the "dynamic energy" of sexuality, and such obstruction for Sanger was "nothing less than foolhardy."

"Instead of laying down hard and fast laws of sexual conduct, instead of attempting to inculcate rules and regulations," as the Church had done, "the teacher of Birth Control seeks to meet the needs of the people," she wrote.

Neither Sanger nor socialism itself was part of the original feminist movement. That movement concerned itself with seeking equality before the law for women, as well as securing their right to vote. The feminist movement didn't become radicalized until American socialists adopted feminism in the 1950's and 1960's and, along with American socialism's than recent adoption of the civil rights movement, made radical feminism part of their raison d'etre. It was then that Sanger's goals and ideas became mainstream as part of the “second,” and now “third wave” of the radicalized feminist movement.

The black civil rights movement, though co-opted and bastardized by the socialists in the 1960's, was long supported by the right - indeed, far more so than by the left. Likewise, gender equality and the right of women to be free from discrimination saw bipartisan support. So to the extent that calls for greater protections in these areas were mainstreamed, our nation was able to affirmatively act on them in the 1960's.

(Just as an aside, let me add here that the Socialist left in the U.S. has, in the past two decades, added others to their stable of victim classes that seek to drive Christianity and Judaism from their place in America - the far left wing of the gay rights activists and the political Islamists who dream of a world without Christians or Jews - or for that matter, gays or godless socialists.)

At any rate, the radical aspects of the socialist movement – attacks on religion, as well as pushing for unrestricted abortion and contraception, saw limited success at the ballot box through the mid-20th century. Consequently, socialists turned to the Courts to achieve what they could not through legislation.

In the mid-20th century, the American socialist left used the ACLU - an organization specifically formed to further socialism and communism - to bring a series of Court cases designed to remove religion from the public square and elevate the ethos articulated by Margaret Sanger. The socialists sought judicial activism – and by and large, the Courts complied. Though the Constitution says nothing about abortion or contraception, thus leaving the matters to the states and majority rule by default, the left asked the Court to enshrine abortion and contraception as federal Constitutional rights. Between 1965 (Griswold) and 1972 (Einstadt), the Supreme Court found a “right to privacy” in the “penumbras” of the Constitution such that access to contraception was made a Constitutional right. And then in 1973 (Roe), the Supreme Court, found the same for abortion.

As to religion, it has been under sustained attack by the socialist left through our Courts since 1947 (Everson). wherein the Supreme Court read the 1st Amendment clause prohibiting the federal government from establishing a national church to mean “a wall of separation between Church and State.” Where for almost two centuries there had been fairly substantial involvement of a generic Christianity in the public square, the Supreme Court, in a series of subsequent cases, changed that completely. In 1963 (Engle), the Court ruled prayer in school unconstitutional. In 1989 (Allegheny County), the Court ruled that a creche, prominently displayed in a Courthouse at Christmas, was unconstitutional. In 2005 (McCreary County), the Court held unconstitutional displays of the Ten Commandments in several Kentucky courthouses. But perhaps the biggest victory the left gained through the Court's was the 2002 decision in Lawrence v. Summers, a case seeking to hold Texas's laws against sodomy unconstitutional. Implicit in the holding of that case was a finding that Christian morality, standing alone, is no longer a “rational basis” to uphold our laws. The potential ramifications of that decision have not yet begun to be plumbed.

The election of Barack Obama brought to the White House the first true child of America's socialist movement. And though he nominally claims to be a Christian – he claims conversion not to the words of the bible, but to the political polemics of Rev. Jeremiah Wright – he has also publicly proclaimed that we are no longer a Christian nation. That was an aspirational statement at the time. It is difficult to believe that Obama's Christianity is anything other than a bare patina on his political ambitions.

Regardless, it is no surprise now to see Obama attempting to bring to fruition the socialist goal of weakening religion as an important force in America. With Obama in power, the socialist left has won at the ballot box and need not rely on the Courts, at least for the moment. Obama would see the Margaret Sanger's radical socialism become the moral underpinning of our laws, not merely as an alternative to Christianity as they exist now in our law, but over top of it. That is what Obama is doing with his HHS mandate to force all Christians, including Catholic institutions, to fund healthcare that will provide contraceptives, sterilizations, and plan-B abortion pills free to all women covered by the plan. And for Obama to portray this as a moral good – saying that to do anything else would be to discriminate against women – is simply obscene.

To direct this healthcare mandate at Christians is a raw power play, nothing more and nothing less. If Obama succeeds in this, then indeed, we really will have made the final push into a brave new world. The Courts have raised socialist ethos above religion as the basis of our laws, and now Obama intends to use the socialitst ethos to to significantly drive religion even further from its historic and Constitutionally protected role in our society. Obama's aspirational statement will be made good. For the first time in our history, we really will not be a Christian nation. This is a critical moment in our nation's history.

As I wrote in Part I of this three-part essay, the original intent of our Founding Fathers in passing the Free Exercise of Religion clause should protect the Church from Obama's mandate. And as I wrote in Part II of this essay, the current law surrounding the Free Exercise clause, would also likely find Obama's mandate unconstitutional, though it is far messier given the current state of the law. Let's hope that I am right.

Update: Greg, a former Catholic seminarian and now a history teacher who blogs at Rhymes With Right, believes the time is right for Pope Benedict XVI to respond to this assault on religion with a four part encyclical. Part 1 would be a statement of the proper roles of Church and State. Part 2 would be by-name excommunication of those Catholics supporting Obama's policy, starting with HHS Supervisor Kathleen Sebelius. Greg's suggested third part "ought to be a reminder to American Catholics of the importance of bringing their faith into the public square and voting booth." And lastly, "lest the encyclical be seen as a rejection of the whole idea of health care accessibility, there should be a fourth section reminding the faithful of the Church's continuing devotion to the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy, and that it is for this reason that the many schools, hospitals, and agencies subject to the Obama regulation operate." It sounds eminently reasonable to me. Do visit his site and read the entire post.

Update: Kindly linked at Bookwormroom, Larwyn's Linx and Seraphic Secret.

Update: And kindly linked at the Watcher's Council for this week's nominations.







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Saturday, February 11, 2012

Obama Offers Catholics A Pure Smoke & Mirrors Accomodation

On Friday morning, the Obama administration responded to the furor raised by the mandate that all Catholic related institutions will have to fund healthcare plans that cover contraception, sterilization, and plan-B abortion pills. This from the USA Today:

President Obama announced a plan today that attempts to accommodate certain religious employers opposed to a rule that would require them to provide access to birth control for women free of charge.

Obama announced that the rule would be tweaked so that in cases where non-profit religious organizations have objections, insurance companies would be required to reach out to employees and offer the coverage directly. . . .

"Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive service no matter where they work," Obama said. "That core principle remains. . . .

The change, loosely based on a regulation in effect in Hawaii, still leaves some unanswered questions. How will women be referred to insurers if they don't think of it themselves? Will the cost of contraceptives get added to premiums? And will other employers -- say, a strict Catholic who owns a restaurant -- be allowed the same exemption as hospitals, schools and charities? . . .

Contrary to the belief of apparently every leftie in the world, there really is no such thing as a free lunch. Just because contraception is free to women does not mean that it is free to the insurance companies. The insurers have to collect the money to pay for the free benefit from somewhere, and that somewhere is from all the people in the risk pool covered by the particular insurance policy. So in other words, what Obama is offering as a resolution of this issue is nothing more than pure smoke and mirrors - an accounting gimmick. If Catholic institutions have to purchase insurance and that insurance has to cover free contraception, steralization and Plan B abortion pills, than the Catholic Church will be funding it in reality, if not in the Obama directed accounting columns.

So why would Obama and the left possibly think that this smoke and mirrors will work to soothe the Catholic beast? Well, the left uses these kind of accounting tricks all of the time. Planned Parenthood is the premier example. Planned Parenthood receives tens of millions of our tax dollars annually with the proviso that none of those funds can be used to fund abortions. And yet, in 2009 alone, Planned Parenthood executed 332,278 abortions. How does the left get away with this? Through accounting of course. On paper, our tax dollars go to fund PP's overhead and all the other activities, while PP accounts show only other funds being used to fund the abortions. In reality, our tax funds are what allow PP to fund all of its activities, including abortion. It is intellectually dishonest to its core. Update: It would seem that our nation's Catholic Bishops share the same reservations noted above and more with Obama's latest proposal.

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Krauthammer On The Gospel According To Obama

Pinhead does his best Obama imitation:

 

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In his column this week, Charles Krauthammer disects Obama's forays into the pontifical:

At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, seeking theological underpinning for his drive to raise taxes on the rich, President Obama invoked the highest possible authority. His policy, he testified “as a Christian,” “coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’ ”

Now, I’m no theologian, but I’m fairly certain that neither Jesus nor his rabbinic forebears, when speaking of giving, meant some obligation to the state. You tithe the priest, not the tax man.

The Judeo-Christian tradition commands personal generosity as represented, for example, by the biblical injunction against retrieving any sheaf left behind while harvesting one’s own field. That is for the gleaners — “the poor and the alien” (Leviticus 19:10). Like Ruth in the field of Boaz. As far as I can tell, that charitable transaction involved no mediation by the IRS.

. . . But this Gospel according to Obama has a rival — the newly revealed Gospel according to Sebelius, over which has erupted quite a contretemps. By some peculiar logic, it falls to the health and human services secretary to promulgate the definition of “religious” — for the purposes, for example, of exempting religious institutions from certain regulatory dictates.

Such exemptions are granted in grudging recognition that, whereas the rest of civil society may be broken to the will of the state’s regulators, our quaint Constitution grants special autonomy to religious institutions.

Accordingly, it would be a mockery of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment if, for example, the Catholic Church were required by law to freely provide such “health care services” (in secularist parlance) as contraception, sterilization and pharmacological abortion — to which Catholicism is doctrinally opposed as a grave contravention of its teachings about the sanctity of life.

Ah. But there would be no such Free Exercise violation if the institutions so mandated are deemed, by regulatory fiat, not religious.

And thus, the word came forth from Sebelius decreeing the exact criteria required (a) to meet her definition of “religious” and thus (b) to qualify for a modicum of independence from newly enacted state control of American health care, under which the aforementioned Sebelius and her phalanx of experts determine everything — from who is to be covered, to which treatments are to be guaranteed free of charge.

Criterion 1: A “religious institution” must have “the inculcation of religious values as its purpose.” But that’s not the purpose of Catholic charities; it’s to give succor to the poor. That’s not the purpose of Catholic hospitals; it’s to give succor to the sick. Therefore, they don’t qualify as “religious” — and therefore can be required, among other things, to provide free morning-after abortifacients.

Criterion 2: Any exempt institution must be one that “primarily employs” and “primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets.” Catholic soup kitchens do not demand religious IDs from either the hungry they feed or the custodians they employ. Catholic charities and hospitals — even Catholic schools — do not turn away Hindu or Jew.

Their vocation is universal, precisely the kind of universal love-thy-neighbor vocation that is the very definition of religiosity as celebrated by the Gospel of Obama. Yet according to the Gospel of Sebelius, these very same Catholic institutions are not religious at all — under the secularist assumption that religion is what happens on Sunday under some Gothic spire, while good works are “social services” properly rendered up unto Caesar.

. . . To flatter his faith-breakfast guests and justify his tax policies, Obama declares good works to be the essence of religiosity. Yet he turns around and, through Sebelius, tells the faithful who engage in good works that what they’re doing is not religion at all. You want to do religion? Get thee to a nunnery. You want shelter from the power of the state? Get out of your soup kitchen and back to your pews. Outside, Leviathan rules.

The contradiction is glaring, the hypocrisy breathtaking. But that’s not why Obama offered a hasty compromise on Friday. It’s because the firestorm of protest was becoming a threat to his reelection. Sure, health care, good works and religion are important. But reelection is divine.

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21st Century Radical Secularism Meets Jefferson Meets Scalia (Part II)

This is Part II of a three part post.

Part I identifies the intent of the drafters in writing the First Amendment's Free Exercise of Religion clause and explains why the Obama HHS mandate is unconstitutional in consideration thereof.

This Part II deals with how the Supreme Court, and particularly Justice Scalia, have strayed from the original intent of the Free Exercise clause, but would still find the HHS Mandate unconstitutional.

Part III will deal with how the founders did not forsee or account for the rise of radical secularism, which is a religion unto itself, and how that impacts the Free Exercise clause.

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Part II Summary

Under current federal law (the Religious Freedom Restoration Act - RFRA), the federal government would stand next to no chance of winning in a suit brought over the Obama HHS mandate as applied to Catholic institutions.  But RFRA - a Congressional power grab on the issue of Constitutional interpretation - is likely itself to be found unconstitutional as applied to the federal government.

If RFRA doesn't apply, then Justice Scalia's 1990 interpretation of the Free Exercise clause, one that severely circumscribes the scope of the clause, would mean that the Obama HHS mandate is lawful.  But Scalia admits in his opinion that he wrote his bright line rule to cut off litigation from minor religions that have sprung up after the signing of our Constitution.  Scalia, like Jefferson before him, implicitly assumes that the government would not encroach on core, mainstream religious beliefs extant at the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights.  Thus, a case brought today under the HHS mandate would most likely result in a complete reexamination of the original intent of the drafters in passing the Free Exercise of Religion clause.  And if that happens, then the Court would likely find that the HHS mandate is unconstitutional.      

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Part II Discussion:

The First Amendment to the Constitution provides, in relevant part, that "Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. As explained in Part I, the original intent of the drafters of this provision, as identified in the 1878 case of Reynolds v. United States, was to keep government from legislating in the area of then extant mainstream religious beliefs, but to allow the government to legislate against acts done under the color of religion that threaten societal order and duties.

As the scope of government has grown over the past near two and a half centuries, and as both minor religious offshoots, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, have proliferated and as people have become inventive in trying to make use of the Free Exercise clause, the Supreme Court has done a significant number of Free Exercise cases.  The Free Exercise clause was used to challenge everything from payment of income taxes, payment of SSI taxes, minimum wage laws, and the draft to name but a very few.  Prior to 1990, the Court had developed "Sherbert" test for Free Exercise cases that it applied on an ad hoc basis.  "Under the Sherbert test, governmental actions that substantially burden a religious practice must be justified by a compelling governmental interest."

That changed in 1990, when Justice Scalia authored the opinion in Employment Division, Dept. of H.R., Oregon v. Smith, a case involving native Americans who claimed the right to use peyote as part of their religious services.  The plaintiff's argued that Sherbert should be applied to their case. Scalia, whose love of originalism exists in conflict with his love of bright line rules, held that the Sherbert test would henceforth be limited to employment compensation matters.  His concern was that the Sherbert test, if generally applied, would produce "a private right to ignore generally applicable laws:"  He as much as admits at the conclusion of his opinion that his goal was to cut off litigation arising out of claims outside the mainstream of religious beliefs, in essence assuming, as did Jefferson two centuries previously, that the Free Exercise clause would protect mainstream religious beliefs because government would never encroach upon them:

It may fairly be said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in; but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs.

Ultimately, Scalia adopted the brightest line of all -  that a case could not succeed solely on Free Exercise grounds unless the government act at issue was directed explicitly at religion.  The problem with Scalia's solution is that it went too far - and his assumption was wrong.  His reshaping of the law now allows the government, as Obama has done, to encroach on what Jefferson called "the rights of conscience" of mainstream religion that the Free Exercise clause was designed to protect.  It disadvantages all ancient religious practices, not merely those that "are not widely engaged in."

Congress reacted, passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb et seq.  Under RFRA,  laws interfering with free exercise of religion under would have to be supported by a compelling state interest and be the least restrictive of religious freedom as possible.  The Supreme Court would later, in City of Boerne v. Flores, declare RFRA to be unconstitutional as applied to the states because it exceeded the bounds of Congressional authority.  The decision was based on whether the Supreme Court or Congress has ultimate authority to interpret the Constitution.  Yet because the Boerne Court did not address whether RFRA still stands as to federal law, it remains today as the law limiting federal government action.  As NRO points out, the practical effect of the RFRA two prong test would be to make it next to impossible for the U.S. government to succeed in a case over the Obama HHS mandate

So here's what all of this boils down to.  In a case over whether the Obama HHS mandate can be lawfully applied to force Catholic institutions to fund contraception and the morning after abortion pill, the Court would have two major questions to answer.  One, whether RFRA is unconstitutional as applied to the federal government.  I think that likely.  Which would then raise the second question, whether the bright line test in Smith applies in a situation where it is not minor religious practices that "are not widely engaged in" at issue, but the ancient, mainstream and core issue of Catholic beliefs as to contraception and sanctity of life.  I cannot seeing the Court doing that, as it would mean truly gutting the Free Exercise clause.  

And that last will cause some amazing linguistic contortions in the Court.  For our nation, at its inception, was a Christian nation that made room for all within its ambit, subject only to restrictions that define the outer edges of what was acceptable to such a Christian nation.  Indeed, that was the whole basis for the decision in the first Free Exercise case heard by the Supreme Court, Reynolds, which I addressed in Part I here.  That is decidedly not politically correct to admit after six decades of radical left wing efforts to remove Christianity wholly from our laws and the public square.  How the Court might modify Smith without admitting to all the rest would be interesting to see indeed.

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Friday, February 10, 2012

21st Century Radical Secularism Meets Jefferson Meets Scalia (Part I)

This is Part I of a three part post. This part deals with the intent of the drafters in writing the First Amendment's Free Exercise of Religion clause and why the Obama HHS mandate is unconstitutional in consideration thereof.

Part II, here, deals with how the Supreme Court, and particularly Justice Scalia, have strayed from the original intent of the Free Exercise clause, but would still find the HHS Mandate unconstitutional.

Part III will deal with how the founders did not forsee or account for the rise of radical secularism, which is a religion unto itself, and how that impacts the Free Exercise clause.

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Part I Summary

The Obama HHS mandate would force Catholic institutions to fund healthcare plans that directly violate the most sacred and core belief of the Catholic faith, sanctity of life. The mandate would force Catholic institutions to provide for contraception, sterilization, and Plan-B abortion, or in the alternative, be penalized or voluntarily dissolve. Such an act violates the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment as it was intended to be interpreted by our Founders.

The original intent of the drafters, as explained by Thomas Jefferson, was to draw a big circle around then extant mainstream religious beliefs and put those beyond the scope of government legislation. Under the Free Exercise Clause, the government could only legislate to stop an affirmative action done under the color of religion that threatened the social order. Catholic opposition to abortion and contraception was an openly held belief at the time, and thus fall within the ambit of the Free Exercise clause's protections.

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Part I Discussion:

The First Amendment to the Constitution provides, in relevant part, that "Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. It was over a hundred years from the signing of the Constitution that the Supreme Court was first called on to interpret the Free Exercise Clause in the 1878 case of Reynolds v. United States. In that case, a Mormon criminally charged with polygamy argued that he was only acting in accord with the precepts of his religion. The Court looked back to the drafters to find how they interpreted the "Free Exercise" clause:

[In a bill] 'for establishing religious freedom,' drafted by [Thomas} Jefferson, . . . religious freedom is defined; and after a recital 'that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of [religious beliefs and principles], and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty,' it is declared 'that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.' In these two sentences is found the true distinction between what properly belongs to the church and what to the State.

. . . Mr. Jefferson afterwards, in reply to an address to him by a committee of the Danbury Baptist Association, took occasion to say: 'Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions,-I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore man to all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.'

Coming as this does from an acknowledged leader of the advocates of the measure, it may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the amendment thus secured. Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere [religious beliefs], but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.

(emphasis added, citations omitted)

The Reynolds Court found that at the time of the drafting of the Constitution, all sects of the Christian faith in Europe and America had, since ancient times, practiced monogamy and had outlawed polygamy. It wan't until the Mormon faith was created in 1830 and preached polygamy as one of its tenets that polygamy in the U.S. became an issue. The Court further found that polygamy was universally held to be criminal in the 13 states at the time that the Constitution was signed.

Thus the Court found that the Constitutional prohibition against free exercise of religion did not contemplate polygamy as within its ambit. The Court, describing polygamy as "odious" to the religious traditions protected by the Constitution, and further finding it to be an "act" that threatened the social order, the Court held that polygamy could be prohibited by the state.

Also implicit in the Court's decision was that the Free Exercise clause protected mainstream Christian and Judaism and their religious doctrines extant in the U.S. at the time the Constitution was signed. Other religious beliefs and or religious beliefs claimed thereafter, to the extent that they conflicted with "peace and good order" and "societal duties," could not claim the protections of the Free Exercise clause. To this point, the Court said:

Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice? Or if a wife religiously believed it was her duty to burn herself upon the funeral pile of her dead husband, would it be beyond the power of the civil government to prevent her carrying her belief into practice?

So here, as a law of the organization of society under the exclusive dominion of the United States, it is provided that plural marriages shall not be allowed. Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances.

Today's Christian and Catholic Church doctrines on abortion and contraception are the same as they were at the time of the signing of the Constitution. As to contraception, "the Catholic Church has been opposed to contraception for as far back as one can historically trace." Likewise, there is no question that issues of sanctity of life and the view of abortion as a sin were part of Christianity virtually from its founding.:

There was universal condemnation of abortion in the early Church. The practice was roundly condemned in early Christian writings including the Didache and the writings of Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose, Jerome, John Chrysostom, and Augustine.

David Braine in his study concludes that:

For the whole of Christian history until appreciably after 1900 . . . there was virtually complete unanimity amongst Christians, evangelical, catholic, orthodox, that, unless, at the direct command of God, it was in all cases wrong directly to take innocent human life.

So looking at this from the standpoint of an originalist, there appears little doubt that the decision of the Obama administration to force Catholic institutions to fund contraceptives and Plan B abortion, or in the alternative to be penalized or choose to dissolve, violates the 1st Amendment's clause on the Free Exercise of Religion. The Catholic Church beliefs on contraception and abortion were core beliefs at the time of the signing of the Constitution. The Church has taken no affirmative "act," and as Jefferson points out, the limitation of the government to prohibit the free exercise of religion was meant to vindicate "the rights of conscience." It is hard to see how attacking a core value of the Church could be categorized as anything other than an attack on the conscience. Moreover, as Jefferson made clear, he saw the Free Exercise clause as being in perfect balance with the then extant religions at the time the Constitution was signed, commenting that he saw "no natural right in opposition to his social duties." Today, the natural rights remain unchanged, it is only government imposition of new "societal duties" that unconstitutionally encroach on Jefferson's - and the Catholic Church's - natural rights.

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Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Does The Obamacare Mandate Further Religious Liberty?





As Charles Krauthammer notes in the above video, the Obama Administration is experiencing a tremendous backlash against its decision to mandate that Catholic institutions pay for health insurance covering contraception and Plan-B abortion, or in the alternative, pay fines or dissolve. Virtually the entire Catholic Church hierarchy is up in arms, as are not just liberal Catholics, but also countless people from other religions who see this as unconstitutional government overreach.  And now, the far left is itself on the attack, making the most disingenuous and intellectually dishonest arguments imaginable in support of Obama's mandate.

The ACLU came out today arguing that Catholics institutions, by refusing to fund contraception and Plan-B abortion, are trying to "impose their will on their employees."  The ACLU further argues that this mandate is not a violation of religious liberty, concluding that "religious liberty" does not give Catholic institutions the right to "impose those views on others, including ignoring civil rights laws or denying critical health care."

Let's address the first of theses arguments, that Catholics are "trying to impose their will on their employees."  In the Thinker's Guide To Fallacies:  The Art Of Mental Trickery & Manipulation, a great publication on critical thinking, this is listed as "Dirty Trick No. 1 - Accuse Your Opponent Of Doing What He Is Accusing You Of."  That is precisely what the ACLU is doing here.  The Catholic Church has since its inception two millennia ago stood for the sanctity of life and, as the issues arose, they have uniformly stood in opposition to contraception and abortion.  The U.S. government has just decided now to force the Catholic Church to change its position, pay a fine or face dissolution.  Yet the ACLU is trying to turn the argument on its head in order to put the Catholics on the defensive.  The left uses this trick all of the time.  Scurrilous bastards.

As to the ACLU's "religous liberty" argument, it is equally meritless. Religious liberty lies at the foundation of our nation. Indeed, it is what drove many of the first refugees to make the dangerous trip to American shores, in order that they could freely practice their religion. And the whole concept of "religious liberty" is found in the very first Amendment to our Constituion, it provides that "Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. Given that sanctity of life is at the very core of the Catholic Church doctrine, and given that the new Obama policy would require either that the Catholic Church act against its core doctrine, pay a penalty, or cease its existence, that by definition impinges on the free exercise of religion.  Furthermore, as Ed Morrisey points out:

The rights in the Constitution are not granted to American citizens because the government decided to offer them beneficently at their discretion. They exist in the document as a testament to our natural rights, part of our innate humanness, and are detailed in the Constitution as a bar to government’s overreach in trampling them.

The ACLU is not alone in their arguments today. The trio of far left politicians, Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray, and Jeanne Shaheen, have authored piece for the Wall Street Journal that is truly outrageous. They shamelessly assert that the Obamacare mandate furthers "religious liberty" based on a full scale redefinition of that term:

Those now attacking the new health-coverage requirement claim it is an assault on religious liberty, but the opposite is true. Religious freedom means that Catholic women who want to follow their church’s doctrine can do so, avoiding the use of contraception in any form. But the millions of American women who choose to use contraception should not be forced to follow religious doctrine, whether Catholic or non-Catholic.

Wow. That paragraph is nothing but non-sequiturs. First, these women are rewriting the Constitution, making it seem as if the Catholic Church itself has no rights. First Amendment protections flow not merely to individuals, but also to institutions.  Indeed, if the Westboro Baptist Church has First Amendment Rights, then clearly so too does the Catholic Church.

Boxer asserts that the new mandate furthers "religious freedom." Yet to make this argument, Boxer redefines religious freedom to mean solely the right of an individual to ignore the doctrine of a religion. That is a unique and tenditious redefinition if there ever was one - which is another tried and true leftie trick of argument by fallacy.

And of course, no person in the U.S., including Catholic women, are being kept by the Catholic Church from accessing contraception or abortion as elective procedures. That has never been true and, indeed, it misstates the whole issue at hand. To claim that the Obama mandate furthers actual religious freedom is as about a shameless lie as I can imagine.

Boxer, further argues:

Catholic hospitals and charities are woven into the fabric of our broader society. They serve the public, receive government funds, and get special tax benefits. We have a long history of asking these institutions to play by the same rules as all our other public institutions.

As a threshold matter, the "rule" which Obama would impose differs fundamentally from all prior rules. None of the prior rules require Church affiliated institutions to act contrary to the core value of the Church. Further, I wait to see any case law - and I do mean any - showing that receipt of government funds and tax benefits constitutes a voluntary waiver of Constitutional rights. And lastly, Boxer ignores contrary "history" that some rules of general applicability, such as discrimination laws, cannot legally be applied in whole to religious institutions. Indeed, that was the subject of the recent Supreme Court Case, where the Court ruled unanimously for the Lutheran Church as regards the ministerial exception to employment laws.

And lastly, Boxer makes a series of pragmatic arguments that nationalizing the funding of contraception and plan-B is a panacea for American healthcare, that virtually all women use contraception at some point, and that, in the absence of funding some women working for Catholic institutions might not be able to afford the out of pocket costs.  As Bookworm points out, Boxer is conflating arguments:

This is the big lie at the heart of the Obama administration's attack on traditional religious institutions. These harpies constantly conflate the availability of birth control with funding for birth control. They are not the same. Women in America can get birth control. The government can fund organizations -- indeed, it already does with the monies that go to Planned Parenthood -- that provide all these birth control options. Forcing religious organizations to pay for birth control, sterilization and abortifacients, however, both exceeds the government's power and contravenes the limitations the Bill of Rights imposes on government. This is not about whether women should have birth control; it's about with the government can force churches to pay for it.

I would add that I find Obama's decision to nationalize funding for contraception and abortion to border on the obscene. For one, this is yet another advance down the secular road, where the radical feminists want the act of sex to be wholly devoid of any moral, ethical or physical consequences. Moreover, it further the feminist left argument that abortions should be unconditionally available. This law essentially institutes radical feminist goals as the public policy of our country. Two, why should I or any other American have to fund elective costs that are rightfully at issue between consenting adults? Three, why are woman entitled to this special treatment and not men for specifically male issues? What about the dreaded EDS you hear about in ads every day for Viagra? Again the answer is because this is part of the radical secular agenda being pushed by the feminists.

So, in sum, there is good and bad in all of this. That portion of the Obamacare mandate requiring all Americans to fund the costs of birth control and abortions is likely to get through (though I wonder if individuals of deeply religious beliefs could not make the same argument as the Catholic Church, using the Courts rulings in the area conscientious objector status as a springboard for a colorable argument). The good news is that Obama has grossly overreached on this issue, as Krauthammer points out in the above video.  I actually find it comforting that Obama and the far left are drawing a line in the sand on this issue. I hope they keep it up through November, because this issue is easily one that could cost Obama reelection and cost the left Congressional seats.

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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Meltdown


I have never seen anything like this. The left is in complete meltdown over Sarah Palin. The above picture is from Salon Magazine's article, "The Dominatrix: Sarah Palin is trying to seduce independent voters. But she comes across like a whip-wielding mistress who wants to discipline a naughty America." Does the author, Gary Kamiya, seem to be losing his grip

Four years after Americans looked at the first term of the worst president in modern history and decided they liked what they saw well enough to sign up for four more years, it's all too plausible that just when victory is in sight, the most crucial election of our time could be tipped by the 11th-hour appearance of a slick, unqualified, right-wing extremist and religious zealot in designer glasses.

Call it Moose ex Machina.

I have to admit, this hyper-partisan at least has some humor - and an obviously overactive imagination dominated with S&M fantasies. Not so with Salon's other article from the odious lightweight, Juan Cole, who compares Sarah Palin to a Muslim terrorist. Not surprising, since Mr. Cole has a long history of being unable to distinguish America's friends from foe.

Michelle Cottle at TNR is "Shattered" by it all, calling Palin a "crackpot." Hillary, we are told, was perfectly qualified by her extensive experience (???) to be commander in chief, while Gov. Palin is obviously not. Indeed, according to Ms. Cottle, "the Palin pick is disheartening on so many levels. For starters, even what little we know about the Alaska governor's policy views is enough to make a traditional feminist weep."

Joan Smith at Seattle PI informs we, the great unwashed, that no "enlightened voter" could possibly support Sarah Palin. It would seem that Ms. Smith bases her assessment on what she believes conservative voters should feel about Gov. Palins pregnant teenage daughter. We thank her for her suggestions and have one of our own - please keep it up. Ad hominem attacks are working perfectly - pay no attention to those poll numbers.

Andy Sullivan over at the Atlantic - the MSNBC of print journalism - has been in meltdown ever since he decided that he wanted to have Obama's love child. Patterico has a cottage industry going debunking the serial smears coming from the keyboard of the excitable one. Among the most recent, that Sarah Palin opposes the teaching of contraception in schools and that Palin wants to see creationism taught in schools.

And lastly, there is Ariana Huffington who refers to Gov. Palin as a Trojan Moose. According to Ms. Huffington, Gov. Palin is George Bush sexed up. That one is a bit of a tough sell, but kudos to Ms. Huffington for giving us some entertainment with her attempt.

Update: The above pretty much pale in comparison to Obama's gaffe of yesterday, seeming to analogize Gov. Palin to a pig. Given that there is a large segment of women in this country livid at the perceived sexism from the Obama camp towards Hillary, this was just incredibly stupid - as is refusing to defuse the situation. A new McCain ad has already pounced on it.

As I've said many times, the left just cannot help themselves on this one. And they seem to be getting more unhinged by the day. It is so obvious and so unfair it is having a real boomerang effect. What can I say but, more please.


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