Not A Good Day For Obamacare

March 27, 2012 4 Comments

Last week I opined that Obamacare would be ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court. In that piece I reserved the right to change my position based on the arguments made before the court. Today the court heard arguments on the individual mandate. What is clear is that Obamacare is in serious trouble. There’s no reason for us to get overly excited yet but if the comments of the five Republican appointees is any indication Obamacare may be going down in flames.

Chief Justice Roberts was one of the two conservatives who was thought to be on the fence. It became clear today that he isn’t as on the fence as originally thought. He wondered whether the government could force citizens to buy cell phones because they might need emergency services one day. Scallia wondered if the government could force us to buy broccoli, after all it’s healthy. Justice Alito asked if we could be forced to buy prepaid funeral services, since we’ll all need to be disposed of. Roberts seems to be buying into this line of reasoning, that being if the government can force us to buy health insurance there isn’t anything they can’t force us to buy.

The real fence sitter though has always been Justice Kennedy. Kennedy has always been a moderate, though he has trended towards the right lately. It still isn’t clear which way Kennedy will vote. But his line of questioning was clearly in opposition to Obamacare. Kennedy said during today’s hearing:

But the reason, the reason this is concerning, is because it requires the individual to do an affirmative act. In the law of torts our tradition, our law, has been that you don’t have the duty to rescue someone if that person is in danger. The blind man is walking in front of a car and you do not have a duty to stop him absent some relation between you. And there is some severe moral criticisms of that rule, but that’s generally the rule.

And here the government is saying that the Federal Government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases and that changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in the very fundamental way.

Of course this doesn’t mean that Kennedy is going to vote a certain way. But his line of questioning and his statements were clearly in opposition to the Obamacare law. It’s entirely possible that he’s asking these questions and making these statements to see how the solicitor general responds. Kennedy could be swayed by his arguments. But in the very least, Kennedy is coming from a position opposed to Obamacare’s constitutionality.

What’s most interesting though is that the Supreme Court seems the siding with the very arguments Obama made against the individual mandate. You’ll recall Obama opposed the individual mandate before he supported it. This took place during the 2008 Democrat Primary wherein Obama supported an outright socialist model while Hillary supported an individual mandate. Obama made all the arguments the five conservatives on the Court made today.

Obamacare has a real shot at being ruled unconstitutional. We don’t know how the justices will react to the attorney’s arguments and we won’t get to find out until late June. But if their line of questioning is any indication, Obamacare is going down. Liberals must hold out hope that Kennedy can be swayed during the court’s private discussions after this week’s hearings. It’s always possible that a Justice can be convinced to vote a different way, it’s happened before. The odds of Obamacare being ruled unconstitutional have increased substantially though.

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Did Dick Cheney Really Deserve A Heart Transplant?

March 27, 2012 2 Comments

Over the weekend Dick Cheney, 71,  received a heart transplant. He apparently was on the waiting list for an available heart for 20 months, the average wait time is 3-6 months. The left is beside themselves that Cheney got a new heart. The vitriol from leftist bloggers and commenters on Daily Kos and MSNBC is enough to make ones stomach churn. The media is opening up a debate over Cheney’s age while barely containing their hatred for him. NBC’s Today Show opened their broadcast yesterday wondering allowed if Dick Cheney really deserved his new heart. Huffington ran a piece today questioning Cheney’s new heart, suggesting that someone younger should have gotten it.

The left’s negative reaction to the Cheney heart obviously has a lot to do with their hatred for the man. The self appointed keepers of compassion and kindness never seem to show any for their political opposition. Be that as it may, the left is exposing not just their hatred for Cheney but their hatred for old age. In attacking Cheney’s new heart, they’re leading the charge against healthcare for old people. They ignore the fact that a new heart can add 7-8 years to the life expectancy for a senior citizen. The left pretends that there’s some young person being denied a heart because a 71 year old retiree who has lived his life in their minds has won himself a new heart.

Obamacare treats old people with the same sort of disrespect as the left is treating Cheney. We could talk about the death panels, but it’s easier to listen to Obama’s own words when it comes to this matter. In 2010 a woman asked him if Obamacare would allow her 100 year old mother to get a pacemaker. Apparently one doctor thought that her mother should get one because she had a spirit of life. In short the doctor saw that the mom had a lot of life left in her and thought she could recover from the surgery. Obama danced around the issue before declaring that we need to have some standard, one that doesn’t take into account a “subjective” spirit of life. He then suggested it might be cheaper for mom to pop pain pills rather than have surgery for a pacemaker.

The idea that in America we have to ask the President whether or not our mother will be allowed to get a pacemaker is absurd. Beyond that, Obama’s answer is very telling. He doesn’t want decisions made for seniors by themselves or their doctor. He wants bureaucrats in Washington to make the decisions based on standards and procedures they dictate. In short, for an old person under Obamacare your doctor doesn’t get to determine whether you have a spirit of life in you, your doctor doesn’t get to decide whether you will personally recover well from a particular procedure. Obama very clearly wants bureaucrats to create standards and doctors will be charged with following them to the letter. If that means you don’t get a life extending procedure, so be it because it saves taxpayers money.

For those of you who think that because you aren’t old yet none of this matters, make no mistake they’re coming after you to. Once health care comes under the control of government every single aspect of our lives can and will be regulated by the government. The state will justify it by suggesting it will result in cost savings for government health care. They’ll regulate what you eat, how you work, what sort of activities you’ll be allowed to participate in. The possibilities are endless. Then when you finally get around to being old, they’ll let you die as a cost savings. Your life won’t be worth anything then, they’ll tell you surely someone younger deserves health care more than you.

Obamacare is already a disaster. It’s nothing but a gateway to fully socialist health care. The left clearly wants this, they crave control over our lives while painting their efforts as humanitarian. Truth be told, they want to control every aspect of our lives. Dick Cheney’s heart transplant shows us how much they crave control. It also shows us how much they hate life. We already knew the left hated unborn babies. Now it’s becoming clear, they don’t think much of old people either. The left wants to send the unborn off to the abortion mill to die, they want to send old people home with a bottle of pain pills to ease into death.

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Why Obamacare Will Be Ruled Constitutional

March 23, 2012 4 Comments

Obamacare should be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. It is patently absurd that the Commerce Clause would allow the Federal government to order Americans to buy a product. It’s also absurd that the Necessary and Proper Clause would be used to allow the government to do the same thing. Nevertheless when the Court takes up the issue in oral arguments next week and when it delivers its opinion in June, Obamacare will be ruled constitutional on a 5-4 vote. This power grab by the government will forever doom our national economy, it will reach far beyond health care.

Let’s go into this assuming the four liberal justices all support the Constitutionality of Obamacare. Let’s also assume that Scalia, Alito and Thomas oppose it. The issue then comes down to Roberts and Kennedy. Roberts tends to take the more traditional conservative approach to the Constitution, which is to say he doesn’t like to rule things unconstitutional but would rather allow Congress work out all the political details. In United States v Comstock 130 S.Ct. 1949, 176 L.Ed.2d 878 (2010) Roberts sided with the liberals and deferred to Congress concerning the detention of sexually dangerous prisoners who had completed their sentence.

The Obama administration is relying heavily on this case, focusing at least a portion of their brief directly at Justice Roberts. They clearly think there’s a chance that Roberts will simply defer to Congress. However we cannot forget that Roberts sided with the conservatives in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission 130 S.Ct. 876, 175 L.Ed.2d 753 (2010). In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that the McCain-Feingold act, which severely limited political free speech was unconstitutional. In short, neither Roberts or Kennedy deferred to Congress on this matter. Meaning that the left cannot rely upon their natural inclination to defer.

Kennedy has gone back and forth on the Commerce Clause throughout his years on the Supreme Court. There are periods when Kennedy finds no wrong in Congress and other periods when Kennedy cannot seem to find anything they pass Constitutional. The administration is however focusing on Gonzales v. Raich 545 U.S. 1, 125 S.Ct. 2195, 162 L.Ed.2d 1 (2005). Gonzales focuses on medical marijuana’s sale via the Commerce Clause. Kennedy ruled for an expansive view of the Commerce Clause in this case, which is why the administration is focusing on it and why we should be nervous.

Three lower court conservatives have ruled the individual mandate constitutional, which could aid either Kennedy or Roberts to do the same. The view these judges take is that the mandate is a political issue, best left to Congress. This is hardly a conservative position at all as it renders the Constitution irrelevant to the whole matter. It’s easier for lower courts to simply rule matters Constitutional because they know there is always an appeal available above them. The Supreme Court has to think beyond Obamacare itself, they need to ask themselves what sort of precedent this case will set and what that will mean for commerce in the future.

The one thing that may end up swaying Kennedy and Roberts isn’t something that’s in the briefs they’re reading. The administration decision on contraception, forcing religious organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church to pay for it despite their moral opposition, may end up hurting their case. It’s no secret that all of the Republican justices are Roman Catholics. Supreme Court justices don’t live in a vacuum, they know what’s going on outside the courthouse. Roberts and Kennedy may very well not like the administration’s attack on religious freedom and that could hurt the case in favor of Obamacare.

Nevertheless, Obamacare will be ruled constitutional by the court. It will be a 5-4 decision with Kennedy as the deciding vote. Roberts has showed a willingness to oppose Congress before, so he ought to be able to do it again. Kennedy on the other hand has recently voted in favor of expanding the Commerce Clause and there’s no evidence to suggest he won’t this time around. As with all pre-argument opinions, I reserve the right to revise after next week’s oral arguments. We’re likely to have a very good idea where this case is heading by the end of next week.

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Failed Vetting: Obama For Socialist Healthcare, Holder For Brainwashing On Guns

March 19, 2012 Leave a comment

Breitbart is attempting to vet Obama via a series of video and information releases. Some of this stuff is interesting but it seems a little late to be vetting the President of the United States. The information he and others have come up with show how poorly the media vetted Obama in 2008.  Other information shows how poorly the media looked into the past of his cabinet appointees and how little the Senate did in doing the same thing before confirmation. Obama and his administration were quite clear about what they wanted to do to the country. You just had to look at their past.

In 2007 Obama spoke to SEIU, the radical service employees union. SEIU is a big supporter of Occupy Wall Street and its board is full of Marxists and other leftists. In addition to Obama telling SEIU ”I’m one of you” he also spoke about healthcare. Obama admitted that his proposed Obamacare would be the intermediary between the quasi free market system we had and the future socialist system. He so much as said his goal was a government run health care system. His proposal would achieve that but not right away, it would take 5, 10, 15 or maybe 20 years to complete.

As it turns out Obamacare will do just that. When Obamacare kicks in employers will have a choice to make. They can continue with their current plan or they can dump employee healthcare and pay an 8% fine. Many employers pay15% or more on employee healthcare so for some the 8% would be a savings. The individual mandate would require individuals to buy health insurance or pay a fine. At the beginning the fine is a modest $600 but it escalates after a few years to more than the cost of a health insurance policy. So what Obama is doing is ensuring that employers give up their employee health benefits and setting up a crisis down the road which will result in people demanding government paid health insurance because employers aren’t providing it. Obamacare is just the intermediate solution before outright socialist healthcare.

Attorney General Eric Holder has been under fire from the right for the past year concerning the Fast and Furious program. You’ll recall that Fast and Furious was a program that allegedly was going to track guns and their use by Mexican drug cartels. The government either paid for illegal guns or told gun sellers to sell guns illegally to those suspected of being involved in drug cartels. Thousands of guns made their way into Mexico, being used in the murders of over 200 Mexicans and one American border patrol agent. The right has long believed this program was created in order to create a gun crisis on the border, which the Obama administration would then use to push for more gun control.

If the media or the Senate would have vetted Eric Holder they would have discovered that this fear of the right’s was completely justified. In 1995 Holder suggested the government brainwash people concerning guns. What better way to brainwash Americans than for the administration to create a crisis which of course they have the solution to? At this point it shouldn’t surprise anyone if Holder not only knew about Fast and Furious long before he claims to have known but was likely involved in its development. After all, he wants to brainwash us into opposing guns.

The media in 2008 spent twice as much time vetting the Republican’s Vice Presidential nominee than it spent vetting the future President. No one bothered to look into the backgrounds of any of Obama’s cabinet appointees. Holder isn’t the only one who has said radical things in the past, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said he wanted Americans to pay European prices for gas. When he said it, Euro gas prices were $8 a gallon. Holder and Chu have both put their radical vision into action as Cabinet members. Fast and Furious was an attempt to brainwash Americans to oppose guns and just take a look at gas prices these days. Meanwhile Obama continues writing regulations for his Obamacare act, which will lead to socialist medicine by his own words. But who in the mainstream press cares about any of this?

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Obamacare Costs Double, Cause 4 Million To Lose Coverage

March 15, 2012 1 Comment

In 1965 when Congress passed Medicare the pols sold it as something that wouldn’t be particularly costly. They said in 1990 Medicare would only cost $12 billion, which included an allowance for inflation. When 1990 rolled around the program cost $107 billion or 9 times the estimate. In 2010 Medicare cost taxpayers $523 billion. When Obamacare was passed the Democrats told us it would cost $900 billion over 10 years, or $90 billion a year. This week the CBO doubled their estimate of Obamacare’s cost to just under $1.8 trillion over a decade. Keep in mind, Obamacare doesn’t even fully take effect until 2014.

Is anyone surprised by this news? You can bet that in a year or two the CBO will tell us it will cost twice their current estimate and still no one would be surprised. Congress routinely pulls this stunt wherein they claim that their programs will only cost a little bit of money but once everything is passed suddenly it costs twice as much. The Republicans foolishly passed the Rx drug bill in 2003 and magically the next year the cost estimate had doubled. It will end up costing taxpayers four times as much as we were told when the bill was going through Congress.

Obamacare isn’t going to cut any costs and is going to cost taxpayers a fortune. Everyone knew that when it was passed, even the Democrats who lied about it being a cost savings program. Obamacare isn’t anything more than an intermediate step toward outright socialist healthcare controlled by the government. The Democrats still aren’t honest about that. But then when a party spends the better part of a year telling the public Obamacare won’t cost taxpayers much and will be an overall cost savings truth isn’t exactly important.

Yesterday we talked about how America has become a regulation nation with hundreds of thousands of pages of Federal and state laws and regulations dictating our every move. Obamacare’s cost isn’t going to be seen in simply financial terms. It will also be seen in the 10,000 plus pages of regulations being created by the Obama administration. These regulations will dictate every healthcare action we take. The financial cost of Obamacare is staggering, the Democrats clearly lied about how much the law was going to cost. A substantial portion of the cost is going to be seen in the regulatory world where bureaucrats will obtain the power to control our health. Ultimately we won’t be able to opt out when the Democrats seal the deal and move us into a fully socialist health system.

The CBO estimates that 4 million people will lose insurance from their employer by 2016. That’s a direct result of the regulations created by Obamacare, both by the act itself and by regulations promulgated by the administration. The cost of health insurance is high as it is, Obamacare is making matters worse. Insurance premiums skyrocketed after Obamacare, in an industry that averages a profit of barely 2%. The increased prices aren’t paying dividends for the owners of health insurance stock, the increased prices are paying for compliance with Obamacare.

We knew Obamacare was going to be a mess when it was passed. We knew it wasn’t going to cost $90 billion a year and we knew it was cause health insurance premiums to skyrocket. We knew that the regulations created by Obamacare would give the Federal government vast power over our personal lives. All we can do now is pray that the Supreme Court would rule Obamacare unconstitutional and if Mitt Romney is the nominee, hold him to his promise to repeal Obamacare if he’s elected.

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Jack Lew Acknowledges Obamacare Is Health Fascism

February 13, 2012 7 Comments

New Obama Chief of Staff Jack Lew appeared on Fox News Sunday over the weekend. Lew declared that under Obamacare the President has the authority to order insurance companies to cover a service and cover that service for free. Lew went on to declare that forcing insurance companies to cover contraception wouldn’t actually cost the companies anything, pointing to alleged actuarial projections. Lew articulated for the first time that the Obama administration supports health fascism. He also articulated what many of us knew already, the Obama administration believes children are a financial burden.

How can there be freedom when the government can order health insurance companies to not only cover a certain product but cover that product for free? What Jack Lew defended yesterday is nothing short of health fascism. Fascism was a product of the left in the early 20th century. The difference between fascism and communism is that under fascism the government allowed the owners of businesses to keep their businesses. However those businesses had to do what the government told them to do, produce what they were told to produce in the quantity they were ordered at and by the employees the government told the business to employ. Essentially business owners became the government’s middle managers. Under communism, business owners were killed and the state took over both ownership and management.

When you look at what Lew said, how is the structure of Obamacare any different than the business structure in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy or Spain? You can keep your insurance company, but you’re going to run it the way Obama tells you to and you’ll be offering the products he wants. For free even if he so declares! There’s no freedom for anyone under Obamacare. The government is going to tell companies what they have to offer and we consumers have no choice but to purchase that which the government has ordered. It’s health fascism. Is this what the American people thought Obamacare was going to be? It seems highly unlikely.

But Lew didn’t stop there. He alleges that health insurance companies will break even if they pay for contraception. This of course implies that children are a financial burden worth reducing. In other words, children don’t matter a whole lot to the Obama administration. They’re like old people, a financial burden. In short, the Obama administration has reduced the joy of parenthood down to a pure financial number, determining it just isn’t worth it. Never mind the non-financial and non-quantitative positives of having children. Children are just another wasteful cost.

If children are a wasteful financial burden, as Lew suggests, and if the President now has the power to order insurance companies to offer products whether they want to or not, one is left to wonder how much control does the President have over our health? How long will it be before the President, be it Obama or someone else, believes they have the power of life and death?

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger famously suggested parents be required to have a license before having children. Under Obamacare, is it possible this could happen? What a wonderful cost saving requirement this could be! And who would be able to stop it? All health power is vested in the President according to Obamacare. Sarah Palin was maligned for her death panels comment. In light of Lew’s recent statements, it’s hardly unreasonable to wonder what sort of end of life power is now vested in the President. If he can order insurance companies to offer products and services, can’t he also order them to stop offering services and products?

Obamacare was forced though Congress without the American people having a chance to see what it actually was. Nancy Pelosi so much as acknowledged this when it was being passed. Now we’re finding out just how much power the President has over our lives. Is this the America that the founders created? A nation where the President has the power to control our health and our health insurance? This whole contraception episode ought to make all Americans, including those who support contraception, wonder just how much power the President has over our health.

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When Did Our Health Become Subject To Presidential Dictates?

February 11, 2012 5 Comments

The last two weeks have been interesting on the Obamacare front. First the administration announced that churches would be required to fund contraception for their employees. Liberals cheered over this supposed defense of women’s health. Conservatives were outraged over this infringement on the free exercise clause. We further wondered when contraception became such a right that the choice to use it was something women could force someone else, namely religious organizations, to pay for it against said organization’s beliefs.

Fast forward to yesterday, Obama made a grand accommodation. Now instead of religious organizations directly paying for contraception insurance companies will be required to contact women and offer it free of charge. Liberals and the media are cheering this decision, the media in particular are fainting over Obama’s crafty decision. Conservatives are puzzled over how this is any different than the previous decision. After all who is going to pay for contraception? Generally insurance companies don’t just hand out freebies. The people paying for an insurance policy will end up paying for “free” contraception. Which means that if a religious organization is paying for an insurance policy for their employees they will in fact be paying for contraception. This isn’t a compromise or an accommodation. Obama is putting lipstick on a pig and telling us she’s beautiful.

But the real issue here, the one not being talked about, is when did the President obtain the authority to issue dictates like the two he’s made in the last few weeks? How did it get to be in America where the President alone determines what will be covered in a health insurance policy? This is the nation’s first real lesson in Obamacare. All authority on health matters comes from the White House. No longer are health insurers able to negotiate policies with insureds or with employers, those decisions will now all be made in Washington. If the President decides that contraception is part of an insurance policy, he’s able to do that and no one in the media questions how it is that the President obtained this sort of authority over our lives and our health.

It makes you wonder what other health decisions the President will be able to make. Suddenly the validity of Sarah Palin’s death panels increases. Because if the President can decide matters such as contraception without anyone questioning his authority, why can’t he set up end of life policies? It doesn’t matter whether Obama intends to create such policies now, the precedent has been set. Obama, in fact any President, can simply make declarations from the White House about insurance policies and no one questions his authority to do so. With that in mind, any imaginable health dictate can be made from the executive branch with little or no opposition. In other words, health has become a Washington dictatorship subject to the whims of the President.

This isn’t Constitutional and it isn’t American. Our nation was founded as one that loved freedom and had a limited government.  There is no freedom when our health is dictated to us by government bureaucrats and the President. There’s nothing limited about a government that believes it can, or is enabled under Obamacare, to make  decisions about our health. Obviously this is exactly what the single payer, socialist left wants. They want control of our health vested in the President. But for those of us who oppose Obamacare, this episode is a real wake up call. We knew this legislation was bad. But we’re finally seeing how bad it really is. Contraception isn’t the issue here at all, the issue is our very freedom.

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Do Our Rights Come From God or Government?

February 10, 2012 3 Comments

The Obama administration is set to “compromise” on the contraception issue that has raged over the last two weeks. While it’s not entirely clear what this compromise is, sources say that religious organizations wouldn’t have to refer employees to doctors that provide contraception. Instead insurance companies would do that. What’s not clear is whether religious organizations would have to fund contraception. If religious organizations have to fund contraception then this is no compromise at all and is really just a political ruse meant to make Obama look like a wise decision maker.

This whole issue comes down to whether churches will be free from government intrusions. In short, do churches remain free. Obama wants churches such as the Roman Catholic Church to provide for contraception for their employees and he wants it to provide contraception in their hospitals. The Roman Church believes contraception is sin and wants no part of providing it to their employees or anyone else. The question is whether the church is free to exercise its religious faith or is the church required to pay for the personal choices people make which it finds sinful and evil.

This issue isn’t about contraception at all, it’s about church freedom. Will the church remain free? contraception just happens to be the tool the left is using to try to make the church subservient to the state. A majority of Americans, even a majority of Roman Catholics have no problem with birth control. But that’s not a reason to have the state step in and force the church to pay for that which it believes is sin.

Perhaps the bigger question, the one no one wants to talk about, is where do our rights come from. Do they come from God or do they come from the state? Do we follow God’s morality or do we follow the shifting morality of humanism, science, statism and mythical democracy? If we follow God’s morality, in the very least our morality and our government have a basic foundation. The Constitution, while nowhere near perfect, at least attempts to uphold basic Christian morality by limiting government.

Absent God’s morality, where does morality even come from? The French Revolution declared God dead and focused on the god of humanism and science. The result was thousands of dead, all morally justified at the time. And then morality shifted and the killings weren’t so hot. The Communists had their own morality, essentially they overturned Christian morality. The Communists justified lists of murders, those people were just “enemies of the state.” The National Socialists did the same thing with Jews and others. Occupy Wall Streeters have called for killing pig capitalists.

None of these people have a base morality in God. Their morality shifts. Murder is ok, then it isn’t ok. Homosexual acts are ok, then they aren’t ok, then they’re ok again. Pick your issue, when humanism, science and statism rules morality can and will shift. Whatever suits those in power or those with political desires will fly.

Obama’s desire is to make the church subservient to the state. Why? Because a church subservient to the state will not uphold Christian morality. If the church doesn’t uphold Christian morality, then neither will the people. Then our rights will come from government and those in power will be the ultimate moral authorities. First the church will be expected to fund the government declared absolute right to birth control pills. Next the government will demand the church fund the government created absolute right to abortion. Give in on contraception and the church might as well give up all of their freedom because they won’t have any.

Americans need to stop for a moment and ask ourselves where our rights come from. We’ve gotten away from that to the point that people don’t spend any time thinking about it. Where do we want our rights to come from? Do we want them to come from God, who is the same yesterday, today and forever? Or do we want our rights to be subject to the political whims of the day or 50.1% of the electorate?

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Obama Launches Assault On Religious Freedom

January 31, 2012 35 Comments

As much as it theologically pains me, I shall defend the Roman Catholic Church today. For those unaware, we here at Steven Birn Speaks are old school reformation Christians. Normally such people don’t have nice things to say about the Catholics. But today their religious freedom is under assault by the Obama administration. If we allow their religious freedom to be destroyed, then Obama will set his sights on us next.

Make no mistake, Obama is attacking the Roman Catholics religious freedom. The administration, as part of Obamacare, has ordered employers to provide health insurance which includes coverage for contraception. For those unaware, the official position of the Roman Catholic Church is that contraception is sin. As such, the Obama administration is giving the Roman church a choice. They can either give up their religious freedom and offer health coverage for contraception, they can give up health insurance altogether or they can refuse to abide by the administration’s demands and face hefty penalties. If Obama is successful at forcing the Roman Catholics to fold on contraception, is their little doubt that next time around Obama will challenge them on abortion?

The issue here isn’t about contraception. It doesn’t matter what your view of contraception is or why my view is. The point here is that the Roman Catholic Church stands opposed to contraception and the Obama administration is seeking to force them to provide their employees something that they find sinful and evil. This is a full frontal assault on the free exercise clause of the Constitution. If the government can force a church to provide birth control to its employees, then why can’t the government force the church to provide coverage for abortions? Think about this, if the Obama administration is successful here, can any church stand for anything anymore? Sure, the preacher might be able to preach against abortion from the pulpit but if the church has to provide coverage for the secretary to kill her baby is the church really standing for anything?

The gall of this administration is incredible. Obama has made this ruling during an election year. He’s willing to risk losing re-election in order to force the Roman Catholic Church to pay for contraception for its employees. It’s incredible considering the number of Roman Catholics who vote Democrat, people Obama needs for his re-election bid. He must believe that he can get away with it and still win, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. If he does get away with this, can you imagine what he’ll do to the rest of the churches in an non-election year?

The free exercise clause of the Constitution allows churches to hold to whatever theology they want without government interference. The Supreme Court recently upheld the free exercise clause when it comes to church ministers, ruling the government couldn’t apply its discrimination laws to churches. Obama of course wanted government involvement, which suggests that had his side been victorious the next battle was over the Roman Church refusing to ordain women.

The founders didn’t want the government involved in such church matters. The church is to be free from government intrusion, whether its in who they hire or what sort of healthcare they’re willing to provide. This is a vitally important issue. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with the Roman Church on contraception or any other matter. The principle is what’s important. The church, all churches, must be free from government interference. If a church believes contraception is a sin, the government has no business forcing them to dispense it in their hospitals or include it in their health coverage. If a church believes abortion is sin, the government has no business forcing them to provide it in their hospitals or via health coverage.

Obama is assaulting church freedom here, make no mistake about it. He wants the church to be controlled by the government. He wants churches to give up doctrines and theologies that he doesn’t agree with. The church, according to the Constitution, is to remain free from such intrusion from the government. If we want our churches to remain free from such intrusion, we must stand up and defend the Roman Catholic Church against the assault from this administration on their rights.

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Pelosi Proposes Federal Control of Child Care.

November 21, 2011 3 Comments

It’s no secret that the left wants to control everyone from cradle to grave. Lately leftist Democrats have more or less come out and admitted as such. Nancy Pelosi recently declared that if she becomes Speaker again she wants to do to child care what the Democrats did to healthcare. Several weeks ago Sen. Richard Blumenthal demanded a stimulus for diapers and other diapering supplies. Essentially the Senator wants to subsidize one of the major costs of having a baby. In short, the far left wants the government to have an increasingly large roll in our lives from the moment we’re born.

Pelosi’s proposal is perhaps the more outrageous of the two. She seeks to move us closer and closer to the European Democratic Socialist model of government and family life. In much of Europe, children are shipped off to government daycare before they’re able to walk. Parenting is more or less limited to evening playtime. The rest of the day the child is under the control of government daycare workers. Essentially children spend more time under the control of government than they do with their parents in a good part of Europe, particularly in Scandinavia which the American left loves so much.

You may say what’s the difference between this and the hoards of private daycare facilities that parents (unfortunately) trot their kids off to today? One of the biggest complaints of the left is that they don’t get to influence children before they start kindergarten. As such they’re trying to get control over children before they start school. Why? Because they’re trying to effectively turn them into little socialists. The earlier they can get these kids the better. As such, in the past two decades you’ve seen more calls for government funded pre-school and other early educational programs. Now you have Pelosi calling for government daycare. The left wants control of kids and they want that control before the kids can even speak so they can influence them.

What Pelosi and other leftists are pushing is just an extension of what John Dewey and Horace Mann pushed concerning government education in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The goal of Dewey, Mann and other progressives was to separate children from their traditional Christian faith and the traditional view of the Constitution, founding and our nation generally. They sought to do this via government education. Keep in mind, the goal of government education has never been about education. It’s been about forcing a progressive outlook on the next generation. Go back and look at Dewey and Mann’s outlook as well as other education progressives of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Government education has been largely successful at moving the nation to the far left. Pelosi is seeking to move things to the next level. That’s why the next great leftist crisis in America is going to be childcare. We’ll be bombarded with all sorts of trumped up statistics and sob stories. Then the left will demand we “do something” about this crisis. Pelosi and assorted leftists will be waiting in the wings for some grand childcare plan that Federalizes the entire industry and brings control of it to Washington.

We should be very wary of any attempt to give children over to the government from the time they’re born. The government ought not be trusted with such control or power. They’ve already shown themselves to be incompetent educators (unless you have a progressive outlook, then the test scores don’t matter) and they’ve shown themselves to unable to do much of anything with any competence. When the left starts crying about a childcare crisis, we need to be prepared to step up and counter this nonsense. We must never forget that their goal is socialism and they’ll use our kids to further their goals. Unless of course they can’t get their hands on them.

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