Announcing his support for Commissar Sebelius’s edicts on contraception, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion, that noted theologian the Most Reverend Al Sharpton explained: “If we are going to have a separation of church and state, we’re going to have a separation of church and state.”
Thanks for clarifying that. The church model the young American state wished to separate from was that of the British monarch, who remains to this day supreme governor of the Church of England. This convenient arrangement dates from the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The title of the law gives you the general upshot, but, just in case you’re a bit slow on the uptake, the text proclaims “the King’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England.” That’s to say, the sovereign is “the only supreme head on earth of the Church” and he shall enjoy “all honors, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity,” not to mention His Majesty “shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts, and enormities, whatsoever they be.”
Advertisement
Welcome to Obamacare.
The president of the United States has decided to go Henry VIII on the Church’s medieval ass. Whatever religious institutions might profess to believe in the matter of “women’s health,” their pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, and immunities are now subordinate to a one-and-only supreme head on earth determined to repress, redress, restrain, and amend their heresies. One wouldn’t wish to overextend the analogy: For one thing, the Catholic Church in America has been pathetically accommodating of Beltway bigwigs’ ravenous appetite for marital annulments in a way that Pope Clement VII was disinclined to be vis-à-vis the English king and Catherine of Aragon. But where’d all the pandering get them? In essence President Obama has embarked on the same usurpation of church authority as Henry VIII: As his Friday morning faux-compromise confirms, the continued existence of a “faith-based institution” depends on submission to the doctrinal supremacy of the state.
“We will soon learn,” wrote Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “just how much faith is left in faith-based institutions.” Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s vicar on earth, has sportingly offered to maintain religious liberty for those institutions engaged in explicit religious instruction to a largely believing clientele. So we’re not talking about mandatory condom dispensers next to the pulpit at St. Pat’s — not yet. But that is not what it means to be a Christian: The mission of a Catholic hospital is to minister to the sick. When a guy shows up in Emergency bleeding all over the floor, the nurse does not first establish whether he is Episcopalian or Muslim; when an indigent is in line at the soup kitchen the volunteer does not pause the ladle until she has determined whether he is a card-carrying papist. The government has redefined religion as equivalent to your Sunday best: You can take it out for an hour to go to church, but you gotta mothball it in the closet the rest of the week. So Catholic institutions cannot comply with Commissar Sebelius and still be in any meaningful sense Catholic.
If you’re an atheist or one of America’s ever more lapsed Catholics, you’re probably shrugging: What’s the big deal? But the new Act of Supremacy doesn’t stop with religious institutions. As Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, put it: “If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by this mandate.” And so would any of his burrito boys who object to being forced to make “health care” arrangements at odds with their conscience.
"dentured servitude"............hehehe. This is why I love Mr. Steyn.
Mark, you are brilliant. As the state keeps pushing, prodding, coercing, bullying, and bludgeoning us, I dream and think that these acts will merely serve to awaken the people and hasten the requisite civil disobedience and revolt.
Note I said "dream". That it seems to condense to merely a dream speaks to the sheeple at large all around us who have and continue to willingly walk to their own slaughter.
Obamination ostensibly wants to be another Lincoln, FDR, JFK or LBJ.
Now we all know who Obscenity really is:
the ,,BULL'' CONNOR of anti-Christian bigotry and persecution.
There is a compelling economic case against coverage mandates like the "free" contraception mandate. This economic argument is completely independent of the religious freedom argument, This Wall Street Journal op-ed by John H. Cochrane lays it out very clearly:
Whatever your opinion of the morality of contraception is; or even if you have no opinion at all, the economic case should be more widely understood. Two key paragraphs from the column:
"Insurance is supposed to mean a contract, by which a company pays for large, unanticipated expenses in return for a premium: expenses like your house burning down, your car getting stolen or a big medical bill.
Insurance is a bad idea for small, regular and predictable expenses. There are good reasons that your car insurance company doesn't add $100 per year to your premium and then cover oil changes, and that your health insurance doesn't charge $50 more per year and cover toothpaste. You'd have to fill out mountains of paperwork, the oil-change and toothpaste markets would become much less competitive, and you'd end up spending more."
A third argument against this, also non-religious, is that the federal government has no authority to either dictate what health insurance covers or that people purchase it. Obamacare, despite the Leftist's rhetorid, was never intended as a solution to the economics of healthcare; it was, from the get-go, all about limiting freedom and concentrating suffocating power in Washington.
Obamacare epitomizes the folly and the fury of liberalism.
They absolutely want to provide free excellent healthcare that is equal for all. That is their folly; they always dream the impossible dream. And therein lies the fury, for they arrogantly assume we lesser souls are the impediment to their dream and thus will stomp over us to achieve their goal. Of course the goal is futile so they inevitably get frustrated and enact more extreme measures. Invariably their dreams become everyone else’s nightmare.
Isn't it true that you're both right (ha!). While I think it's often useful to characterize a group of people is if they are one, in this case it's not. Some liberal's are fools, chasing a utopian dream for all. Others are much more sinister, using the liberal machinations to collect power (Obama) and wealth (Al Gore).
This story doesn't end well. In the end the fools will be shamed for enabling the sinister to consume the rest of us.
I think that this quote from Andrew Klavan sums it up, "Free people can treat each other justly, but they can't make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end."
Your explanation is incorrect. Longplay has it right.
They never wanted to provide free or excellent healthcare, or they would have joined up for it themselves, but the govs chose to sit it out, whereby setting up a slave-driven program where the workers become slaves to the non-workers and the govs.
You're falling victim to the same conceit you accuse liberals of. That is that they're too stupid to know what's best for them. It's a good idea to never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance. But it's even more foolhardy to rule out malice as a possible motive. At the very least you're underestimating and dehumanizing people.
All wanted to provide more for their people and in the end killed millions upon millions of them so they could all suffer more miserably then before but at least they’d all suffer more miserably together.
In the US we are now >50 years post the Great Society with ever expanding programs and ever worsening results. Yet the current president in three years has accelerated the spending and now focused on restricting one of our prime liberties, religion.
This is the same trajectory that nations followed under the 1st five names I listed.
You can call me any name you want but if I can veer our nation off its current course then we will be spared true conceit and dehumanization and I for one can live with that.
Longplay is, IMO, getting closer to the crux: Yes, religious liberty is an issue here, but the more fundamental factor is the liberty to contract - to purchase or not purchase, to work or not work, and to negotiate or select among alternatives as one chooses. To reach an agreement (contract) agreeable to both parties, not one the government dictates.
In the current case, the restriction of liberty forces Catholics (or entities owned by the Catholic Church) into contracts contrary to their religious tenets. But why should a Catholic Hospital and an employee be limited, by government fiat (backed by the coercive power of violence), to agreeing to a deductible level set by some department of the Executive (not even Congress but the Executive which has no Constitutional warrant to make law or set the specifics of a law - see Article 1, Section 1) or to agreeing whether or not pregnancy services will be paid by the employer.
The Catholic Church has stood by idly, or else actively endorsed it, when Progressive government has nibbled away at the liberty to contract. Now their favorite contract liberties are threatened and suddenly the Church is for individual liberty.
They took away the liberty to negotiate wages below an arbitrary minimum, and the Church applauded; they took away the liberty to negotiate deductibles and the Church applauded; they took away the liberty to decide how to accommodate the handicapped and the Church applauded; they took away the right to negotiate what services would be covered (sex change, pregnancy, injuries from high-risk activities, etc) and the Church applauded until they took away the liberty to negotiate over contraception and abortion. Now the Church screams.
The only liberty the Catholic Church seems to care about is their own liberty to live by their own particular doctrines. A pox on it. Or a belated welcome to the cause of liberty. Does the Church have the intestinal fortitude to take up arms (figuratively or literally) against the monster it, until now, enthusiastically endorsed?
Here is a wonderful argument against the principle the administration has hidden behind....there is no mention of separation of church and state in the Constitution. There is the first amendment, which prohibits the establishment of a national religion or suppressing the free exercise of religion. Separation of church and state was in a letter from Thomas Jefferson as an idea for how the government should function but was never included in the constitution or any law.
You are, of course, entirely correct, but you are missing the point: liberals call stuff lots of things that are not actually so. It's their first gambit. This stems from a mindset that is legally, not morally centered. It doesn't matter to lawyers what something IS, just what you call it. If you have ever had much dealing with bureaucrats, you soon find out to watch exactly what you say, since your own careless use of words can destroy you, no matter how pristine your actual conduct may be. (See Scooter Libby).
I find that the most interesting thing about all this Obama stuff is that something is now occuring that I've been waiting for my whole life. Noone gets all excited until their own ox is gored. Well, join my club. If you are a small businessman, you have dealt with absurd government, at all levels, for forty years. If you are a large one, it started with FDR and unions. We who have been fighting leviathan for lo' these many years are both amused and delighted to see you all finally thrown in the boat with us.
What's it like to be assumed guilty until proven innocent? What it like to be subject to random inspection and seizure by any old pettifogging government official, no matter how stupid and minor? What's it like to know that you only get to keep some tiny fraction of what you've earned only by deceit or plain old luck, and only if the government decides they can't possibly think of a use for it, instead?
The Catholic Church is now reaping what they've sown. They have been playing fast and loose with government since forever, using them as collectors of tithes and as de facto financiers through tax exempt status. They have long been walking the fine edge of propriety with this , since they often set themselves up in competition with businessmen who are crippled by the taxation they don't pay. They are the original sweetheart deal, just like any other modern NGO or non-profit (Non-profit, my french Aunt Tootie! I'd once like to make as much as a local museum director, who only makes his $250,000 because he gets to keep it all). The overlords live like kings because they don't pay taxes, even from purely for-profit enterprises, and Mother Teresa they ain't. I don't condone what that bum in the White house is doing, but when did they think the gravy train was going to arrive at the end of the track?
Well, you live by the sword....
I hate to bring this up, but now all you who supported getting free stuff paid for by others are about to learn the worst part of the Golden Goose story. After they killed the goose, they didn't just go away. They started eating everyone else,too.
Don't worry. You're probably last.
Bon appetit!
Interfering with the free exercise of religion is a clear violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The language of the First Amendment is simple and clear. No other argument is necessary, or sufficient, regardless of how valid. No compromise is necessary or sufficient, no matter how political.
Reverse the rules now. Remove the usurper in November!
Obamacare is proving out to be the monster we feared it would be. Surely this latest outrage will compel the people to rise up, cast Obama out of office in November, and demand repeal?
Or will we shrug our shoulders and move on along?
Obama is betting on the latter. I'm afraid I agree with him.
I'm afraid you are right. By any objective analysis Obama should be at about 10 percent approval right now. The Repubs haven't learned a thing from the Bush years and can barely mount a coherent opposition to this blatant act of tyranny. When are you Texans gonna follow through with the secession thing? Let the rest of us know so we can make arrangements.
I don't think that Obama is betting on the latter. That's why he's filling his campaign coffers with taxpayer money, through friends from Solyndra who are bundlers, through this newest mortgage financial reshuffle, and through other various money grabs. This is also why his creepy friend, the AG, has attacked South Carolina for wanting to require voter I.D.s. Acorn is being funded by covert means. Obama isn't counting on winning fair and square. He'll have to do it by lying, cheating and stealing, which is how he does everything. Obama is a thug.
People are more worried about American Idol and the X Factor to worry about trivial things like individual sovereignty. We trust the government will give us free stuff, and that they know what is best for us. Now, back to American Idol!
Follow
